Pioneered in Japan: Mathieu Konnert

Over the past fifteen years, digital marketing in Japan has seen consistent evolution, driven by pioneers who have continually expanded what’s achievable. Their dedication to improving digital advertising for consumers, brands, agencies, and publishers alike is an inspiration to all. This quarterly interview series highlights these innovators and shares best practices that can be adopted to advance the industry in Japan and worldwide. 
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In Conversation With Digital Marketing Innovators

Today we’re sitting down with Mathieu Konnert. Currently the Head of Media at Moët Hennessy Diageo (MHD), Japan, Mathieu is a serial innovator with a track record of digital firsts. He’s been instrumental in accelerating the maturity of digital channels and practices in both Europe and Japan.

In addition to initiating the first large-scale Facebook campaigns for Nintendo while at iProspect, he spearheaded the biggest programmatic campaign in Asia for SK-II when programmatic had only 5% market penetration in Japan, and is also responsible for creating the first Curation platform in Japan for the LVMH Group. As a result, Mathieu rose to Digital Director at GroupM in Japan within four years.

We asked him to reflect on his journey, how the challenges he repeatedly faced proved to be catalysts to innovation, and the takeaways he would share with other marketers.

Q. What makes you a pioneer?

I was lucky to have been in the right place at the right time on a few occasions. This involved big challenges, big opportunities, and some very demanding clients. I see now that these were catalysts to innovation. 

I started in Paris back in 2014, as a Social Media specialist for iProspect. They were one of the most forward-looking agencies around and had a dedicated digital advertising team. Social was still a very new advertising channel. We were the first to launch large campaigns on Facebook. This was for Nintendo and involved building things from the ground up and having to prove the case for these new channels. 

We were constantly being challenged. There were decades of investment on more “traditional” platforms, and we had to justify re-allocating important media budgets toward emerging Social Networks. “Your ads are never viewed. People just scroll”. Meeting these challenges meant establishing KPIs that hadn’t existed before. They had to speak the client’s language while making sense for the new channel and what we were trying to achieve.

We started with things like viewability and accuracy on target, but were constantly raising the bar. Things like Brand Lift surveys came from this need.

Ad Safety then emerged as an issue, so we had to find ways to solve that too, which meant partnering with the first ad verification solutions on the market.

I can see this pattern repeating itself throughout my career. Building something new for very demanding clients. Being pushed by clients forced us to push ourselves, and this grew the possibilities of the channel and technologies. Ultimately, this made me very demanding, too. If I am a pioneer, this is how it happened. 

Q. What brought you to Japan and what happened next? 

The year I joined iProspect they were acquired by Dentsu, and that set me on a course for Japan. In 2016, I became Digital Lead for Dentsu in Tokyo supporting SK-II, a Japanese skincare brand owned by P&G, to launch their programmatic advertising program. I was tasked to spend a budget of JPY 3b per year programmatically in a market with 5% of programmatic penetration!

Japan was the biggest market for this brand. We had a big budget, but with equally big expectations from the client. They needed to recruit their next generation of consumers and we knew we had to shake up the traditional media mix to achieve it. P&G is one of the most demanding clients in terms of performance and data. This again meant finding solutions and answers that were totally new. 

The budget helped, as it meant we had a lot of leverage to be demanding of our media and technology partners. We could shake things up and push for a lot of innovations and integrations that would have taken a lot longer without it. When you ask them to integrate a third-party tool, they put it on the roadmap. When they’re beta testing a product, you are part of it. We were able to accelerate the maturity of the ecosystem thanks to this leverage.

Q. And then what? I don't suppose you stood still! 

I stayed in Japan, but moved to GroupM in 2018.  As Digital Director, I needed to have a bigger vision. This took the shape of a curation platform for LVMH which we called L’Assemblage.

Q. So, curation came to Japan in 2018?

Not overnight. Navigating media buying was really expensive and complicated for brands back then so we had to establish some basics.  Essentially, we had to walk before we could run.

When we started that project, most brands in LVMH were buying directly from publishers. But they were used to paying print magazine prices, and didn’t know that 100$ CPM to buy a takeover was crazy! It was also really difficult to scale, because it was (and still is) really fragmented and complicated to buy media. 

There was also a lot of fear associated with the word “programmatic:” it could be daunting for the clients’ marketing team. There were years of potentially questionable practices among many providers, and many professionals were seeing this ecosystem as a minefield.

The client brief was something like “help us to solve this mess!” We knew audiences were shifting online. We just didn’t know how to buy the right media to reach them. 

Q. How did you achieve this? 

We built a Private Market Place of between 50 and 100 sites where the brand wanted to be. The really important thing was not just to buy media on certain sites, but the right placements and the right creative formats. This is critical for luxury brands where you want your brand to shine, and appear in the right context, with the right audiences to deliver the right experience. 

I can see now that by fixing the mess and defining the rule, we were effectively establishing a script or playbook for curation. For luxury brands, that means maintaining complete control over what really matters, but at the same time gaining scale and efficiency. That’s still the need, and why I believe curation, done right, is the way luxury brands can embrace programmatic. 

Based on what we did at GroupM with L’assemblage, I was invited to go client-side to set up something similar in-house, for MHD. It’s been 4 years now. 

Q. We’re nearly up to date. What are the key lessons or takeaways from your journey?

1. My early years in an agency, responding to the client’s demands, has made me very demanding of media partners, agencies, and technology partners. But also of myself. It helped to advance my progression and seek ever bigger challenges. 
2. I’ve seen things from both sides. Now I’m not only a media buyer but also a strategist, I can see booby traps everywhere. Brand safety, ad fraud, metrics that don’t add up. Because I’ve seen it from all sides, I have an eye for details in the data, and I want to only work with partners who share the same vision for what’s possible and provide total transparency.
3. The need to keep things simple. At its core, it is, or should be. We want people to be inspired by our brands. To want to spend time with them, and prefer them over others. In Tokyo, on average, people see about 2,000 signals a day. Be more interesting than the competition. To stand out you need to be bigger than life. The right creative format, right placement, right property, right audiences.
4. The need to educate and bring people along. Make it easy, which is why simplicity is so key. Pushing for this simplicity is critical to “sorting out the mess,” but also the path to further innovation. Things have become really complicated, and simplifying this means making it easier for people to at least understand why things need to change, and then how to go about it. There’s still a long way to go, and if change is made harder to implement, there’s a risk it will never happen.  

Q. What's the most rewarding thing about working in Japan? And, what's the most challenging? 

As a Westerner, who’s always worked with Western brands, the most rewarding thing has been the encouragement to take (calculated) risks, and seeing what this can achieve in a Japanese team. When I first came to Japan, working for Dentsu with Western FMCG brands, my manager said to me: “I want you to have ideas that we would not have.” It’s hard to break the status quo in Japan. If someone takes a risk and it doesn’t work, it’s not well perceived. So there’s a reluctance to leave the comfort zone when it comes to innovation.  

But I was actively encouraged to take risks. If it doesn’t work I can say, ok. Pin it on me. But if it does work, it’s a team success. It gave me the freedom to try things. I think such a “deal” allows me to be a pioneer. There is an appetite for innovation, but not a natural inclination to take risks. The two working together are very complementary. 

What I like is the bringing together of the two worlds. Once the new idea has been tried then the Japanese devotion to perfectionism makes its contribution. When you move the machine in Japan, it works as a unit with everyone working towards a common goal. More than in the West. I have total confidence in the Japanese team’s ability to execute and see it through. They won’t cut corners. They will do things properly. They will pursue excellence. Having a diverse team that can operate like this is a blueprint for how innovation can work best in Japan.  

Q. So, more rewards than challenges in your experience? 

The most challenging thing for me isn’t about working in Japan, but in digital advertising for the luxury sector. The sector is really risk-averse when it comes to technology. If you think about it, at P&G we were doing our first programmatic campaign seven years ago. We’re only starting to do this in luxury now. 

I think luxury is still behind. Not in terms of creativity. In the creative department, luxury brands take risks, and it’s where they are strong. But in the technical department, they lag behind, which creates misalignment. Because they are already taking risks on the creative front, technology takes a back seat. 

Marketing is both art and science, but in luxury, they lean more on the art side in their recruitment, and science has less representation and leverage. The way forward for luxury is for it to be as creative and daring on digital coordination and delivery as it is on creative expression.

For an in-depth look at the topic, watch the replay of our Cannes fireside chat, where Mathieu discussed how technology is transforming luxury brands - from AI and curation to targeted advertising - reshaping storytelling, boosting engagement, and strengthening brand loyalty. Stay tuned for the next edition of Pioneered in Japan, coming next quarter.