Dentsu’s President on Advertising, Internet Ads, and Google

October 17, 2007
By Ken Worsley

While we’re on a Dentsu theme, I though I’d share some excerpts from a recent interview the Nikkei held with Dentsu President Tatsuyoshi Takashima.

On the sluggishness of the traditional market for advertising versus the growth of internet advertising:

Online advertising makes it possible to identify the frequency of ad viewing and the age of viewers, something that is not easy to do with paper media. And with corporate ad budgets facing severe cuts, use of media for which the effects of advertising cannot be determined easily is diminishing. Advertisers are growing selective, and the accountability of the media side is greater than ever today.

On the “Google Threat” (ie, Google moving into traditional advertising channels):

There are a large number of local newspapers and regional radio stations in the U.S., and unsold ad slots abound. Google has tapped this niche market, but I do not think it will spread to prime ad space and so do not feel threatened.

I take that to mean something along the lines of, “Google doesn’t stand a chance of tapping into our network in Japan.” It might be true.

On newspaper and news agency being available for free online:

I still don’t know why television and newspaper companies offer free access to their portal sites. News is valuable and important content. It is difficult to recover costs with ad revenues alone, and they should have explored pay news distribution services early on. Japanese media lagged behind their U.S. and European counterparts in exploiting the Internet, but there is still room for innovation.

Innovation means paying for content? This one made me scratch my head. It reminded me of a comment made way back in 1997 by Michael Bloomberg:

Why can we charge $1,200 a month and these other idiots can’t get away with anything? Because on the Internet, when you try to charge for anything, usage goes to zero. The data that we have is publicly available, but the value added is in the categorization and the utilities that let you do something with it.

Emphasis added. From the New York Times, April 29, 1997

Full disclosure: I paid to read the interview with Takashima.

Filed Under Advertising, Dentsu, IT