IM@S at A&V

Kisaragi-san

I confess, I don’t read A&V; nothing personal, that blog just doesn’t talk in a way that I particularly find rewarding versus the time it takes to walk that talk down to its components. But occasionally the talk does match the walk in a way that surprises, such as today’s contribution from a favorite blogger of mine. I think the post does a good job unraveling the cunning calculus beneath a, by all means, mundane product tie-in/advertisement. It’s easy to write about smarts in a smarty-pants show, but I need that like another EN blog post on Utena or another article about chuunibyou. Well, I’m sure someone does.

One of the big takeaways I had from my recent Japan trip is precisely this–there is a reason why things like IM@S is as big as it is. Or I should say, there are many, many different reasons why, and one of them has to do with precisely the way certain things came together, how they’re planned originally, how these ideas were then turned into features and functional-to-dos. If you ever planned a startup, you might find the whole process eerily familiar, even the pivot that happened between the IM@S1 and IM@S2 line of products. The closer I got to this vertical, the more clear these details became, with less barriers in the way. There are things it did well, there are successes and failures, there are things the IP did, the management did, to steer through the good and bad times.

But as someone who hasn’t really been close with the IP during much of its life, I cannot speak with authority on the details. It’s just got that shape, that unique smell, if you will. Like the smell of countless flowers in the halls of SSA.

TL;DR: Anim@s is a surprisingly intelligent piece of planning and writing, and Otou-san only uncovered part of it. Or, version 2: A&V blogged about something I cared about for once. Or, even shorter: アイマス最高!


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