Like a short, Apple-produced version of the movie Sliding Doors, the company’s latest ad for the Japanese market pits two parallel versions of the same character against each other — one with Apple Pay, one without.
Guess which one makes it onto the train home in time? (Hint: the answer probably won’t shock you!)
Apple Pay launched in Japan back in October. One of the big selling points of the service in the country is the fact that it works with the Mobile Suica contactless payment system, letting users easily pay subway fare rides. During a recent trip to Japan, Tim Cook showed off this feature by passing through train states gates using a Suica-enabled iPhone.
While that was the idea, though, in reality the launch suffered a few problems — thanks to the massive numbers of users who tried to use Suica cards on Apple Pay, which far exceeded the quantities expected.
This was reminiscent of the debut of Apple Pay in China, where tens of millions of people overloaded the system on its first day by trying to register with the service.
At present, Apple Pay is available on a variety of credit cards in Japan, although some cards issued by American Express, DC, UC and MUFG are currently excluded.
On a personal note, I’d love to see more ads about people’s lives if they didn’t find out about Apple. I’m picturing lots of stressed-out users typing DOS commands, but with a bit more money in their bank accounts.
