With new boutique, ADK vows to 'create facts and activate people'

ADK has launched a creative boutique called Fact, which the company says will follow an explorative process to help give brands distinction.

Fact is part of ADK Creative One, a division set up last year to house creative spinoffs. Masato Mitsudera, ADK Creative One’s ECD, led the launch and also serves as Fact’s own ECD and ‘city activator’ alongside five other members.

The team consists of a creative director and art director; a strategic planning director; a PR director and communication planner; a copywriter and planner; and a business director and ‘projetista’ (project manager).

Campaign asked ADK to define the role of ‘city activator’. A spokesperson said it referred to someone with expertise in revitalising communities (a personal passion Mitsudera has followed since working at Beacon Communications and Geometry).

Fact’s tagline is, “We create facts and activate people”. According to ADK, the abundance of goods and information in society has made it more difficult for advertisers to attract attention simply by talking about their products or services. With its 15-second time slots, Japanese TV advertising in particular tends to be heavily product-focused. To help brands under these circumstances, Fact aims to work with clients to unearth “valuable facts that have not been discovered” and build “proposals based on discoveries”.

ADK did not provide details of clients Fact will initially work with. Taking into account Fact’s manifesto, clients are likely to eschew a top-down approach and seek some degree of pushback to their briefs from the agency in order to create work that goes against the grain of mainstream advertising.

ADK said that with major events looming and the advent of sustainable development goals, Japanese companies have been showing more interest in the concept of so-called ‘creating shared value’ (CSV) management, and suggested this was an opportunity for Fact.

“Companies and brands are required more than ever to reassess their existence, think about how to realise both social and economic values, and to put these into practice,” ADK said. “This means we have entered the competition to find the values that will activate people.”

Fact will operate at a premises separate from ADK’s main Tokyo office, starting out at WeWork with plans to move to a more permanent location in the near future. The launch follows that of Cherry, a boutique with a similar structure, last July.