The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2022–2024
JR's 150th-anniversary stamp rally goes digital — 1.8M users, 12 Grand Prix
Dentsu turned Japan's beloved station-stamp culture into a GPS web app where pressing a stamp on your phone makes a journey personal.
JR Group · Dentsu Inc.
What it had to solve
Six JR companies jointly celebrated 150 years of railways, but 2022 made large physical stamp-rally events impossible; they needed a campaign that reconnected people to rail and domestic travel.
How it works
For the 150th anniversary of Japan's railways, six JR Group companies asked Dentsu for more than a logo: reconnect people to rail and to domestic travel after the pandemic. Dentsu's answer reimagined the station-stamp rally — a ritual generations of Japanese travelers love — as a location-aware web app where visiting a real station earns a digital stamp.
The craft is what made it stand out. Over ten designers researched each station's history and culture, producing 1,063 stamps plus 50 'railway work' stamps and 18 seasonal variants in woodblock-inspired style. The app kept analog quirks: a stamp comes out faint or too dark depending on how you press, and records the date, time and station — so each collection is a personal travel diary.
By October 2024 the service had been used by over 1.8 million people who pressed about 11 million stamps, and the campaign that was planned for one year ran into a third. It won a Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2023, four Grande Lotuses at ADFEST 2024, three Grand Prix at Spikes Asia 2024, and a D&AD Black Pencil — 12 Grand Prix in total across the 2023–24 award seasons.
Why it lands
- Built on an existing national ritual (stamp rallies) instead of inventing a new behavior.
- Made a public place personal: the stamp records your exact moment, so the railway becomes 'my' railway.
- Analog imperfections in a digital product created emotional attachment rather than a polished but forgettable app.
- Ten designers' research into every station made each stamp a reason to travel somewhere new.
What it did
1.8M+ users, ~11M stamps pressed in 2.5 years; the one-year project ran into year three — winning 12 Grand Prix plus a D&AD Black Pencil across Cannes 2023, ADFEST 2024 and Spikes 2024.
What you can take
When a physical ritual can't happen, digitize the emotion, not just the logistics. Keeping analog imperfections made a web app feel personal — the warmth was the point, not the tech.
Since then
The anniversary campaign became a lasting platform: the app kept running past the official one-year period, Dentsu described it as moving 'beyond a web app toward a platform,' and the team still dreams of stamps outside Japan. It is now cited as the reference case for 'emotional infrastructure' branding in Japan.
Sources
- MY JAPAN RAILWAY — Delivering the Value of Railways with Warm Digital Stamps
- From traditional to personal: Dentsu's award-winning 'My Japan Railway' story
- MY JAPAN RAILWAY (web app case page)
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