If there is a company that can be seen as a true innovator in the field of online advertising, it will definitely be Uniqlo. Uniqlo is Japan’s, and in the mean time Asia’s, main clothing retailer. Best to be compared with Zara or H&M.

It seems that out of the box, out of room and even out of the building thinking is the starting point for each Uniqlo online campaign. A couple of years ago they drew attention with Uniqlock a widget streaming images of Chinese dancers. At the end of 2009 they brought a new campaign again challenging competition and innovating the field of online advertising.

To support its end of the year promotion where they gave away lucky tickets in store, Uniqlo created a banner campaign that distributed lucky tickets literally everywhere. They created a blog widget containing a button, when consumers pushed the button the images on every website changed into lucky tickets. The winning tickets received a price. Despite this, bloggers were given incentives to put the widget on their website. When a winning ticket would be obtained through their blogs they received a present as well. This resulted in a lot of bloggers putting up the banner for free.

You can already imagine the great results this yielded.

Again this comes to show that online advertising and banners are still in a premature phase. Nothing should be taken for granted and everything should be challenged. Or how in this field creativity can be seen as a strategy. Plus it seems to become a golden rule that you can’t expect to get any benefits from online advertising if you don’t give anything back in return. Uniqlo understood this by offering presents to both consumers and bloggers. That is why marketing has to evolve into a service and why the Internet is so well equipped to support this.