6. Touch Wood smartphone ad

It’s rare to see an advertisement so artfully and skillfully done, but Sharp’s Touch Wood SH-08C cellphone commercial is truly stunning.
In a Rube Goldberg-esque creation, Morihiro Harano, the award-winning creative director of Drill Inc., came up with the idea of having a wooden ball roll down through a homemade marimba/xylophone in the middle of a peaceful woodland scene in Kyushu, Japan. Kenjiro Matsuo actually created the instrument.

The commercial starts by showing the surroundings, the crew setting up the contraption, and the director saying “Take one,” which is the only talking in the commercial. It pans to someone rolling the ball and then the song takes off. It’s a little over 2-minutes of lovely music, and throughout the song you can hear a stream flowing in the background.
Until the ball rolls to a stop at the end of the commercial, you have no idea that it’s an ad for a cell phone. Japanese mobile phone operator NTT docomo said it will only be producing 15,000 SH-08Cs, but we think the company may see higher demand after people see this ad.
From what I was able to deduce from NTT docomo’s product page, which is available only in Japanese, the colors of each phone varies by the wood’s grain. The number of phones is limited because it’s difficult to mass produce the wood that comes from the cypress tree in Shimanto, Japan.