Journal: Japan is unique in that you have the 800-pound gorilla (major established competitors) sitting in the corner. Comments?
McCaughan: You’re right, there’s no comparison in any other market. It makes things…interesting. The Japanese market is starting to change, but we still do have a couple of gorillas out there. Because of their size and history, there’s a whole range of issues, whether it’s media negotiations or whatever, and the fact is that the media here is locked into certain behavior patterns that might not even be considered as making business sense in other big developed marketplaces.
The market here is different—the relationships that the big agencies have with media and clients, and so on, put a lot of pressure on everybody. We’ve been in Japan for 50 years this year and we have about 300 people in Tokyo, making us one of the biggest of our more than 200 offices globally, but in Japan we’re just a mid-sized agency. It’s one of the things that makes doing business in Japan different.
But what we’re seeing is that the advantage the big agencies had when dealing with traditional print and broadcast media is starting to slip away, as social media and other digital media becomes more important. You don’t buy the ad space in the same way. It’s slow going, because many marketers are reluctant to move away from traditional media forms, but we are seeing companies changing. The financial crisis has accelerated a trend. Where we might otherwise have seen Internet versus other spending as plus-two, we saw it move to a plus-ten relationship very quickly.
Journal: As a cost-cutting exercise?
McCaughan: Yes. There’s a misconception that doing stuff on the Internet is cheaper. I was talking to a client who was thinking of using Twitter because it’s “free media.” It’s not. You have to pay someone to respond, and you’re not just developing one message—you’re developing hundreds of alternative messages. Even if two customers are fans of a common brand, they may have a different take on that brand. What people expect from social media is a personalized response. So you may not be booking space, but the cost comes in the development of the individual messages.
We work on this sort of thing, as well as search strategies—a term that’s come up only in the last couple of years—looking at ways in which people search, and inserting yourself into results without seeming too forced.
You used to have to have a Web site because everyone else had one. But people don’t actually go to them, so URLs have had to become less formal and quicker to understand. It’s true in so many areas—the long copy ad is a dying art.
Journal: As a writer that saddens me.
McCaughan: Some designers were telling me that their work is all about the 30-second grab. Japan is already seeing the manga-ization of literature, with keitai (mobile phone) books. Changes in types of literacy are going to make a difference–pictorial literacy, such as manga, is expanding in the U.S., as well as Japan. Does this mean the death of the long-form novel? We’ll have to wait and see.
Remember that most TV commercials in Japan are delivered in only 15 seconds, they’re there to provide an atmosphere—that’s why you get Western celebrities in commercials—they’re not there to endorse the product so much as to set a mood. Not “I drink this, therefore you should,” rather, “I’m like this, this brand is like this.”
To finish, here’s a tip for setting the atmosphere. Find out who your target audience is and what the hit songs were when they were 19. Then pick one as your soundtrack. Everything happened to you when you were 19—first partner, first drinks, college, whatever. Those songs were playing then. There’s a song inside everybody that’s part of the memory of their youth. Use that, and you’re touching that moment of joy we all have inside us.
