ad:tech Japan: Moving past mobile and on to social

"It's almost inverted, in Japan, we're experiencing a social media revolution with mobile marketing as a second, slightly out-of-date topic. Whereas in the US, mobile marketing is the revolution while social media is more matured," commented Roche who is also in a consultant position as digital director with DDB Japan.

One of the factors driving discussion is the rapid adoption of social media in Japan since the earthquake and tsunami in March. In January, the New York Times reported that Facebook wasn't gaining traction in Japan, with less than 2 percent (2 million) of the population using the social network. Fast forward to the end of August and Facebook subscriptions had exploded to over 11 million. Japan's home-grown social network, Mixi, meanwhile has about 10 million users. Twitter is even stronger with about 16 million users in Japan, making it Asia's top Twitter nation. Overall, social media subscriptions increased 30 percent following the quake.

"My takeaway from the conference is that while the Japanese are experiencing a social media revolution, they're doing it the Japanese way - mainly through gamification," said Roche. "Marketers here ask themselves, how do we translate gaming into business, how do we tie play to CRM."

He says Japanese consumers respond well to engagement that is approached in a playful and interesting manner: "Campaigns that take things lightly without thinking too much about engagement - the game brings it all together."

An example offered by Roche is Hakuhodo's campaign for Samsung's Galaxy 2 smartphone which tied a toy astronaut holding the smartphone to a space balloon and launched it into space. The phone would receive and display Tweets transmitted via a live camera feed. The promotion received over a million page views and almost 90,000 Tweets.

Another trend Roche has noticed is the convergence of CRM and social media. "We've always collected data, and have lots of it, but for the most part, it's been useless because people were not giving real information, and now finally, it’s coming to life with rationalising of the data and repurposing of the data through social media - CRM programmes engaging people socially for a specific purpose."

Nestle Japan, said Roche, is convertings its decade-old database into a bartering platform for its users. "They opened up a programme that used to just push Nestle products to their customers. Beyond social media, it ties into CSR with the ideas of green consciousness and recyling."

Japan is starting to lose its "Galapagos island" mentality - a change in consciousness in part fueled by social media, said Roche. "Interestingly, while there is the internationalisation factor of social media, the digital market here is still uniquely Japanese with the bias for gamification."

With social media on the table, the big question of how to determine ROI for social media campaigns was a hot topic. "The big answer after these three days is that we don’t really have a mechanism that proves ROI for social media and we’re not likely to have one for a few years. So, don't worry about it - it works, consumers engage and convert," said Roche.

In total ad:tech drew nearly 12,000 visitors and featured speakers like Kenji Kasahara, CEO and founder of Mixi, Erik Johnson, vice-president of Facebook Asia-Pacific, and Toshiharu Kiba, marketing director for Toyota.