When corporate managers in Japan consult with us, they often raise one issue in particular: the companies they lead are not creating new value or making major advances.

This is even the case when their companies employ many talented people, actively recruit personnel with the latest capabilities, and have industry-leading intellectual property, expertise, and networks. For some reason, the enterprises tend to be disrupted by outside businesses. The managers want to know why their companies cannot generate such innovations internally.

All companies, regardless of industry or type of business, recognize issues such as the inability to spur on new value creation in-house, and the realization that what previously have been considered core values, now no longer are viable. This recognition underpins BX.

At the same time, the purpose and strategy of BX, namely, the how and why of reshaping what, up to now, has been cultivated as commonplace, requires a sense of inevitability, as well as stories that are easy to understand and in line with individual company businesses.

Expanding the creative abilities that have produced advertising up to now—from DX and business innovations to new business creation— BX Creative Center supports business transformation starting with output that assumes implementation throughout society.

At present, the concept of customer experience (CX) is being transformed from its application in a narrow sense to that in a broad sense. To date, CX has represented a small part of the experience of existing customers, involving customer support at customer centers or the resolution of customer issues.

However, from the perspective of the customer, becoming aware of a product, gradually becoming fond of it, purchasing it for the first time, and recommending it to others is a seamless series of processes that originally might have been perceived as a single experience. Thus, in a broad sense, CX includes all the customer experiences a brand offers: advertising, sales channel, and existing customer support experiences.

Our efforts, over the past few years, to design customer experiences and promote the digital transformation of Japan have accelerated amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Clients are asking us to explain what customer experience (CX) entails, and expressing a desire for the digital transformation (DX) of their businesses, although they are not sure how to use the data they have.

In our view, their concerns are rooted in a tendency to treat the means as an end. For example, clients typically want to adopt customer relationship management tools to design customer experiences and to use data for its own sake. In other words, the purpose is to apply these means. More importantly, however, we need to begin by considering the essence of the customer experience.

It is difficult to encapsulate DX in a few words, as it has many elements. Dentsu defines the area related to consumer perspectives, aimed at corporate BX and growth, as marketing DX. In addition, Dentsu supports the creation of infrastructure that allows marketing innovation.

Particularly important for marketing DX are developing:

• New services, which are the backbone of BX
• Marketing infrastructure to support business growth

The following is an overview of the perspectives Dentsu values in terms of the development of new services.

Within DX, Dentsu defines the area related to consumer perspectives aimed at corporate BX and growth as marketing DX, and provides all-out support for the creation of infrastructure that provides marketing innovation.

Particularly important for marketing DX are developing:

• New services, which are the backbone of BX
• Marketing infrastructure to support business growth

Following is an overview of what Dentsu values in terms of the development of marketing infrastructure to support business growth.

The use of cookies, Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), and other personal identifier data have become increasingly restricted in recent years as a result of revisions to related laws amid growing global awareness of the need to protect personal information.

With the coming arrival of a post-cookie era, the arena for digital marketing is shifting from the cookies-based OpenWeb platform to anonymized customer data supplied by major platform providers, such as operators of loyalty points programs.

Data clean rooms have emerged along with this shift. A data clean room is a marketing environment provided to corporate clients by platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Within a secure cloud location, first-party data held by corporate clients and data stored on the platform can be shared, analyzed, and used for distributing advertisements and other information.

Data generated by digitalized products, services, and operational procedures are being used to reform businesses and improve processes that are regarded as important components of digital transformation. In this article, I discuss how this is relevant to marketing, as well as Dentsu’s related capabilities and initiatives.

When it comes to media, such as television and newspapers, advertisers are limited to purchasing advertising slots. But, a full-page ad in a newspaper looks the same no matter who sees it.

But in the world of digital advertising, all this changes. Auctions are held each time an ad is displayed, and the ad shown is that submitted by the auction winner—the company. This ensures that all digital media users see the ads most appropriate for them. In other words, users see different ads even when looking at the same advertising spaces.

In modern society, which is flooded with massive amounts of information (big data), rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies have heightened expectations for the use of big data to improve the accuracy of business and marketing, so as to enhance corporate competitiveness.

Dentsu is working with the Dentsu Group and its partner companies to develop a variety of business-related methodologies and solutions. Its motivation is based on the recognition that the goal of digital transformation is to build systems that uncover information that is useful for capturing opportunities. This is done through big data analysis, which is then used in business and marketing decision-making.

As Dentsu works to achieve advertising transformation (AX) and so maximize advertising value, one may well ask why AX is necessary.
The reason is that Dentsu is committed to assisting client companies attain sustainable growth, and a necessary element of this is marketing, which domain includes advertising. In short, realizing our mission hinges on maximizing the benefits of advertising.

In this context, Dentsu is always considering whether there is room to increase further its contribution to business growth through the sale of products and services.

As society undergoes substantial changes, the world of advertising, which has been Dentsu’s field of business since its founding, is also changing significantly. To continue contributing to the growth of client companies and the resolution of social issues, Dentsu is accelerating its AX. Below, we introduce some solutions that are part of the Company’s ongoing change.