Dentsu's Kyoko Yonezawa Reaches for Stars & Cars

Advertising wasn’t the first career choice for Kyoko Yonezawa, creative technologist/director at Dentsu Inc. As an astronautics graduate she was interested in more extra-terrestrial environs. But then her love of bringing creative solutions to tech clients, Honda in particular, lured her into the industry and to the role of interpreting between scientists, creatives and even cats

As anyone in the advertising industry will tell you, interpersonal communication is key – and Kyoko Yonezawa certainly has that skill in spades. In her role as creative technologist/director at Dentsu Inc. she’s an interpreter between engineers, developers and creatives, facilitating the exchange of ideas, translating data into creative visuals and vice versa. Her enviable ability to communicate extends even further. Cats. Astronauts in outer space. And even, on one memorable occasion, the dead – resurrecting the late racing driver, Ayrton Senna, through the sound of his record-setting 1989 Formula 1 lap.

“My strength has always been telling people [stories] through technology,” says Yonezawa, who is in Cannes to present a seminar on lunar robotics and the untapped marketing opportunities for agencies in space. The final frontier has long fascinated Yonezawa. She spent her childhood in Yokohama, Japan devouring sci-fi novels and went on to study astronautics at Tokyo University. But advertising – at least in its traditional guise – wasn’t a career path she had considered until it came to graduation. “I wanted to work in the interface between technology and humans, so one choice was advertising agencies creating solutions for tech clients. I was particularly interested in Honda and Google.”

Senna’s spine-chilling sonic speed

Inspired, she applied to Dentsu Inc. where, after several years as a marketing researcher collaborating with MIT Media Lab and Tokyo University, she got her wish when creative director Kaoru Sugano invited her to join the Honda team. At the time, the role of creative technologist didn’t exist, and Yonezawa had to define her own role. “I’m a sort of interpreter between the technology, developers and engineers and the creative team,” is how she puts it. While hard technical skills such as programming are vital for understanding “what can and can’t be built”, Yonezawa reckons the ability to bridge the gap between tech and creative points of view is equally important. “Artistic people still have logic in their thinking. It’s about trying to understand different types of logic.”

Perhaps the most stunning marriage of technology and creativity that Yonezawa has facilitated was the Titanium Grand Prix- and Black Pencil-winning Sound of Honda. To promote Honda’s car navigation system, Internavi, the team set out to recreate the winning lap driven by Ayrton Senna during the 1989 Japanese Formula 1 Grand Prix, using historical data from Honda’s archives. Originally, they planned to run the stunt online with computer graphics, but decided that a physical light-and-sound installation at Japan’s famous Suzuka circuit would be more compelling. Almost 20 years after setting the record, Senna roared around the track once again, sending chills down the spine. 

If Sound of Honda proved how dry data could be converted into powerful emotion, Connecting Lifelines, another Pencil-winning Honda project, showed how it could save lives. After the devastating earthquake and tsunami that crippled east Japan in March 2011, Internavi tracked road and traffic conditions, which Yonezawa’s team converted into a live road map, thereby helping efforts to rebuild affected areas and literally mapping the road to recovery.

Yonezawa is quick to point out these are team successes, the results of a “very, very deep” relationship of mutual trust. “[Japanese] creativity doesn’t come from the blood, it comes from the environment,” she says. She herself has worked with the Honda team for five years, but Dentsu’s ties to the brand go back for decades, a not uncommon situation in the Japanese industry.

The Honda work may have cleaned up at awards shows, but Yonezawa stops short of calling it innovative. “Innovation is supposed to be something which happens once in a hundred years,” she maintains. “Personally, I think that it’s weird that we have Innovation Lions every year at Cannes. I don’t think that we can say if something is an innovation at the time. It’s only when you look back and see that it has totally changed the landscape that you can truly call it one.”

What’s her reaction to agencies adopting – often with only minor tweaks – the innovations of others for awards purposes? “Zero-to-100-style innovation, like Edison inventing the light bulb, that’s not something an advertising agency is capable of doing,” she says diplomatically. “Innovation [by agencies] is more about combining things, and showing something from a different angle. But yes, when they [agencies] lie in order to try and get an award, it’s not right.” 

Moon cars and chatty cats

Currently on secondment to a Tokyo start-up that’s developing a privately-funded lunar rover, Yonezawa is finally realising her childhood dreams of intergalactic exploration – which she got a taste of on 2012’s Space Hangout for the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), which saw consumers live video-chatting with astronauts from their home computers via Google+ Hangouts.

Having put her astronautics background to good use, Yonezawa is now looking to indulge her other great love: cats. She’s already designed a “human-feline interaction platform” – a collar that uses GPS tracking tech and other sensors to help owners communicate with their pets. “Some people thought I was a bit weird for trying to make a cat talk,” she admits. That’s Kyoko Yonezawa: a bit weird, but an all-round star-girl.