The Future Direction of Advertising Strategic Media Planning in Japan

"Obstacles to Advanced Media Planning"
Article No.1 (by Hideaki Koizumi)

I. Introduction
The AMA (American Marketing Association) defines advertising as, "The placement of announcements and persuasive messages in time or space purchased in any mass media by business firms, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and individuals who seek to inform and/ or persuade members of a particular target market or audience about their products, services, organizations, or ideas." This simply means 'broadcasting a message through some media'. In other words, the ad creative strategy and the ad media strategy are the keys to advertising.

"Advertising Principles and Practice" which is often used as a text book in US, which was written by Wells, consists of five chapters: 1) Advertising fundamental knowledge and environment, 2) Advertising background, planning, and strategy, 3) Advertising media, 4) The creative side of advertising, and 5) Factors for IMC (Integrated Marketing Communications). There seems to be no doubt that ad creative strategy and ad media strategy are big factors for doing research. In Japan, there is a lot of research on creative strategy. And many books have been published (e.g., "Outline of Advertising Copy" by Norio Uejou). But research and books specializing in ad media are very limited. In the US, we can find many textbooks. Some of the most useful books for understanding business practices are "Advertising Media Planning", written by Sissors & Bumba, and "Introduction to Advertising Media" by Surmanek. The book for advanced study is "Advanced Media Planning" by Rossiter & Danaher. A lot of research on media planning is also available. On the other hand, there is not enough of these kinds of books in Japan. We only have translated books, such as "Strategic Media Planning" written by Lancaster & Kent (translated by Kishi and Takeuchi), and "Media Planning From The Marketing Point Of View", written by Barban, Cristol & Kopec (supervised by Tasaburou Kobayashi and translated by Katumi Nakayama). As for academic research, Hirose wrote a book called "Basic Research of Media Planning" in which he reviews the media planning research available at the time. But the number of these kinds of books is limited.

II. Obstacles to advanced media planning
Japan is behind with getting to grips with media planning; both in the field of academic research and in business. As I mentioned earlier, in the field of academic research, we don't have enough quantitative and qualitative research in Japan compared with the US and Europe. But the same is true in business as well in Japan. The field of media planning is not yet considered as important compared with other areas, such as creative strategy. I have a hypothesis as to why this situation exists, as follows;

1. Complicated analysis isn't required in Japan if communication activities are executed mainly through the four major media (TV, Radio, Newspaper and Magazine).
2. New ideas related to the usage of ad media are rarely accepted by the media companies, such as the TV networks or newspaper companies since they are more powerful than the advertisers and ad agencies.
3. Remuneration for ad agencies is still often based on the 'commission system' in which their fee is calculated based on a fixed percentage of ad expenditure. So, ad agencies tend to propose a media plan that will maximize the money they will receive from advertisers with the least amount of time required for media planning, rather than doing media planning focusing on ad efficiency. This is especially true for TV, where the situation is that there is limited competition among the ad agencies over TV spot costs. All the ad agencies can only offer the same costs as long as they don't give any advertiser a discount. This system was caused and is supported by the media companies who have decided to present only 'client (gross) costs' to the advertisers, which is then paid by the advertisers to the ad agencies. Up till now, naturally perhaps, not many cases could be seen where an ad agency proposed to aggressively change a system which would likely result in lower profits. We also have to admit that there is a lack of information which can be used as the basis for evaluating the value of media. For example, advertisers don't know what the costs their competitors pay for certain ad space. And ad agencies certainly don't make it clear how much profit they get from any advertiser.
4. Generally speaking, it is easier for advertisers to evaluate creative strategy that they can actually see and hear. Media planning is often presented using sometimes complicated quantitative analyses. Therefore, creative ideas tend to be presented to advertisers before the media planning. Then, the media allocation is automatically decided by the advertisers depending on their evaluation of the creative idea.
5. Compared to the US and Europe, there is insufficient information/data about the ad media in Japan to conduct appropriate media planning.

The above points could be used to support the argument that media planning is not regarded as important in the business world.

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