According to the 2022 edition of ‘Advertising Expenditure in Japan’, an annual press release by major advertising agency Dentsu estimating total advertising expenditure and advertising expenditure by medium and industry, total advertising expenditure in Japan in 2022 was 104.4% of the previous year's total, at JPY 7,102.1 billion, the largest ever since 2007, when it topped JPY 7 trillion for the first time.
And in 2023, internet advertising media spend is forecast to continue to grow steadily and expand by 112.5% year-on-year to ¥2,790.8 billion, while advertising strategies will further change dramatically with the advent of Web 3.0.
Web 1.0 ‘when there were no payment functions’
The lack of a ‘payment’ function meant that Internet users could not receive direct payment for information published online. Therefore, only players such as publishers, advertisers and retailers attempted to monetise in various ways.
Web 2.0 ‘The era of closed platforms’
Blogs, SNS, social bookmarking and RSS emerged. The goal was to open up information and monetise it through an advertising model, but the emergence of major platforms resulted in the ‘era of closed platforms’.
In the Web 2.0 era, hobbies, tastes, interests and principles are linked around a single user as a common denominator, and this relationship is directly linked to advertising, product sales, marketing, etc. The ‘interest graph’, which claims that the correlation between people on SNS such as Twitter and Facebook is linked to marketing, etc. The so-called basic concept of marketing in the Web 2.0 era is the ‘social graph’, which states that the correlation between people on social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook is linked to marketing and other activities, and that the aim is to create a hybrid of the interest graph and social graph.
Advertising in the Web 2.0 era was divided into four areas: ‘long tail type’, ‘aggregate type’, ‘listing type’ and ‘CGM type’.
The long-tail type is one in which advertisements are distributed to individual websites and blogs to consolidate traffic and reduce advertising costs, and includes content-linked advertising as typified by affiliate and Adsense.
Aggregate location type is where advertisements with high word-of-mouth value for advertisers are shared on social networking sites and blogs, and a fee is charged for the placement of the advertisements.
Listing type is a generic term for search-linked advertising, which appears in conjunction with keyword searches on search engines such as Yahoo! and Google, and display advertising, which can be placed outside the search results screen.
CGM stands for Consumer Generated Media, which is a generic term for media in which content is generated mainly through posts by general users on word-of-mouth sites, SNS, blogs and bulletin boards (BBS).
It is said that these advertising methods of the Web 2.0 era will no longer work in the Web 3.0 era.
In the Web 2.0 era, companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon held various data on consumers and used it for marketing activities.
Advertisers also implemented their advertising strategies via these companies, which ultimately played the role of a platform, so it is not as if they benefited 100% from advertising in terms of cost-effectiveness. Naturally, this is because advertisers also paid advertising fees to the companies that played the role of platform.
However, once the decentralised internet based on blockchain becomes widespread, the ownership of data will shift to individuals, and the marketing methods of the past will no longer work.
Emergence of Web 3.0.
‘The concepts of marketing and advertising will also change.’
As the concept of marketing changes, advertising strategies will naturally change as well. For example, the role of advertising agencies is likely to change in a Web 3.0 world. As mentioned earlier, the ownership of data will become personal, which means that advertisers will also become personal.
At the moment, we are in what can be called the dawn of Web 3.0, so this is only an observation balloon speculation. The term ‘Web 3.0’ appears on the Internet like a trendy word and is often spoken of in a positive light, but naturally, in a new concept and a period of change, troubles accompanying system changes are bound to occur.
Experts have voiced concerns that the Web 3.0 era will see malicious individuals gaining more power, black hackers becoming more active, and data leaks becoming harder to stop.
However, these concerns are only some of the predictions. It cannot be said that they will happen or that they will not happen. When the real Web 3.0 era arrives, there may be benefits and troubles that were not anticipated.
If the advertising methods of the Web 2.0 era will no longer work in the Web 3.0 era, what will be the marketing concepts and advertising strategies?
According to experts, the basic concept of marketing in the Web 3.0 era will be the ‘token graph’, in which each user's NFT tokens are analysed to identify their interests and preferences, which can then be linked to marketing and other activities. Let us explain what a ‘talking graph’ is.
