1) Mobile Advertising: Winners Selected for the 6th Mobile Advertising Awards
2) Industry Trend: Japan’s Mobile Content Market Approaches 1 Trillion Yen in 2006
3) Japan Cellular Subscriber Data

Mobile Marketing 2007: Japan's Largest Mobile Advertising IndustryEvent

This past June 6-7, Net Marketing 2007 and Mobile Marketing 2007, both focused on Internet and mobile marketing and sponsored by Nikkei Business Publications, were held simultaneously in Tokyo, Japan at Tokyo Midtown. The events generated a huge amount of excitement and were attended by industry leaders from marketing, advertising, communications, as well as from the Internet and e-commerce / transaction sectors.

This was the second time for the Net Marketing Forum, which was jointly held by Nikkei BP and the Mobile Marketing Solutions Association (MMSA) in parallel with Mobile Marketing 2007.  The agendas of the two events included 60 sessions featuring presentations and panel discussions by key figures from companies on the cutting edge of marketing and related services, as well as booths and exhibitions by participating companies.

The keynote speech on the first day of the event was given by D2 CEO Akihisa Fujita, and was titled “Using mobile to reduce waste in marketing.”
 
In his talk, Fujita pointed to the increasingly short lifespan of products and the brief yet decisive battles being waged via “one week of sales at convenience stores to determine the life a product, which may only be as short as three weeks.”  In this situation, using mobile can be crucial to success, since nearly 75% of all mobile emails sent are read almost immediately by recipients, with 98% being read within 24-hours of receipt, making it possible to sustain user interest in the product.  According to Fujita, mobile is an essential tool in PR, where the speed of communication can be of decisive importance. Fujita also emphasized how mobile can be highly effective in building a relationship with the customer, since it is an “intimate media, offering a special sense of proximity and entertainment to the end user.”

The events featured a number of exhibition displays and panel sessions dedicated to hot topics in the mobile business. In one panel on mediba and Navitime Japan, special attention was paid to how GPS functionality can be applied to mobile marketing. With on-board GPS capability now established as a standard feature for all future next-generation handsets, there is a great deal of expectation directed toward using this functionality to enhance mobile marketing applications.

There were also a wide range of other interesting sessions dedicated to mobile, including content management systems for mobile using sync-ware, as well mobile mail order and mobile search engine marketing by D2 Communications.  Numerous sessions also explored the latest marketing methods being developed by advertisers, including a campaign by Coca Cola Japan utilizing a social networking site, cross-media brand strategies by Kao and Unilever, as well as viral communication by Otsuka Seiyaku also using a social networking site.

All in all, the two events made for a massive gathering attended by more than 2500 people, and concluded with terrific success.

According to a recent report released by the Mobile Content Forum (MCF), Japan’s largest independent mobile industry trade organization, Japan’s mobile content marketplace in 2006 was worth some 928.5 billion yen, an increase of 129% over the previous year.  Broken down by category, the mobile content market (i.e., transactions for fee-based content) comprised 366.1 billion, marking an increase of 116% over 2005. Mobile commerce (including hard goods, services, and transactions) made up 562.4 billion yen, an increase of 138% over the previous year, marking definite growth in the mobile market overall, and confirming a growth trend that is expected to break the trillion yen mark in 2007.

As of the end of June, 2007, the number of mobile phone subscriptions in Japan was 98.06 million, of which 85.65 million were Internet-enabled mobile phones.  Of these 85.65 million, some 74.69 million were next-generation mobile phones contracts (source: Telecommunications Carriers Association) of which 28% were signed up for flat-rate data packages (source: MCF White Paper 2007).

As indicated by these figures, the Japanese market offers an environment in which users can easily access a wide variety of mobile Internet services, a factor which is contributing greatly to help drive the expansion of the mobile content business as a whole.

Within the mobile content market, the downloadable ringtone melody business shrank some 20% from the previous year to 84.3 billion yen, but the real-tone market showed substantial growth of 135% over 2007 to reach a total 75.9 billion yen.  In addition, growth could also be seen in new services like “decorated mail,” which generated some 5.5 billion yen, as well as the electronic book market, which showed considerable growth over the previous year to reach 6.9 billion yen.

In terms of mobile commerce, there was considerable growth in the sale in the three major areas of hard goods (mobile mail order), services (including banking, travel, air and rail tickets), and transactions (such as fees for stock trading, auctions, and racing). A particular increase was seen in hard goods, which showed an increase of 168% over the previous year.

According to the MCF survey, the outlook for growth is anticipated to continue so that by mid-2008, some 90% of the handsets in the market will be next-generation devices, and the percentage of customers using flat-rate data plans will surpass the 40% mark.

Here is the latest Japan cellular subscriber data for your reference.
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