Uber Taxi: The Sixth Sense

Uber Taxi's platform in Japan is Master Your Ride: the small upgrades the app makes over hailing a taxi from the street. The first Superpower campaign took one of them, the taxi coming to you, and turned it into telekinesis.

Year two had to keep the taxi coming to you and show more of the app's features, for people who still hail from the curb and don't see the point of booking in an app.

Japanese taxis are already trusted and loved. The challenge wasn't convincing people taxis are good: it was showing Uber Taxi upgrades the experience without replacing what people love: professional drivers, reliable cars, high standards.

The platform evolved into The Sixth Sense: a TVC starring Yo Oizumi and Yuri Tsunematsu, where Oizumi appears to sense his taxi's location and arrival: revealed as Uber Taxi's real-time tracking. Comedy makes a practical feature emotional, memorable, and culturally familiar. Cut down to :30 and :15, and rebuilt again as a vertical social edit, PR interview, and behind-the-scenes film.

The deck put it in one line: "The moment he touches his temple, he can see where the Uber Taxi is before it arrives… with Live Tracking."

The same line closes the films and runs across the stations and streets.

The superpower had to come from Live Tracking, so every film runs on the same three beats. Reality first: you can see your Uber Taxi coming, which you can't when you hail from the street. Then imagination, grounded in that reality, marked by a shift in grade, music and performance. Then reality again, ending on an Uber Taxi pickup.

The comedy rests on the pair. Oizumi and Tsunematsu play colleagues who behave like brother and sister: she has seen all his bits before and has never once admitted he's right, yet she keeps ending up there anyway. They had worked together once before, about fifteen years earlier, when Tsunematsu played Oizumi's daughter in the film 半分の月がのぼる空.

The :30 opens this page. The :15 changes only the ending, and the :06 keeps just the reveal.

For launch, the idea went vertical for social and into three longer films: an interview, a making-of and a PR film.

33 placements in six cities, June to August 2026: Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya and Fukuoka.

Launched June 3, 2026 on Uber's official YouTube with TV from June 4 across Kanto, Kansai, Nagoya, and Fukuoka: :30 and :15 TVCs, making-of, interviews, and social. It extends a growth story where Uber Japan's gross bookings grew more than tenfold since 2021, across all 47 prefectures and 1,000+ taxi-company partnerships.

Dates come from the brief, the presentations and Uber Japan's announcement.