Postmortem: An Interview with Aniplex of America's President

Article Title: A Meeting With Aniplex of America President Henry Goto 

Author: Seth Burn

Publication Date: 9/2/2016

Remember when I mentioned that there were off-the-wall stories? Well, buckle in, because we're going to be riding this one to crazy town.

This was published during a time I like to call the Backlog Years... basically, my editing backlog was about five miles long, and it took a while to get to pretty much anything.

I'm still kind of stuck there, sadly. But anyway!

Seth had attended Anime Expo 2016, and was granted an interview session with then Aniplex of America president Henry Goto. The interview was originally supposed to focus on AkibaFest, which was gearing up for October of that year.

Before we go further, I'd like to note that Seth is a hell of an interviewer. He's charismatic and has this great talent for getting on just about anybody's good side, as the conversation continues.

The conversation moved from AkibaFest, over to Mr. Goto's career in the industry, to Aniplex of America's pricing structure, and even their biggest achievements. Through the discussion, Goto proved to be remarkably candid and forthcoming with details, even even going as far as to draw up a pyramid that showed off Aniplex of America's pricing strategies when trying to better explain their approach to the market at large.

This is a mock-up.

Seth's article painted a portrait of a seasoned veteran, a a man who had lived through the great industry crash of the mid-oughts, and whose decisions were being made to guide his company to a position of absolute safety in the future. He was was constantly thinking three or four steps ahead, and genuinely cared for this industry that he's called "home" for his entire career.

Moreover, we were both pretty well-taken by one quote from him: "If [customers] like your show, they’ll watch it twenty-six times."

It was an interesting interview, for sure. And, to be honest, both Seth and I both came away from this piece with a new respect for Goto. As Seth put it, "he put his balls on the table." 

At this point, I'd like to note that this wasn't the typical interview format. Seth noted that he wasn't allowed to take in a recorder, and basically transcribed all notes by hand (this becomes relevant later). But, by all rights, we saw nothing really outlandish in the piece. 

So, as editor, I went through and polished the copy. I fired a link off to our contacts at Aniplex, and published the next day. All in all, it was a pretty standard convention interview up to that point.

Now, here's where things get interesting.

Before we go further, I'd like to add some context to this coming passage 

In 2016, it was often argued by marketers that Likes were pretty much vital to marketers on Twitter. And, well... any comments that the Anime Herald twitter account were general one-off comments - nothing exactly earth-shattering, just "Hey I like your article" or "this is from @animeherald." 

With that in mind, I built a Twitter bot to Like tweets as they pinged the Anime Herald account.

Big mistake.

A day after the article went live, it caught on like wildfire. People latched onto a few of the statements within the article - the most notable being "[Mr. Goto] considers Fullmetal Alchemist to be one of Aniplex of America’s greatest successes." 

At the time, we were smack dab in the middle of a massive license expiration run - shows like Fullmetal Alchemist, Baccano!, and Birdy the Mighty: Decode were all seeing their rights expire, as the licenses reverted back to Aniplex.

I'm sure you can see where this is going.

Basically, our article got a flood of angry tweets, citing the Anime Herald Twitter account. 

And the bot, like a good bot, continued to Like them, not caring of the content. At the same time, we didn't see anything exactly wrong. We were fielding comments, and generally responding, and Aniplex of America had been pretty quiet about all of it. 

Moreover, my focus was more on the site end, as I was doing tech work to handle the "Reddit" and "4chan hugs" that saw our operations crippled pretty badly. 

Server reboots became a fact of life, as the traffic grew, and my general focus moved away from Hootsuite as I attempted to handle the bigger operational issues.

During the peak of the article's spread, our traffic had literally doubled from its norms.

Anyway, things got real about a week after the piece went live. We received a comment from our contact at Aniplex asking for a call. I was at work at the time, but I agreed to take it that evening.

And that night, they called. Several Aniplex of America representatives, plus a member of the company's legal team were on the line. 

Shirobako works so well in these contexts - it's not intentional, it just has a lot of great scenes with tense meetings. :P

In particular, the group stated that the article had received some additional attention, which was troubling as it hadn't been foreseen. 

A surprisingly large issue, though, was Anime Herald's endorsement of virulent messaging on the piece.

There was about ten seconds of silence as reality hit. I explained the situation - that I was basically the only person doing the marketing, and that I was a software engineer in the waking life who had an automated bot Liking literally everything that came down the line. There was this bewildered amusement that came about as I explained this - not that I was laughing, mind you.

Seriously, being in a call of this nature is fucking terrifying. You don't know what will come out of them, and there's this very real fear that something foreboding will happen within the next few minutes. 

Thankfully, this bit was a misunderstanding. I promised I'd turn off the bot and unlike the comments - which I did do once we hung up. 

With that out of the way, the tension died down considerably. 

After that, it was a discussion on content. While the overall article was generally fine, there were a few passages that were deemed potentially problematic - namely, the ones that people were already latching onto on social media.

During the call, I had Seth on Google Hangouts, and asked him to check his notes on each item. By this point, we had been on the phone for more than 45 minutes, and it was getting close to the end of the work day in Los Angeles. We agreed to touch base via email afterwards.

Over the next day or so, we ended up going back and forth, pushing back on just about everything that Seth was able to verify in his notes. We had contemporaneous written proof of each statement, which helped to give some standing as we backed our arguments up. Our recounting was, for the most part, accurate, and our quotations were valid.

Still, in the end, we did concede on two items, and made a pair changes to the article for accuracy.

• One was the previous Fullmetal Alchemist quote, which we changed to Aniplex, Inc. from Aniplex of America. 
• For the second alteration, we had to remove the Aniplex logo from the pyramid chart, as it was seen as a potential branding and endorsement issue. We fully agreed, there, and published the graphic you see above.

But, anyway, this was one of those rare cases where a seemingly standard interview turned into a total lightning rod. Still, with a firm resolve and the facts on our side, we were able to stand up and push back to maintain our integrity on the work. 

As a note, there were some details omitted here for legal reasons, and names have been removed to protect the innocent, as always.

-MF