Attention’s Big Moment Arrives in Japan

• Why attention is becoming big in Japan 
• How he’s helping clients think through attention’s impact on ROI 
• How attention impacts platforms, formats, and creative differently 

Why is attention important? Why is it, you know, at every discussed at every event at the top of so many advertisers’ minds in 2024?  

Yeah, I think it's an interesting question. I mean, I can speak from the from the context of Japan, obviously working here. At Dentsu in Tokyo, one of the big issues has always been that a lot of the advertisers have really focused a lot on television.  

TV has been incredibly dominant in Japan for a number of years and remains incredibly dominant. But what we see year over year, obviously with younger generation and sort of a more diversified content platforms that are arriving in Japan, such as Netflix, television viewership is declining year over year.  

What that's done over the last few years is because the very TV-centric heavy advertisers to now understand that they need to be making that shift to digital, but they have a lot of big questions around digital. It arises out of digital ad effectiveness, which the advertisers will say that, on TV, the results of a 30-second spot or 15-second spot that we know what that gets us in terms of volume response.  

We don't know that [with digital] because we just have metrics like VTR (view through rate) or completed video view that doesn't really tell us the details of if there's high ad recall or if the ads have been effective.  

So, the conversation in Japan is about how this idea of how we can take a metric or find a new metric that's going to be as qualifying as the metrics that many of these TV-centric brands use.  

We decided that ad effectiveness was the thing to discuss. And then that led into conversations around attention, obviously seeing what was being done with attention in the UK and the US, so we decided to bring that over to Japan.  
 
We've just completed our first sort of attention research [with Realeyes and Lumen] that we’re introducing the results of in a couple of weeks. It’s going to be this big introduction to Japan around attention metrics.  

I think Japan has always been two to three years behind the West in terms of their adoption of new things in in specifically sort of digital metrics. Viewability came a bit late.  

Ad verification came a bit late a few years after, and I think we're at that phase now, where attention is now something that the our global clients who are from outside of Japan, who are doing business in Japan are sort of asking the agency and their teams to say, Hey, why are you not looking at this? Because we're looking at this around the world? 
  
In Japan, there tends to be a very sort of practical view to digital and it is always something that ROI is incredibly important. What we've seen is attention has gotten the advertisers excited around digital and feeling more confident in running digital ads because they have this sort of way that we can all agree is a great way to assess the effectiveness of their advertising. 

Should media attention and creative attention work together? What should people take away from the idea that there are different ways to look at attention?
 
In the conversations that I’ve had with clients, we’ve tried to layer it by answeting questions. The first question is, in the digital ecosystem, where can the highest attention volumes be found at the platform level? That’s the first thing the clients want to understand in terms of investment. If they are going to shift some of their TV budget to digital, there are a number of platforms that they could go. So where can the highest volume of attention be found?  

First, we have a platform discussion. Is it YouTube, Meta, Instagram, or Twitch? Is it open web? So, we look at those things first, then we drill down to the second part, which is format, because we know that all impressions are not equal. With format selections, you’re looking at TrueView versus Instagram real versus a CTV, pre-roll, etc.  
    

Now, what we didn't want to do is just leave it there because my concern is that clients will say, “Great. Here is our TV asset that we've produced for a 30- second TV spot. Please run this on digital, and we hope to see the same Attention and ad recall, etc. Results.  

And we know that that's just not the case. And so creative really became kind of the foundational piece of our discussions around attention. Because what we see obviously with the research that we've done with Realeyes is that the creative adaptation to the format and the platform yields the best results. 

We have the conversation at three levels: platform mix, format mix, and then based on that format mix, making recommendations to the clients about how they should adapt their creative. We do some creative pre-testing work as well with Realeyes that we're developing together for Japan.

You talked a little bit about Japan being, you know, in in some instances, couple of years behind other parts of the world. There’s clearly a lot of education needed. What are some of the best practices when you're having those conversations just to get people comfortable with, you know what is a new way of measuring ad effectiveness?  

There are probably two or three avenues that we approach in terms of doing this. The first step is educating the agency and a lot of the people within the organization. I’ve started by getting everyone in the agency behind this new metric and then we start to evangelize this to our clients.  
 
The talking point that's really worked quite strongly is the ROI or media effectiveness talking point where it's hard to dispute. If the person has not seen your ad, then they're probably not going to recall your brand, right?  

This is something that is surprisingly more simplified than maybe things we've used in the past where it's like, well, if your view-through rate equals this or if you have this number of completed views, then your ad recall would be this.  

I think we've kind of drilled down to something that's that's actually somewhat more simplistic, which is like how many people saw your ad. And for how long and do they remember? 

And I think that that has been able to translate quite well. I think, so far in the sessions that we've had with the clients. I think the other aspect of it, too, that's been helping is having global clients. So, clients who have headquarters in the UK or the US have been using or hearing about attention for some time.  

Obviously, Dentsu started the attention economy project back in 2016. It's been quite some time since that started. You already have clients who have been seeing the results of that who are sort of sharing that with their counterparts here in Japan. That's how we're able to make some inroads. We've worked with a lot of partners.  

Teads, Ogury, The Trade Desk, Twitch, who have really worked with us to develop this research that we did with you guys. It's also collectively the market kind of coming together and trying to push this, which I think will help a lot as well.       

Do you think there'll be more conversations around attention and additional metrics further down the funnel, like sales lift?       

We've already kind of started to have discussions with different partners about how we attach attention to sales uplift and drive to store and geolocation.  

E.g., I saw your ad, and then I was able to measure that within seven days I visited your store. There are conversations that are happening now, and I think the future of this would be this ability to be able to truly measure across a number of different KPIs. 

To say, okay, we know that this level of attention will equal, you know, this amount in foot traffic. We know this level of attention will give you online conversions at X amount. Obviously, the market is talking a lot about the capabilities that AI has. It'd be really interesting, from the creative standpoint, to have some sort of very clear sort of statistically significant facts about creative right to say, if you build your creative this way and this way, this is generally the response you will get. 

People will watch this, or this is how short it should be, or this is where your logo should go, or things like that. So, I'm also kind of interested in that in terms of attention as well, which is creatively this sort of [Synthetic Testing] AI capability, which I think is something you guys are working on.