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Google turns to advertising in Japan
By Martyn Williams

Google Inc., well known for relying on word of mouth to spread news of its services, launched its first large-scale advertising campaign last week in Tokyo.

The campaign promotes its Google News service and involves posters on subway and railway trains and at five major railway stations in the Tokyo metropolitan area, said Kaori Saito, a spokeswoman for Google Japan. In addition to the scheduled 7,770 transport ads, the campaign is also using banner ads on 18 Web sites.

The first transport ads appeared on subway trains on March 30 and the last ones will be taken down on May 10.

The launch of the campaign was timed to coincide with the beginning of the Japanese financial year, said Saito. April 1 is typically the day that large Japanese companies take in new employees. It is also close to the beginning of the school and university year, so many people are starting "new lives" at around this time of year. With the campaign, Google wants to promote itself as a way for people to get information relevant to their new lives, said Saito.

The ads list a handful of news events and the times at which they were first reported in an effort to raise a sense of urgency about keeping up with the latest news, said Daigo Hayamizu of the advertising agency Grey Worldwide, which created the campaign.

Also highlighted is the service's recently launched personalization option, which lets users create sections for their favorite news topics and also bring in news from the 22 global versions of the service.

"We communicate that Google News can provide them with the latest news or news they want at any time very efficiently," Hayamizu said.

By focusing on news, the company is promoting a Google service that hasn't achieved any growth since its first month online in September last year, according to market research figures. Google News debuted with 1 million home users accessing the service during its first month, according to figures from NetRatings Japan Inc. That figure fell to a low of 892,000 in November. The service was accessed by 928,000 users in February, the latest month for which NetRatings has estimates.

"Each month its reach is somewhere between about 900,000 and 1 million," said Soichiro Nishimura, a spokesman for NetRatings Japan.

In contrast, the Daily News page of Yahoo Japan reached 13.7 million home PC users in February, and the Web sites of the Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun newspapers reached 4 million and 2.8 million, respectively, according to NetRatings.

The aim of the Google News campaign is to attract an extra 166,000 users to the service, said Hayamizu.

The campaign marks a change in the way Google promotes its services. The company's sites around the world have grown since launch almost exclusively through word of mouth to become among the most popular on the Web.

The only exception has been promotions in trade magazines for products like Google's search appliance and a small amount of online advertising on targeted Web sites.

Google said it has found word of mouth worked because users like to share positive experiences with their friends and families.

The company's problem in Japan isn't an unattractive service but the formidable competition it faces, especially from Yahoo Japan, according to Nishimura of NetRatings.

Yahoo Japan's portal attracted 29.6 million users in February, making it the most popular portal in Japan. MSN was ranked second with 18.8 million home users, followed by the Nifty, Infoseek, Biglobe, Goo and Livedoor portals before Google, in eighth place with 9.7 million users, said NetRatings.

Posted April 4, 2005 03:55 PM |