Suntory - Media and Advertising

Media and Advertising

• Suntory and its various products, are featured in the Ryū ga Gotoku/Yakuza series of games.
• Suntory was one of the first Asian companies to specifically employ American celebrities to market their product. One of the most notable is Sammy Davis, Jr., who appeared in a series of memorable Suntory commercials in the early 1970s. In the late 1970s, Akira Kurosawa directed a famous series of commercials featuring American celebrities on the set of his film Kagemusha. One of these featured Francis Ford Coppola (an executive producer of the film), which later inspired his daughter Sofia Coppola in her writing of Lost in Translation, a film which focuses on an American actor filming a Suntory commercial in Tokyo.
• A Reuters photo by Toshiyuki Aizawa from July 2003 showed Suntory's unusual marketing strategy of TV helmets. In this scheme, advertising company employees clad in orange jumpsuits wear televisions that broadcast wide-screen digital feeds of the brewing company's commercial on top of their helmets.
• Suntory operates two museums, the Suntory Museum of Art in Tokyo and the Suntory Museum Tempozan in Osaka, in addition to a number of cultural and social programs across Japan.
• Suntory produced several drinks under the name "Final Fantasy Potion", named for the weakest and most common healing item in the game, each were released in Japan only for a limited time to promote the release of the Square Enix game Final Fantasy XII, the 10th Anniversary of Final Fantasy VII, and the release of Dissidia Final Fantasy, which comes in two varieties. Each drink is different despite sharing the name. For the release of Final Fantasy XIII the Potion name was abandoned and replaced with Elixir, an item which typically heals one party member fully and restores all MP.
• There is a top Japanese rugby club called the Suntory Sungoliath owned by the Suntory company.
• In the 1970s, Suntory engaged US pop group, the Carpenters, to advertise its new line of soft drinks.
• Suntory is a former sponsor of the professional match play golf tournament played annually at Wentworth Club, near London.
• Suntory Kakubin is featured in an episode of the 2006 anime series Bartender entitled "Menu of the Heart."
• In the 2000s, to advertise its The Premium Malt's beer, there has been a series of television ads featuring Eikichi Yazawa and various versions of the title song of Shall We Dance?.