Last year, Variety magazine surveyed 1,500 teens in the United States as to who their favorite stars were. Surprisingly, the top five were all Youtubers, the Japanese equivalent being Hikakin. Paul Walker, famous for his appearances in the Fast & Furious movies was ranked sixth, despite the fact he had died in an accident. It is ironic that a deceased Hollywood star ranks so highly, but this is the reality of our situation. Assuming social media stars are the leaders of social marketing, we can assume that sympathy and empathy are creating this trend. People think about going to a certain event because their friends went to it. They think of going to a certain travel destination because they were invited to go there by a loved one. This means that they are no longer relying on the information transmitted by television and the mass media. We worked on a promotion that used the phrase "I'll go to see the Doraemon movie if Hikakin recommends it". This effect actually occurred, achieving a 900 million yen increase in box office sales. Mass media is still particularly strong in Japan, which means television idols such as AKB48 and Arashi are very popular. But I think that many new stars who are different from idols of the past will emerge due to smartphone use, and many social stars who are famous only within their own community or area will appear because of the amount of time people spend looking at their smartphone screens.
It is still common in Japan for companies to make a few YouTube ads simply because they have left over budget, but in the United States it is common to see short versions of full-scale viral videos(*7) being released as television commercials as well as on YouTube. Fashion brand Lacoste has spent several billion yen making viral videos. I expect these kinds of trends will continue to grow stronger in the future.
The conventional consumption model is changing. We used to think that, no matter whether you buy a Toyota or Canon product, at some time in the future new models will be released and your product will become old. In the future, "use" will be better than "ownership". Someone like Horiemon (Takafumi Horie) would say it something like "I don't need a house as long as I can sleep", but this gives the concept rather a bad impression, and I don't think the concept will go that far. However, the Uber service allows people to lend the empty space in their car to others, and Airbnb allows people to rent empty rooms in their houses at cheap rates to others, so we can see that a "sharing economy" has started to penetrate the markets.