The Campaign Launch Videos

Opportunity

Last year, Crunchyroll launched a standalone digital manga app. I directed the films that introduced it to the world.

The campaign theme was The Perfect Pairing. Manga is where anime begins. Every fight, every heartbreak, every moment fans have watched a hundred times started as ink on a page. Crunchyroll now had both. The films made sure everyone knew it.

My role: Creative Director// Motion Director// Concept// Story// Co-Writer// Music Director

The Challenge

Manga is the original comic book format behind One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, Demon Slayer, Attack on Titan. Fans know the shows. The app was giving them access to the pages those shows came from, hundreds of titles worth.

So the films had to feel as massive as the library. If they felt small, the product would feel optional. And they had to feel as exciting as the shows themselves, without animating a single character or altering a single panel of legally protected artwork, on everything from a six second social ad to a Times Square billboard.

The Work

The hard part was figuring out how to build energy inside a format that legally could not move the way we wanted it to. The panels had to stay untouched, so momentum had to come from everywhere else: camera, timing, typography, composition, graphic punctuation. Making the space around the art do what the art itself could not. That balance is not obvious and it is not automatic.

Once that language was established, everything locked in. Anime clips cut to their exact manga counterparts so fans understood Perfect Pairing before a single word of copy appeared. Panels flew out of devices and filled frames with the kind of density that makes "hundreds of titles" feel true rather than claimed. The app UI anchored every sequence so the product always felt real.

Messaging evolved across the rollout from pre-registration anticipation to direct conversion, with dual CTAs supporting new subscribers and upgrade-driven calls tied to Ultimate membership. The creative ran across owned channels, paid media, app store surfaces, social cutdowns, and large-format OOH including Times Square digital boards during launch week.

Retail Extension

The campaign extended into physical retail through MangaSpot, an offline-to-online activation built on the same Perfect Pairing logic. Branded shelving, a Manga Finder quiz, QR codes routing into Crunchyroll accounts, anime monitors playing clips next to the volumes that inspired them. Take someone standing in a store and walk them directly into the platform.

Impact

Strong pre-registration volume. Measurable lift in premium tier upgrades. National scale across every major owned and paid surface. Times Square visibility during launch week in front of one of the highest-traffic audiences in the world.

And beyond the numbers: fans who thought Crunchyroll meant anime understood it meant manga too. That perception shift was the whole game.