Lance Shields is a creative director, social media expert, digital brand strategist, MBA candidate. He got his start as a creative in the web industry during the dotcom in the late 90’s working at the fast-paced Agency.com in San Francisco. Moving to Tokyo in 2000, he was creative lead at Scient Japan launching global and domestic websites for Hitachi, All Nippon Airways, Mitsubishi Corporation, NTT DoCoMo and Yokogawa Electric, among others. He is the founder of Tokyo-based digital design studio Blue Creative and online community Japan Social Media Marketers.

Lance is currently working client-side at Amway Japan as a creative strategist and is engaged in a variety of strategic digital projects. In this part of the interview, he speaks about what keeps him going in Japan for 10 years, and some of his experiences there. He compares the recession in 2002 with the current financial meltdown from the digital point of view. He believes the recession is in a way a good thing, during recession is a good time to start the business. To find out what does he see as a clear trend in terms of innovation this year in this iTV-Japan interview.