Welcome to Tokyo: Episode IV
by Keanu Newman, Director of Business Operations, Asia-Pacific
Our first big event of the summer, Advertising Week Asia, took place May 28–30. The MetaX Japan team attended numerous seminars hosted by companies such as Teads, Dentsu, Unruly, McCann Worldgroup, Pubmatic, and Rubicon Project. Topics discussed included the state of digital advertising in 2019, building brand safety in a disloyal world, and monetizing video through creativity and technology. We focused on attending seminars centered around advertising technology, ad verification, programmatic advertising, and video monetization.
As of 2018, 65% of the world’s advertisers engage in programmatic advertising. Although Japanese advertisers are behind the global average, the country presents a vast opportunity for programmatic: as projections estimate 62% of Japanese media buying will eventually be programmatic by 2022 (Rubicon Project, Yeon Sung (Country Manager — Japan)). Japanese companies tend to utilize traditional processes, i.e., outdated ad servers, but with the rise of header-bidding, there was a sudden shift in acceptance towards programmatic.
However, from creating the advertisement to actually serving it on a publisher’s website, there are six independent hops potentially amounting to 10–40% data loss (Unruly, Phil Townend COO — APAC). Unpredictability, audience delivery is one of the biggest downfalls of programmatic advertising, a concern amongst Japanese companies. adChain Audits can maintain transparency within the advertising ecosystem by allowing buyers to track their campaign data and impressions every hop of the way, reducing any existing fear that each hop is negligibly wasting budget.
Another thing I’ve discovered is that Japan is outdated when it comes to integration with advertising fraud vendors. Ad fraud is often overlooked in Japan, and companies are reluctant to admit that fraudulent activity is an issue. However, as online and mobile fraud becomes a $44 billion-issue by 2022 (according to Juniper Research), Japanese companies will need to react quickly and look towards safety vendors to mitigate fraud.
At the end of this month, we will keep this conversation going at ATS Singapore, and look forward to learning more about the industry’s needs!
