KINCHO's 'Adolescence Sketches' radio spots sell roach spray through awkwardness — ACC GP

KINCHO's Gokiburi Mounder is the insecticide families buy for the home, but pest-control advertising usually trades on fear and function. Radio gave the brand a chance to be listened to, and the brief was to make a summer staple feel like real family life rather than a threat.

Dramatize a boy's standoffs with his mother — pocket change, kiss mark, tongue click, hole in the wall — and let roach spray be the one thing they can agree on.

Dentsu Creative KANSAI's Masayuki Furukawa wrote four 60-second spots — 'Pocket Change', 'Kiss Mark', 'Tongue Click' and 'Hole in the Wall' — built on the painfully recognizable standoff between a sullen middle-schooler and his mother: no reply when called, a kiss-mark question that goes nowhere, a tongue click, a hole punched in the wall. Each scene stalls on awkwardness until the mother calmly sends the boy out to buy Gokiburi Mounder, landing the product message inside a moment every parent recognizes.

The series took the ACC Grand Prix (Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Award) in the Radio & Audio category at ACC TOKYO 2025 — Hits Corp's third consecutive and seventh overall radio Grand Prix — plus double ACC Golds and craft awards for direction, copy and acting; in 2026 it also won the OCC Award Grand Prix.

KINCHO's Gokiburi Mounder is Japan's household roach spray, sold every summer, and its radio work has become a fixture on Japanese stations. The 2025 series 'Adolescence Sketches' (思春期スケッチ) aimed at something pest-control ads rarely attempt — family life as it actually sounds, with all its awkward silences.

Written by Masayuki Furukawa of Dentsu Creative KANSAI, the series is four 60-second spots: 'Pocket Change', 'Kiss Mark', 'Tongue Click' and 'Hole in the Wall'. Each dramatizes the standoff between a rebellious middle-schooler and his mother — he ignores her calls, dodges a question about a kiss mark, clicks his tongue, and has punched a hole in the wall.

The twist is the product. In 'Pocket Change', the mother reveals a cockroach, hands him money and asks him to buy Gokiburi Mounder before dinner; he grumbles through his 'rebellious phase' and goes anyway. The spray is not the enemy of the scene — it is the one errand the family can still share, and the narrator thanks the boy at the end.

The bet landed: the series won the Grand Prix in the Radio & Audio category at ACC TOKYO 2025, Hits Corp's third consecutive and seventh overall radio Grand Prix, with double Golds and craft awards, and the OCC Award Grand Prix followed in 2026. For a brand whose radio work had already won Galaxy Awards repeatedly, the series became a rare case of an insecticide commercial people actually look forward to hearing.

The campaign sold an insecticide by never really talking about insects — the roach is one line in a story about a mother and son.

It leaned into a universally recognizable relationship moment instead of the category's fear default, so listeners laughed before they learned the product.

Each spot ends with the mother calmly sending the boy to buy the spray, making the product the solution the family already agrees on.

Radio's intimacy was the point: the brand's stated craft principle is to make listeners feel the scene as their own experience, and the awkward pauses only work in audio.

Make the family the story, not the bug: when a mother and son can't talk, the roach-spray errand becomes the neutral thing both accept — the product message arrives inside universal awkwardness.

'Adolescence Sketches' became the most decorated entry in KINCHO's radio series: ACC TOKYO 2025 Grand Prix in Radio & Audio (Hits Corp's third straight and seventh total radio GP), double ACC Golds, and craft awards for direction, copy and acting. In 2026 the series added the OCC Award Grand Prix for Masayuki Furukawa, and the production house extended the same family-realism approach to a parallel 'Kizukai Mounder' (thoughtful Mounder) series, which also won ACC Gold. KINCHO's radio platform remains one of Japanese radio's most anticipated summer fixtures.