How Hiroshima Tourism Board Used Cats to Put Onomichi on the Map
Cat Street View is an interactive digital campaign created by BBDO Japan for the Hiroshima Tourism Board, launched in Japan in September 2015, presenting the streets and alleys of Onomichi — a historic port city in Hiroshima Prefecture — through a cat's-eye perspective filmed at approximately 15 centimetres above ground level.
Onomichi is a city defined by narrow lanes, independent shops, and a long-established community of stray and resident cats. The Hiroshima Tourism Board, working with BBDO Japan under the agency's I&S BBDO banner, identified this feline culture as the campaign's central creative vehicle. Rather than presenting Onomichi through conventional destination photography or broadcast travel content, the campaign constructed an interactive experience modelled directly on the mechanics of Google Street View — but reimagined entirely from cat height. Visitors to the dedicated digital platform could navigate the city's streets, lanes, restaurants, and shopfronts as a cat would experience them, moving through a low-slung, immersive visual world that made familiar travel content feel genuinely novel.
The campaign featured eleven local cats, each given individual profiles, biographical detail, and what the project described as 'meotags' — location markers tied to each animal's known territory within Onomichi. In doing so, Cat Street View turned the city's residents — both human and feline — into characters within a navigable narrative. The geographic market was specific from the outset: Onomichi and the wider Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan, with the campaign launched on 1 September 2015 according to reporting by The Japan Times and documentation held at BBDO Japan. The project's scope, as noted by TechCrunch and USA Today, initially covered selected streets and locations within Onomichi, with tourism officials subsequently announcing expansion plans to additional locations in October 2015. Clapboard rates Cat Street View 82 out of 100.
Japan's domestic and inbound tourism sector faced a competitive and rapidly evolving landscape in 2015. International tourist arrivals globally reached approximately 1.184 billion overnight visitors in 2015, representing year-on-year growth of around 4.4 percent, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization. Within Japan, regional cities outside the established circuits of Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka faced a persistent challenge: attracting visitors who already knew the country's headline destinations but had no specific reason to choose a smaller, less internationally profiled city such as Onomichi.
The strategic insight behind Cat Street View was precise. Japan's internet culture had long demonstrated a pronounced affinity for cat content, and the Hiroshima Tourism Board and BBDO Japan recognised that this cultural behaviour could be converted into a functional discovery mechanism for Onomichi's tourism proposition. Rather than competing with major destination marketing campaigns from operators such as the Japan National Tourism Organization or rival regional boards, the campaign chose a lateral entry point — internet culture — to reach an audience that conventional travel advertising would not have engaged. As reported by Vice and Business Insider, the interactive format invited exploration rather than passive viewing, making the audience's relationship with Onomichi active and personal from the first interaction.
The digital medium was deliberate. A Google Street View-style interface required no download, no app installation, and no prior knowledge of Onomichi. In Japan, where smartphone penetration and broadband access were both high by 2015, this frictionless format lowered the barrier to engagement significantly. The campaign's planners, including Tatsuro Kumaki and the wider planning team at BBDO Japan, structured the experience so that discovery of the city's shops, restaurants, and lanes emerged organically from the act of following the cats — meaning the tourism information was embedded within the entertainment rather than presented alongside it.
Cat Street View required purpose-built production methodology. The campaign's creative and production teams developed a camera rig capable of capturing 360-degree footage at approximately 15 centimetres above ground — the approximate eye-line of a cat moving through Onomichi's streets. This was not an adaptation of existing street-level filming equipment but a dedicated solution designed to render the city's textures, gradients, doorways, and alleyways from a perspective that human-height cameras structurally cannot replicate.
Executive Creative Director Masaki Honda led the creative team at BBDO Japan, with Art Director Yoshiyuki Kaneko shaping the visual identity of the experience. Digital Planning Director Tomohiro Hikami and Senior Digital Planner Hironori Ogata oversaw the interactive architecture of the platform, ensuring that the cat-perspective footage translated into a navigable, responsive digital environment. Communication Director Daisuke Sasaki and Communication Planner Susumu Yamamoto managed the campaign's outreach framework, while Account Executive Shunsuke Takeda coordinated the client relationship with the Hiroshima Tourism Board. Production company KOO-KI was credited on the project, as noted in production documentation, though the specific scope of their production role was not publicly specified.
The eleven cats featured in the campaign were not props or fictional characters. Each was a genuine resident of Onomichi, documented with individual profiles and meotags that placed them within specific locations across the city. As reported by The Week and Branding in Asia, this biographical layer gave the experience a quality closer to local storytelling than destination advertising. The streets, shops, and restaurants of Onomichi appeared not as curated tourism assets but as the actual environment these cats inhabited — a distinction that gave the campaign's visual world its credibility and warmth. The result was a single digital asset that functioned simultaneously as a travel tool, an interactive narrative, and a piece of internet culture calibrated for organic sharing.
No independently audited performance data for Cat Street View has been submitted to Clapboard's verified metrics database. However, the figures reported by BBDO Japan and corroborated across named media sources are substantial enough to warrant direct analysis.
According to BBDO Japan, the campaign generated 1.7 million views within its first two weeks online — a figure also cited by The Week and Branding in Asia. Coverage of the campaign reached 409 media outlets globally, generating the equivalent of US$8.0 million in advertising value, according to BBDO Japan's own reporting. These two data points together indicate a campaign that achieved distribution far beyond its production and media footprint, converting a single digital asset into a global earned media event. Visitor numbers to Onomichi increased by more than 20 percent compared with the previous year, according to BBDO Japan — a result that connects the campaign's digital reach directly to measurable behaviour change in Japan's travel market.
Cat Street View won Gold at the APPIES on 1 September 2016, as reported by BBDO Japan, confirming its recognition within the Asia-Pacific marketing industry as a strategically and creatively effective piece of work. TechCrunch and USA Today were among the 409 outlets that covered the campaign at scale, providing geographic distribution of earned attention that a Hiroshima Prefecture regional tourism budget could not have purchased through paid media alone. Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on the alignment between its format and its audience's existing behaviour: by meeting internet users inside a content type they already consumed voluntarily, Cat Street View converted passive cultural interest into active destination consideration for Onomichi and the wider Hiroshima region.
Cat Street View is a 2015 interactive digital campaign created by BBDO Japan for the Hiroshima Tourism Board. It presents the streets of Onomichi, a port city in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan, through a cat's-eye perspective filmed at approximately 15 centimetres above ground, featuring eleven local cats with individual profiles and location markers.
BBDO Japan, operating under the I&S BBDO banner, created Cat Street View for the Hiroshima Tourism Board. Executive Creative Director Masaki Honda led the creative team, with Art Director Yoshiyuki Kaneko, Digital Planning Director Tomohiro Hikami, and planners Tatsuro Kumaki, Kenta Takagi, and Takeru Nagasaki among the named contributors.
Cat Street View generated 1.7 million views in its first two weeks online, according to BBDO Japan. Coverage reached 409 media outlets, equivalent to US$8.0 million in advertising value per BBDO Japan's reporting. Visitor numbers to Onomichi in Hiroshima Prefecture increased by more than 20 percent compared with the previous year.
Cat Street View won Gold at the APPIES on 1 September 2016, as reported by BBDO Japan. The APPIES is a prominent Asia-Pacific marketing effectiveness awards programme. The campaign also earned broad recognition across international trade and consumer media, with coverage spanning 409 outlets globally following its September 2015 launch.
Onomichi has a longstanding resident cat community that is part of the city's local identity. BBDO Japan identified Japan's strong internet culture around cat content as a strategic entry point for reaching audiences who would not engage with conventional destination advertising, converting cultural behaviour into active discovery of Onomichi as a travel destination.
Cat Street View was filmed in Onomichi, a historic port city in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. The initial scope covered selected streets, alleys, shops, and restaurants within Onomichi, as reported by TechCrunch and USA Today. Tourism officials announced plans to expand coverage to additional locations in October 2015 following the campaign's launch.
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