Japan's programmatic market may be fledgling compared to the US, UK, and some of its Asian peers, but it faces similar challenges that underscore the need for simplicity, data integration, and ad viewability.

Delegates at ExchangeWire's ATS conference in Tokyo this week identified key issues the local industry would need to resolve to drive the adoption of programmatic and its associated technology platforms.

During a discussion comprising local marketers, panellists stressed the importance of ad verification tools to ensure their campaigns were being viewed by their targeted audience, and by actual humans.

Takeshi Tamate, head of marketing for Asahi Breweries, explained that the F&B company used lookalike modelling to extend its reach in targeting specific audience segments. It discovered that the impressions served were not reaching actual people, but instead bots, Tamate said.

"So the issue we face whether traffic is real, and I wonder if we're actually reaching and communicating with real users," he said, adding that ad verification technology provided great value and was highly regarded within Asahi Breweries.

The organisation also was keen to determine the impact of its digital marketing efforts on actual purchases. For instance, he said it would be useful to know whether consumers who saw Asahi ads on their smartphones would stop at a convenience store on the way home to purchase the company's products.

"This is something we're actively pursuing. We would like to know if our efforts have contributed to actual sales, on which media have our ads been most impactful, and so on," Tamate said.

Too complicated for advertisers

However, with inventory and data sitting on different platforms – and with little integration between these systems – it can be challenging for advertisers to make sense of the information. The ecosystem also is too complex.

Shunsuke Konno, founder and CEO of Ireo, noted that advertisers would need a fairly sophisticated understanding of key ad tech solutions, such as the various Google platforms, to obtain good results from their campaigns. "Everything is too complicated. While the functions are automated, there's too much to work on and a high level of skillsets is required to do a proper analysis of campaigns. It's too complex for just one person to handle," Konno said, adding that depending on the organisation structure, the marketing executive would not have the luxury of focusing on just one aspect of ad tech.

He also noted the high cost of deploying and managing digital campaigns. Dedicated teams would be needed to collect and analyse data, as well as execute based on the insights gleaned from the data, he said. This was a significant challenge for marketers, he added.

Akinari Kakeya, executive officer of OPT, concurred. He said data, ideally, should be interlinked to help brands enhance their engagement with consumers. However, the processes to achieve this were still too cumbersome.

Kakeya also pointed to inconsistencies in capabilities and skillsets among market players in Japan, as well as the lack of integration between their service offerings, which placed added pressures on marketers. He urged the need for better collaboration between solution providers to better support brands with their campaign delivery.

Daisuke Ishikawa, CyberAgent's executive manager for internet advertising business, added that cohesion within the industry would facilitate the ability to present data in a way that could be more easily understood by advertisers.

"As Konno pointed out, we don't have a 'superman' to integrate everything [ourselves], so the experts in each domain should be aligned and integrated," Ishikawa said.

Sadanori Shibata, Hakuhodo Dy Media Partners' executive manager of data management platform, data-driven media marketing business, also stressed the need for standardised ad metrics in Japan, which had yet to follow its US counterpart in this aspect.

This would establish concrete methods of measurement so ad viewability could be established, Shibata explained. "If there's good content, then advisers will invest," he said, echoing a point raised earlier by Asahi Breweries' Tamate about the value of ad verification.

Toru Sasaki, Google's Japan head of media & portals partnerships, noted that viewability was increasingly important because it helped ensure transparency and accountability, both of which were especially important in programmatic.

"Non-viewable ads will become meaningless in future, and advertisers are not going to pay for impressions that have no viewability," Sasaki said.

Duncan Trigg, comScore's vice president of AdEffx, further pointed to "a loss of clarity" that had surfaced over time concerning where ads were actually appearing. With the industry transitioning from site-specific media buys to more audience and behavioural-driven targeting, Trigg noted that this had created an environment where ad fraud had proliferated.

This underscored the importance of ad verification, which he said encompassed four key pillars: audience reach, brand safety, viewability, and fraud detection. While useful as standalones, these four tools provided the "only real solution" when deployed together and would help establish verified impressions, he noted.

However, there currently were discrepancies regarding viewability rates as defined by different ad tech vendors, which Trigg said was due primarily to what kind of data was used as part of the metrics. Citing comScore's proposed method of calculating viewability, he said the inconsistent removal of non-human traffic, or invalid traffic (IVT), as part of this metric had resulted in discrepancies and inaccurate measurement.

"Verified impressions should be used as a way to look at what's doing the work in a campaign, and they can affect the quality of programmatic [buys]," he said.

Konno also urged publishers and ad tech vendors to avoid creating "blackboxes" and disclose as much information as possible, as this would help facilitate campaign measurement.

"We can't validate if you just give us a blackbox. We need more information," he said, adding that brands also should provide information more freely.

Also noting the need for the right infrastructure to first be put in place, Kazuo Nomura, deputy director of content creation and distribution for Fuji Television Network, said it would be pointless to discuss the potential of ad tech platforms, such as programmatic or private marketplaces, if marketers were not ready to do so.

He related how some of his clients still delivered their data on magnetic tapes, requiring his staff to make a trip to their office to pick up the tape because they would not allow the data to be duplicated. "So a lot of things need to be transformed first before we can move into discussion about programmatic or private marketplaces," Nomura said.