Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Multinational low-cost airline and superapp airasia, with the aid of their recent VTuber agency Project Kavvaii, and online art community Pixiv have joined forces in officially kicking off a fan art contest dedicated to Project Kavvaii’s first-ever VTuber Aozora Kurumi.
Said contest kicked off last 9 September and will conclude by 24 October this year.
The fan art contest was previously announced by airasia during Aozora Kurumi’s media announcement last May of this year, which was also her debut month, in which she was introduced last 8 May.
Top winners of the said contest will receive a variety of prizes from airasia and Pixiv, including Wacom drawing tablets; hotel accommodations for use in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand, as well as CabinZero backpacks. The other consecutive winners will receive 20,000 BIG points from airasia, which is from BIGLIFE, airasia’s loyalty management subsidiary.
Speaking to MARKETECH APAC, Izal Azlee, senior manager for content strategy at airasia, said the four months that they have shared with their first-ever virtual idol was at first unexpected, but they have totally loved it, adding the reason of how together and tight knit the community is, from fellow VTubers in the online community, to other VTuber agencies, as well all the way to the fans and viewers themselves.
“Doing what we do in airasia, we are in total awe of the community. We as a company have always aimed to embrace the various communities across the region and we are just getting started with the VTubing community. And the best part about this whole thing is how much we (the talent and agency) are learning a lot of things together on this journey. The fact that it’s collaborative makes it all that more exciting,” Azlee stated.
For the team at Project Kavvaii, the contest is not about making it resonate with the brand but rather showing their gratitude and appreciation to Kurumi’s fanbase that have welcomed not only their talent but them as an agency as well four months ago.
“We just want to show our appreciation and hopefully we can continue on this journey for a long long time. Ultimately, our bigger goal is to bring the creativity in the region into the spotlight. This is one of the small ways we can achieve that,” Azlee added.
Such positive relationship of fans and the brand themselves, according to Azlee, is best observed when looking at the gradual reception of these communities to the brand in focus.
“For brands, we would say learn about the community first to see what it’s all about and understand what this would mean, not just to the brand but to the community. It isn’t a walk in the park, so there’s a lot of learning. From our experience the best way to excel here is to listen to the community and VTubers,” he concluded.
Aozora Kurumi, who speaks multiple languages namely English, Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, Korean as well as some Bahasa Malaysia and Japanese, now currently holds 11.8k subscribers on her official YouTube channel as of this writing, and has made multiple collaborations within the VTuber space, with the larger majority concentrated in the Southeast Asian region like Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia.
