Media Industry in JP | ORANGEFOX WEB

What’s funny about Rakuten? There is tremendous!

by admin | Mar 10, 2020 | Media Industry in JP

Stock Price almost one-third in these 5 years

Rakuten used to have its stock price of roungly JPY 2,500 in the early 2015 but it is JPY 778 as of today, March 2020. There are several reasons that caused this tragedy so let us pick up some interesting reasons here.

Huge Gap between own valuation and market’s valuation

There are many funny stroies around Rakuten all the time but this huge discrepancy of roughly $40 Billion between Rakuten’s own valuation and their market cap is well representing their problem.

It reminds me of the terrible fight between HD-DVD & Blue-ray which happened more than a decade ago. In the later phase of this war, HD-DVD team was calling out some tricky numbers like “bundling sales ratio” to conceal the defeated reality. Likewise, Rakuten is explaining their “growth” by calling out the increase of “membership value” according to their own definition. This membership value is indicated with gray color in the graph here while the dark-blue is true market cap. They are claiming that they calculated this membership value by refering to the growing cross-use ratio of thier multiple services.

Overview of the Competition Landscape

EC Competitors

The landscape of EC industry is getting more and more competitive. Not only Amazon and Yahoo, but also the shop builders like Shopify is now so easy-to-use that merchants are able to examine departure option more easily. Having own online shop is quite a challenge but it gives them full control over their own brand and of course no longer need to pay commission!

payment competitors

Rakuten has their own payment method that is named “R-pay” but that competition is indeed a red ocean. LINE and Softbank are now merged and getting more & more aggressive in user acquisition.

Rakuten launched their telecom network as an experiment and then ended up with huge outage in December 2019..

time to launch the recovery plan?

Ok! Then, how to increase this super-cheap stock price by getting more trust from the market? Their final attack plan is now with the launch of new MNO (Mobile network operator) in Japan! Mobile number subscription in Japan is way more expensive compared to Europe and actually other MNO is making significant profit. If Rakuten could get some sezeable market share, that would be a very great success!

Challenge for the world’s first “Cloud-native” Platform

Rakuten is claiming that they have plan to deploy world’s first “cloud-native” telecom platform that utilize the fully virtualized server instances. It indeed sounds like a big challenge.. and offering super cheap plan compared to the existing Japanese MNOs. (Rakuten offers JPY 2,800 per month with roughly 10GB data communication)

It sounds exciting enough and I believe everybody is paying close attention on it !

Rakuten is claiming the platform is “simple, agile, and disruptive”.. hope that word is true 🙂

Author: Rodorigo. J Tani

Digital Content Producer

Introducing the latest digital business trend from APAC countries. If you have any interest in running content marketing or influencer campaigns, please kindly reach out to me at rodorigo@orangefox.ai

Geo-IP Targeting and the “foot-fall report”

by admin | Jan 29, 2020 | Media Industry in JP, My Work History

Target the people in specific location?

If you want to be “innovative” in online advertising, it might be tempting to use geo-IP based targeting technology depending on your campaign objectives.

Some Options Available in the market

OK. Here we have several options when you want to run geo-IP based tarketing promotion. “X-locations” is spinned off from the global player named “Near” back in 2017. I believe it was MBO (management buy-out). Because their data still come from Near Pte, Ltd. they have strong audience data all-over the east asia. Thus, you can target the Chinese, Honkonese, or maybe Korean people who is visiting Tokyo or anyother cities by using their data. That geographic IP data is something they are getting from the bid-request, it is not as accurate as WiFi data. Please note that when you use the locations data, the most accurate data is WiFi data followed by the bid-request data.

Softbank also has some presence in this field

Softbank is one of Japan’s biggest MNO (mobile network operator) and agressively collecting the user’s data for the advertisers. Because their data is based on WiFi usage, the accuracy of the data is high.

Arrange the KPI for the geo-IP targeting promo

Basically when you do that kind of campaign, we assume that you would like to make purchase happen at the offline venues (stores). If the conversion of the campaign was a purchase event that happens offline, your measurement strategy is really important to evaluate the performance of the campaign. Here is how that measurement strategy works.

Measure the effectiveness of the campaign by using “Foot-fall report”

By utilizing the tracking capability of the geo-IP type of the media, we can find out which location actually those users have visited. By appying this technology, we can find our the “foot-fall” of both of following GROUPs.

1). the users who have been exposed to the adverts (a.k.a. “Exposed group”)

vs

2). the users who have NOT been exposed to the adverts (a.k.a. “Controled group”). When you measure the uplift of the footfall of the exposed group, you can successfully find out how effective your campaign has been performing.

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Promote your online shop by affiliate network in Japan

by admin | Jan 28, 2020 | Media Industry in JP

How to promote your online shop effectively in Japan or other APAC regions?

It is a very basic question everybody have when they come to this market. Although there are several options to advertise your website, the affiliate network is definitely something you can test out first if you prioritize the performance of your conversion campaign.

Want to stick to Google ads or Facebook ads?

Well, Google ads or Facebook Ads are okay, but if you want performance, it is a tough game unless you have very strong keywords in Google SEM (search engine marketing). Facebook has some strong feature that is named “FB coupon offer” where you can provide the coupon code discount for the users by linking your platform (such as Woo Commerce) with Facebook Ads, but even with coupon offer, most likely you can not achieve better ROAS (return on ad spend) than the affiliate networks.

Strong Affiliate Network in JP that You Can Test First

“A8 affiliate network” is definitely one strong candidate you can test out first. Here is how it works.

Normally, the affiliates in A8 netowrk are getting some around 10% of the “website purchase” amount . However, if you have significant brand awareness, it works even with 7% of sales price.
In some cases, client can collect more than 1,000 applications from the affiliates in the first month but no worries! A8 automated screening algorithm can filter out bad affiliates by checking their past achievements. Thus, no much workload expected:)
Client can have our own guidelines regarding affiliate’s campaigns. (e.g. NO Google Adwords SEM because it will be done by in-house agents) This should work well to keep brand sagety.

Hope this would remove some of your worries around the online promotion in Japan. For more questions, please inquire us from the LinkedIn page of ORANGEFOX!

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Advertising on the radio in Japan

by admin | Aug 6, 2019 | Media Industry in JP

Hi there! ORANGE FOX K.K. was established because we had this project! Our advertiser was based in the U.S. but had local legal entity in Japan since nineteen-fifties. The industry landscape of the radio is quite different in Japan compared to the states regarding following points.

I heard the radio is quite “niche media” in the U.S. and there are hundreds or thousands of the radio stations there while in Japan we don’t have so many. In JP, the radio is still “big media” (of course depends on which station we work with, but anyways..) and therefore strictly regulated by the government.
Big station has very broad audience all over Japan. Thus, the small budget promotion does not work unless you work with small local station. Sizable budget is required for radio advertising.
Some stations have special “designated broadcaster license” granted by the government. This license can actually protect them from getting acquired by big companies. In return, those designated broadcasters (Nippon Broadcasting, etc) can’t do deals with any foreign entities. They can do deal with only Japanese entities who has the corporate registry in Japan.

Requirements from Japan’s radio stations

Under that environment described above, it really depends on which station you work with. In case you want to advertise over “designated broadcasters” like Nippon Broadcasting or TBS Radio, you have to submit the local corporate registry document (need the presence or local legal entities) and need to go through their advertiser screening.

In case you work with non-designated broadcasters like “Tokyo FM”, there should be no such a strict screening process for the advertisers so the process should go smoother.