The Way I See It: Rei Inamoto

Rei Inamoto, chief creative officer of AKQA, was born and raised in Japan, educated in Switzerland and America and is now based in New York. He tells Diana Goodman all about seeing his brother in the mirror looking back at him and how most advertising is “pollution”.

I like to keep my age a secret. Luckily, I’ve got to a senior position reasonably quickly and I like the idea of making people guess – to keep the mystique.

I live in Brooklyn, in an apartment. I keep my personal life pretty private.

An interesting fact is that I’m an identical twin. He’s an architect and happens to be in New York; we moved here together when we graduated from college in the 90s and I moved back here two years ago after five years in San Francisco.

Growing up, I personally thought it was great because I automatically had someone to play with as a brother and also as a friend. Our only issue was our younger brother, who always felt jealous.

All three of us moved away from home when we were 15, which is reasonably early. It came from the fact that when my mother was 18 or 19, instead of going to a Japanese college she decided to study abroad, in France. At that time it was totally unheard of for a Japanese woman to go overseas. Because of her experience, we grew up in a household where that type of progressive, liberal thinking was encouraged.

I would like to be seen as someone who is driven, with ease. I think there is a way to be driven and lead and move forward, but you don’t have to be an asshole to do that.

One of my quirky habits is that I don’t check my work email on my mobile. So my assistant has to text me or call me. I actually think it’s a myth that you have to check your email at that given moment and be on it. Eight out of ten times, if you call a person you can resolve something more efficiently and quickly than you can over email.

When I look in the mirror, I see my brother. There was one time I remember distinctly, when I was 17, I woke and went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and it freaked me out. I thought, “What the hell is my brother doing in the bathroom?” That only happened once in my life. We go through phases, like right now, where we don’t look alike.

I was born in Tokyo and then at an early age my parents moved to the countryside because Dad was starting up a business. We played outside – baseball, soccer, climbing trees – but also we had encouragement from our parents and teachers to be quite active in the art and crafts field. So that had an influence on both myself and my twin becoming artistically inclined.

My father was a physics assistant professor and taught at a university after he graduated. But he quickly realised it wasn’t his destiny, so he decided to change completely and opened his own furniture-making business.

I get on with my parents really well. I consider my mother to be my best friend – in addition to my brothers. My father is a visionary – probably one of the most driven and relentless people I’ve met. He doesn’t take no for an answer and never accepts failure.

I was at school in Japan until I was 15, and then from 16 to 18, I was at an international boarding school in Switzerland. That was definitely challenging for the first six months because I didn’t really speak English, but everyone was in the same situation: learning English and trying to make friends. After that it was great.

There were 300 kids from 70-plus countries, so it was as international as you can get in such a confined and concentrated space. That was one of my earliest influences. Being exposed to so many different people and cultures means I have a global and neutral perspective on everything I see and hear.

When I was 18, I went to the University of Michigan. Coming to the States was almost a bigger culture shock. I came from an international perspective to a very domestic perspective, so it was reverse culture shock.  

I got two separate degrees – one in art and design and another in computer science. At the time of graduating, I went back to Japan to gain professional experience. I worked at a tiny studio – Noriyuki Tanaka Activities – as a gofer. I did everything from making coffee and making copies to fetching rolls of film and designing in between. I even had to clean the bathroom.

To this day, I don’t really admit I’m an advertising guy because I really don’t like advertising, to be honest. I haven’t been shy about this. I think 90 to 95 per cent of advertising is pollution, and as a consumer, I do everything to avoid it. In fact, I actually cancelled my cable subscription because 50 per cent of the content on TV is ads that you don’t want to watch. 

I’m convinced that the future of advertising isn’t advertising. Traditional advertising is being taken over by software and social networking. Products themselves become the vehicle to carry the message.

Personally, I do think that sharing information is weird. People posting every meal they had, which I don’t care about, or “I just woke up” or “I’m taking a shower”. But that is accepted normal behaviour for younger people; that level of transparency has become the norm.

At AKQA we try to avoid saying we are an ad agency. What we say to clients is that we build meaningful connections between brands and people. And you can’t really rely on a 30-second spot to create that connection.

Campaign is another word we try not to use; we create franchises or programmes that brands can own. For example, the vision for the Nike Training Club was, how can Nike be the best personal trainer for everyone in the world? The tangible execution was an app that you can download to your mobile phone and professional athletes come up to provide you with training programmes based on your fitness level. It was the number-one fitness programme in 36 countries and recently it surpassed 100 million minutes of workouts. It’s the kind of time any advertiser would kill to have.

I have got an American Green Card, but when people ask about my nationality I am Japanese. If I took American citizenship it would be for practical reasons rather than emotional reasons.

Emotionally, I feel more Japanese. I’m quite Americanised, obviously, but emotionally it’s difficult. For example, there was a survey done by Adobe and the question was: which country is the most creative and which is the coolest? Every country but Japan and the US said Japan is the coolest country. But guess what? US respondents said the US was the most creative country, as did respondents in Japan. That reflected the Japanese and American psyches so perfectly: it shows the level of humility among Japanese people, and the level of confidence – and lack of humility – among American people. So I am still Japanese in that way, I think.

I think luck has definitely had a part in it. One has to be lucky to get what you get, but luck is also something you create, and sometimes you have to make a certain decision that you might not want to make. Certainly, taking a job at AKQA was a risk for me at that time, and when I joined eight years ago the company was one-fourth the size it is now globally. 

The first advertisement I remember liking was a [1998] TV commercial called Blind Long Jumper. I think it may have been the very first Nike commercial ever aired in Japan. Basically, there’s a blind person [Paralympian Mineho Ozeki] who’s a long jumper. The way he jumps is he has someone ringing a bell when he runs, to let him know where the line is. It was a piece of advertising that definitely made a positive impression on me.

I get real pleasure from seeing clients succeed – that is our duty, because if they are successful, we are successful and that turns into pride. In some cases there is way too much emphasis on winning an award, and not really on making a difference in a client’s business and consumers’ lives.

Something I feel really proud of is AKQA’s Future Lions, which we started in conjunction with Cannes about seven years ago. It’s for any student around the world who wants to break into this industry, and the brief is to come up with an idea to promote a product in a way that couldn’t have been possible five years ago. The first year we had 34 entries, this past year we had 1100 from 40 countries. That’s a pretty major deal.

I was a judge for the Cyber category at Cannes this year and there was one piece of work that kept winning in other categories. When we looked further into the work, it had almost no impact in the marketplace; there was no way it had created what the video claimed. It was clearly a piece of work created to win an award and I find that sort of behaviour so crass.

My worst experience in advertising was when I was working on a major client almost 10 years ago. I was a mid-level creative, but at the same time I was leading the project from a creative perspective. There was a technical check-in two weeks before a big ad went up in Times Square, and somebody told me, “By the way, the CMO is going to stop by.” I said OK, but I didn’t realise the difference between a big technical check-in and what the CMO was expecting. It was not finished and she went apeshit in front of us and the client team, and in front of tourists in Times Square. The lesson I learned was, there is a time and place to show things to the right people, and don’t show it if it’s not ready.

Obviously, I try not to favour one type of person over another – it should be based on meritocracy – but I do champion women in general and also female creatives, because the creative side tends to be a boys’ club.

In last 18 months the idea that made me jealous was Instagram. It’s not really a new idea – it’s an improvement of an existing idea – but they made it better. If it had been done for Kodak it would really have transformed the brand.

I try to care very little about what others think of me. Richard P. Feynman, who was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, wrote a book called What Do You Care What Other People Think? That’s one of the books I was quite influenced by as a teenager. The title says it all. 

Whom do I most dislike? Nobody comes to my mind particularly, because I think the only thing that should be disliked is hatred itself. It’s the mentality of not being open, of being complacent, of hating others.

In terms of things I would never work on, I think political organisations that I don’t [identify] with could be tough for me personally. I’m definitely not a conservative; I’m more liberal and progressive, I would say.

My most precious possession is time. I never have enough time for everything I want to do.

At one point about 10 years ago I almost lost one of my eyes. It was a soccer injury - I got hit and had retina detachment. I had to go through a series of procedures that required four operations. After each operation, as part of my recovery, I had to have my face parallel to the ground looking down at the floor 24/7 for about two weeks. That was probably the most taxing thing physically and mentally I’ve ever done in my life. It was the closest I came to losing my mind, but I just had to persevere because otherwise I was going to lose my sight.

I don’t believe in God. My grandmother is a Christian, and my mom, and all three of us were baptised, but religion wasn’t a huge part of my life. I guess I don’t believe there is somebody else who is in control of my destiny. I want to be in control of my own destiny. 

I wouldn’t trade anything for my childhood. I appreciate the kind of life and opportunities my parents gave us, encouraging us to go abroad at a fairly early age and supporting us mentally, emotionally and financially. Most people don’t have that and I certainly feel privileged and blessed.

I am not afraid of dying. We all die at some point; that is a pure, plain, cold fact that nobody can avoid.

In Japan, it’s a common custom to burn the body and Mum always said, ‘spread my ashes over the ocean when I die’. So I repeat that answer: not necessarily Japan, just ocean.

If I could change the world, I would save the planet. Mother Nature is totally in danger, you can feel it.

What, in the end, really matters? Happiness. Most important is seeing your immediate circle happy; that’s ultimately the goal for me to exist.