Marketing in Japan vs the US: How Japanese Companies Choose an Agency

The Short Answer

On the Unpacking Japan podcast, host Tobi asked Matt Hannan, Hanami Social’s founder and a former Senior Software Engineer on the Instagram Reels Creation team at Meta, how he explains his work to Japanese clients compared with American ones. Matt said:

If you’re talking to an American versus a Japanese person, business person, very different pitch. Their understanding is at a different level, what they know to be reliable.

This page collects what he said in the episode about marketing in Japan and the US, and about how Japanese companies choose agencies, in his words. Hear the full conversation on the Unpacking Japan episode page.

“Polar Opposite Countries in a Lot of Ways”

Tobi asked whether Matt noticed differences in how social media is used in Japan. Matt said:

There’s huge differences. If you compare America and Japan in any way, you will notice massive differences. They’re polar opposite countries in a lot of ways.

On the algorithm itself:

The algorithm is just a representation, mathematically and statistically, of human attention, what people are interested in. So depending on who your audience is, that can mean a lot of different things. And it changes over time as people change what they want to see over time.

So the algorithm specifically itself is not built for American audiences in particular. I think that would be an unwise business decision on Meta’s part. But Japanese people who make content for Japanese people, the things that do well are what Japanese people are specifically interested in, which can look a lot different from what American people are.

He gave Japanese TV as an example: “If you watch Japanese TV, there’s 10 boxes in the corner with people facially reacting to everything so people know how to match it. Very unusual.” He also mentioned “big, loud text, breaking design patterns that Americans often follow.” When Tobi asked whether that carries over into social media, Matt said it’s difficult to trace back why: “I don’t know, but it’s interesting.”

Japanese Companies Understand Advertising, Not Organic Content

Matt described what he set out to build after Instagram made DM automation possible:

So I saw that and I thought, I bet I can build something that works exactly like an advertising system, which is really popular in Japan. They really understand advertising systems. They don’t really understand organic content.

More on that in Organic Reels vs paid ads.

Data or Personal Relationships

With American business people, Matt said, “we show them case studies and sets of data to get them to sort of believe or trust based on history that it may go this way for them.” Japanese businesses, in his words, “hate risk and they want to hedge it as much as possible,” and “the way that Japanese people culturally hedge risk is personal relationship.” The guide to Japanese business culture has his full answer.

“It Isn’t Really in Japan. It Hugely Is in America.”

Tobi asked how Matt has approached building relationships with Japanese companies. He began, “To be honest with you, I never know the right answer. I’ve considered so many different things,” and went on:

When I first came here, I was used to the American way of doing business and I thought my background working as an engineer on Reels at Meta would be essentially enough.

Tobi called it “a badge of approval.” Matt continued:

I’m not just advising you from the outside. I was inside. I think that’s a super rare background that almost no one has. So I thought that would be a huge differentiator for me. It isn’t really in Japan. It hugely is in America.

The Unspoken Rule for Choosing an Agency

There’s so many unspoken rules about Japan. I’m obsessed with this idea. And the unspoken rule of business often is that a large company, if they have a contract, they want to pay some agency to do, they go with the biggest one. You’re just supposed to. And people do. That agency then funnels down the actual work to the smaller agencies for almost no money at all.

He compared it to a sushi chef who isn’t allowed to touch the rice for a year, “something like that.” After a long time working with those people and building personal relationships, he said, “you can branch off, start your own thing. And you have the fundamental relationships and you can ask for shoukai in your network to be able to produce valuable business.” (A shoukai is an introduction.) His view of that route: “That is very slow for me. I still don’t know if that’s the right way.”

Where His Business Went

Tobi asked how working in Japan has changed Matt’s experience of being here. Matt said that in his first year he was “really outside,” in the izakayas every day, and that his life now is organized a lot more around business:

Because of the nature of the Japanese economy and currency issues and just the structural barriers of Japanese companies working with foreign companies and hedging their risk based on long term relationships, it’s an extremely difficult market to participate in. So a lot of my business has become American focused or the entry of American people or businesses in the Japanese market.

Later in the conversation: “So I’m working with more American clients for a bunch of different reasons. Yeah, but the real answer is I don’t have the answer yet, but I’m trying.”

About Hanami Social

Hanami Social is a bilingual social media agency in Tokyo that helps American and other overseas brands with social media marketing for Japan, from the short-form videos to the automated follow-up that turns viewers into customers.