Japan's ad tech community need to redirect their focus on improving the quality of ad delivery as well as user engagement – both of which are showing signs of deterioration.

The digital era, alongside the ability to buy media programmatically, had provided tremendous benefits for advertisers, said Aco Yamagata, Unilever's Japan media director of customer marketing. In particular, she noted, marketers now had the flexibility to more quickly adjust and react to actions taken by their competitors.

And, while previously they would have to book ads one to two months in advance, and at a fixed price, to support a campaign, buying media programmatically had significantly shortened the gap as well as allowed advertisers to better control their budget, said Yamagata, who was speaking at ExchangeWire's ATS Tokyo 2016 conference this week.

However, the advent of digital also brought along with it challenges related to both quantity and quality. She noted the lack of inventory in the local market, echoing similar views of the Asian region. Exclude YouTube clips in the mix, for instance, and the volume of viable video inventory would be left wanting, she said, stressing the need to plug the gaping shortage in order to drive the big shift towards programmatic and RTB.

"There's also an issue with quality. Sometimes, the ad cannot be seen easily", Yamagata said. She noted that it was the responsibility of media owners to ensure ads placed on their inventory were properly executed, but not all took this role seriously.

She recalled how newspapers, once major players in the industry, would take accountability for all ad inserts and monitor every piece of information published on their print platform.

Unilever's Aco Yamagata

"There was great awareness of what they published, [but] this has been greatly diluted today", she said. Noting the vast amount of media on digital platforms in the current landscape, she explained that advertisers needed to monitor their own ads to ensure they had been delivered on the appropriate platforms and assess the impact.

Yamagata added that media owners might lack the motivation to address this issue since it could impact their ability to deliver the required inventory. She also brought up oft-cited concerns about brand safety, emphasising the need for media owners to have better control of how ads were inserted into their content.

She further urged for an industry standard on viewability, which remained inconsistent in the Japanese market where different players touted contrasting numbers. This, she said, complicated issues for advertisers who needed a clear framework to measure the impact of their campaigns.

Relook at use of clicks as KPI

Marketers in the country also might be anxious to learn that 57% of consumers would not click on ads. This, however, did not necessarily translate to lower sales conversions, said AdRoll's Japan managing director Luciano Kohmura.

Despite the fact that more than half would not view ads, more than 80% would go on to make online purchases, he noted, citing statistics from the company's survey. The findings put into question the accuracy and relevance of depending solely on clicks to measure the impact of ad campaigns, Kohmura said. He added that advertisers polled in the AdRoll survey still placed CPC and the number of clicks as top KPIs.

According to the study, 65% of consumers would recall an online ad even if they had not clicked on it, while 63% would buy a product several days after seeing the product's ad. This further suggested that marketers should consider a longer timeframe in measuring the impact of an ad, he said.

Advertisers, though, should refrain from pushing ads too aggressively or risk alienating their consumers. Some 77% found ads "irritating" in several instances, for example, when an ad covered the entire screen of their mobile device, Kohmura said.

Another 50% did not appreciate being "stalked", where 30% said they were put off by persistent ads, including those that continued to pop up even after they had already purchased the featured product. Some 52% of consumers said repetitive or persistent ads would negatively impact the image or reputation of that brand.

While advertisers clearly would want to avoid evoking such reactions, they often would end up working with multiple SSPs, publishers, and market players, Kohmura explained, and this likely would lead to overlaps in inventory and the same ads being pushed by different parties in the value chain.

The problem would be exacerbated due to advertisers' focus on click rates, fuelling the desire to expose their ads more than was necessary, hence, pushing up ad frequency.

He suggested that Japan's unique landscape, where agencies would not have exclusive relationships with advertisers, created an environment where the former ended up working with multiple companies in one industry segment and with multiple vendors across multiple campaigns.

He recommended marketers worked with just one to two vendors in order to better capture attribution.

Shift towards better user engagement

Brands increasingly would need to look at user experience to establish better engagement and trust among consumers, urged Emmanuel Fischmeister, Teads' Japan head of international sales. "Users hate poor creatives, poor targeting, and slow page loads", he said, noting that 72% of consumers cited disruptive or annoying ads as a reason for installing ad blockers.

Citing numbers from Teads' own research, Fischmeister said 62% did likewise when ads affected website performance; and 61% would do so when they found ads to be excessive. comScore research also found that 60% of pre-roll ads were not actually viewed by consumers, indicating that advertisers would find little success in forcing video ads on their target audience.

He lauded the use of outstream video ads instead, which also opened up new inventory for publishers that did not offer video content to monetise, since they could now place such ads on any article page within their website.

Marketers at ATS Tokyo 2016 discuss the importance of user experience.

Tetsuya Shintani, The Trade Desk's Japan commercial director and country manager, also pointed to a shift in focus "from ad slots to people", reiterating the importance of viewability and ad fraud, as well as Deal Identifiers (Deal IDs).

Pointing to September 2016 stats from the ad tech firm's Japan network, Shintani said only 39% of overall impressions were viewable. Improving user experience, he added, would help improve viewability.

And data insights would be critical to facilitate such efforts, said Kenichi Sugawara, manager of brand advertisement at local media company, SmartNew. He noted that media consumption and users' information route had changed significantly, with consumers accessing information on their mobile and at anytime, anywhere.

This also drove the distribution of media so companies could better reach consumers and heightened the need for content to be optimised for the platform to which they were delivered, Sugawara said. This meant marketers would have to be mindful of different characteristics of each platform and ensure their ads were optimised for their targeted platforms. If they neglected this need, consumers would turn to ad blockers, he said, further driving home Fischmeister's comments.

He said he prioritised several key factors to improve user experience, including displaying ads without compromising pageloads, optimising content for targeted screens, and producing quality creatives.

In an environment where consumers now were more easily turned off by ads, marketers would need to leverage data insights and better creatives to develop their brand, Sugawara said.

Cross-device support was particularly important for the travel industry, said Takuya Ogawa, chief of online sales at Japan Airlines, who noted that consumers would browse for travel options on their mobile but complete their purchase on the PC.

So, airlines must be able to engage with consumers on mobile and establish a profile based on their browsing and purchasing patterns across platforms, Ogawa said.

For cosmetics company, Madre:X, this also would include their physical channel. Director Naoya Fujiwara said their marketing efforts encompassed digital platforms, mobile, TV, as well as their network of 630 outlets. "We combine online digital channels with our physical stores to maximise the impact of our campaigns", said Fujiwara. "And with the smartphone always with you, in your hand, it means that we need to be able to market in real-time [based on] the location of customers."

He noted that women, for instance, would spend a long time at nail salons, presenting opportunities for the company to push ads promoting their cosmetic products while they were getting their nails done.

Content marketing also proved effective, he said, pointing to a portal Madre:X developed to provide information on acne management. The company would then push ads featuring their acne products to people accessing the website based on their demographics. This would ensure an acne treatment cream for adults would not be pushed to adolescents, for instance, while ads for their acne treatment product for teenagers might be retargeted to parents of children in this age group.