Designing
New Context
Designing
New Context
| [Serials: The Future of Digital Advertising] What role should digital advertising play and how must it be transformed in today’s online environment that is overrun with malicious media, including fake news and fraudulent articles written with generative artificial intelligence (AI)? This series examines these issues and looks toward the future via interviews with members of the Quality Media Consortium, which was founded by advertising and media companies striving to build a healthy media environment. |
Rapid digitalization has forced newspaper companies to make major changes to their business models, including the Internet, smartphones, and generative artificial intelligence (AI). One of these is The Asahi Shimbun Company, which has frequently implemented changes through trial and era.
Kenichi Takano is executive director (Digital Business / ICT Strategy / Director of Media Business) at The Asahi Shimbun Company. While reflecting on the company’s transforming digital policy, he spoke about how its past measures have revealed the value of newspapers and advertising in the digital era. This includes the asahi.com website at the dawn of the Internet era, external media outlets acquired by Asahi, and changing newspaper content in the age of smartphones.
Executive director (Digital Business / ICT Strategy / Director of Media Business), The Asahi Shimbun Company
Kenichi Takano
Joined The Asahi Shimbun Company in 1996. Was assigned to the Digital Department in 2000 to work in digital policy, including i-mode news. Was appointed director of Alliances, Digital Innovation in 2018 to handle new businesses such as Virtual High School Baseball. Became president of ASAHI INTERACTIVE, Inc. in 2019, which operates the Japanese versions of CNET and CNN. Has been an executive director of The Asahi Shimbun Company since 2021.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, the 1995 release of Microsoft Windows 95 helped bring the Internet into widespread use. That year, The Asahi Shimbun (a traditional newspaper, later referred to as “Asahi”)took its first step into the digital realm by launching asahi.com, a news website that charged no fees. Surprisingly, this effort was spearheaded by just a few interested employees.
“A handful of senior employees got together to develop the website. They formed a special team that used Macs, because their division was the only one with that type of computer. Back then Japanese companies couldn’t buy .com domains, so they set up a server in San Jose, California. Apparently, they began writing the HTML by hand. This website came about thanks to Asahi’s company culture, which is extremely individual and democratic. Forward-thinking employees can create new things according to their interests, rather than everything being decided by the company.”
The team had a stance of focusing on new, innovative ideas before profit. As a result, NTT DOCOMO unexpectedly reached out to Asahi, suggesting that its articles be published on NTT DOCOMO’s i-mode service.
“When I joined the Mobile Phone Business Team, there were more than one million users of Asahi Nikkan Sports, our mobile phone news site. Thousands of new users signed up when there was some kind of accident or event, sometimes numbering 10,000 in one day. Experienced employees taught me that uncommon efforts are necessary because they draw interesting people to you. If you’re not trying new things, no one will reach out and suggest working together. I still keep their asahi.com prospectus on my smartphone because I never want to forget that attitude.”
The first digital service was created by a group of employees, but later the company started its own online measures. Asahi tried many new things in a wide range of fields, including Japanese versions of The Huffington Post (currently HuffPost) and CNET; launching its own news outlets like withnews; and Virtual High School Baseball, a new business based on Asahi’s own content.
However, Takano said that genuine digitalization started by innovating the main Asahi Shimbun newspaper. “In the past, the central figures involved in news reporting were accustomed to physical papers, and it was difficult to get them on board at first. That’s why we formed a separate digital team to create digital services and get these reporters interested in our efforts.”
One example was The Asahi Shimbun DIGITAL, launched in 2012 to replace asahi.com. Takano said, “We had always posted free articles, but we saw that it would be difficult to maintain the company solely through online advertising revenue. We launched the new website to try out an online subscription model.”
“Frankly, digital subscriber sales can’t easily make up for our declining circulation. But we believe that Asahi must remain a news company that helps improve society through its journalism. It’s clear that we are selling fewer papers, so we have to share our reporting with customers in some other format. We have to build optimum methods and services to that end—there are no other options.”
Because free news websites depend on advertising revenue, they tend to give maximum focus to page views, which earn them income. Asahi is focusing on improved satisfaction for paying customers by switching to a subscription model, and is carrying out unique measures to achieve this goal.
One is Asa Digi Score, its unique metric for assessing articles. In addition to page views, Asahi combines many ratings to create a comprehensive score, such as the number of customers who finished reading the article, saved it, and sent free links to others. The comprehensive evaluation derived from these factors is quantified as the “Asahi Digital Score” and is utilized for content creation and marketing purposes.
“If your only aim is page views, you end up focusing on impact, not on what benefits your readers. Sometimes this leads to misleading titles. Because we have to convey accurate information, we evaluate our articles based on our standard that prioritizes the long-term satisfaction of our customers who pay money to read them.”
Asahi also works to improve engagement and enhance article credibility as ways to strengthen ties with its customers. The company recently started posting reporter profiles and added a function letting readers follow them on the app to see past articles and activities, and even send messages.
A strong technical team is needed to uphold these digital efforts. Asahi is an unusual newspaper company because it has a team of in-house engineers who develop apps and other services. This structure makes it possible to improve their services in just one or two weeks. Takano said, “We’re more like an IT company than a traditional media outlet in terms of our technologies and development structure. Many of our engineers previously worked at major IT corporations are surprised to see the advanced things we have developed.”
Asahi is working to boost reader satisfaction by improving the quality of its unique digital content and communication, striving to break free from the attention economy that collects page views through sensational content. Takano said that these efforts to build trust with readers also lead to better advertising value.
“A reader once told me, ‘I bought the crab advertised in your paper because I assumed it would taste good and have a great texture.’ We don’t actually sample the crab before running an ad (laughs). Still, we do put our ads through a rigorous examination process—if we print ‘This is the most delicious crab from Hokkaido,’ we ask them to provide evidence that can be shared with our readers. I think that’s why so many people trust The Asahi Shimbun.”
With pay-per-click advertising—the format used by major tech companies—it is not unusual for online ads to spread misinformation or cause ethical issues. The Asahi Shimbun created a strict standard for the ads it publishes and has developed an original system for improper content in pay-per-click ads.
Takano pointed out that the Quality Media Consortium must make unified efforts to solve online advertising issues. Its members include BI.Garage, The Asahi Shimbun, other major media outlets that released the Quality Media Declaration last October, stating that they will focus on improving the quality of Japanese digital advertising: “There is a great deal of distrust in the chaotic Internet environment. Our aim is to be a content media group publishing information and ads that earn trust from users.”
“I think consortium members make decisions about which ads to run based on whether they actually offer benefits to customers and society—not because they bring easy profit. As companies involved in these challenges, we must share information about issues and the dark side of digital advertising with clients and members of the general public who read our publications.”
Takano said that newspapers are valuable because they have earned strong trust from customers based on rigorous standards developed by traditional media outlets. To maintain this trust, he said that newspapers must constantly evolve with the times.
“The Asahi Shimbun has to be involved in this new world. If not, for example, we might not survive as a media outlet when generative AI makes it possible to ask questions in natural language via an app, instead of opening a browser search engine. Going forward, we must continue transforming the way we provide news and flexibly adapt to new devices, business methods, and technologies.”
Related Articles:
・[The Future of Digital Advertising #01] Shifting From Click-focused Advertising to Media Quality (May 29, 2024)
・[The Future of Digital Advertising #02] Companies Need Advertising Strategies to Protect Brand Value (June 3, 2024)
Jointly administered by 32 leading media companies, this organization was founded by BI.Garage to improve the quality of Japanese digital advertising. It is the only ad network that works to provide the highest-quality advertisements by focusing on the quality of ads and the mediums where they are delivered.
