Surveys taken as recently as 2014 still indicate that television remains as strong a media as ever, even taking into account the occurrence of these kinds of changes. I hear that many leading advertising agency staff tell their clients that smartphone media and social media have future potential and that they should be used in moderation, but that expenditure on television advertising has been gradually increasing since the Great Earthquake. However, qualitative changes have been occurring. What this means is, television has become more of a background presence, something that people have switched on while they do something else. But people are far more serious about their smartphones. You would immediately think there is no reason to be so serious about a smartphone, especially considering the amount of time people look at their smartphones is a lot shorter than the time they spend watching television. But when you think about people typing messages such as "I'm on my way now", they need to pay full attention to the smartphone in order to type the message. But television is passive, you can leave it on without paying attention to it. If we consider changes in viewing trends, we can see the rising media value of smartphones. In the absence of i-mode, companies are now battling over what kinds of app users want on the first screen of their smartphones. Smartphones are cameras, notepads, and remote controls, and in the future may even become robots or AI devices. In light of this fact, I think many companies are focusing on this question of how to get their apps onto the first screens of users' smartphones.

According to the results of a 2013 survey, 70% of the total time spent looking at smartphones is spent on SNSs. When I went to companies and asked the presidents how their digital budgets were being spent, most said they were spent on SEO and search listing rankings. However, I would point out to these budgets were being entirely spent on Google, but that Google cannot access LINE conversations or Facebook comments. In fact, Google only accounts for less than 30% of smartphone viewing, and their advertising revenues seem to have peaked. Even the mighty Google has reached the beginning of the end. This is how fast things change in the Internet industry. Reports state that currently the average digital budget of Japan's leading enterprises, the 255 companies on the Nikkei Index, is about ten percent of their advertising expenses. Yet only about ten percent of that budget is allocated to social media, meaning only one percent of total advertising expenses. In the United Kingdom on the other hand, the digital budget is 35 percent of advertising expenses and half of that is allocated for social media. It is difficult to judge whether they are advancing social media ahead of us, but this difference in expenditure is remarkable.

Television and smartphones can co-exist despite being different media. This is because people use their smartphones while the television is on, but do not read a magazine or newspaper while watching television or while using their smartphones. This means that information distribution routes are changing again. For example, if a company has a 3,000 GRP shampoo advertising campaign on television in the Kanto region, they will achieve around a 15 percent product recognition. However, the same results won't be obtained if they spend the same amount of money on smartphone advertising. This is because users look at smartphone advertising differently to that in other media. They see it exactly as what it is, but end up ignoring the content as irrelevant to them and instead just play free games. In the context of smartphone advertising, sympathy and empathy are fundamental concepts. Targeted advertising such as that which appears in YouTube, LINE, and Facebook is completely different to conventional "mass media". The conventional mainstream approach of mass media was akin to asking a company like Dentsu to get as many people together as possible in a public area, and to push the message to them using huge megaphones and television stations. This approach is still used and can still be effective. But we do not know where people using social media are living. Many advertising agencies that are used to conventional media do not want to use social media because the effects achieved as a result of the effort required cannot be easily seen. However, there are some guides to finding where the target demographics live. Sony Digital is attempting to become such a guide. However, this does not mean they have extensive knowledge about everywhere. We now live in a world of countless sub-tribes. There may be a group of people who are into sub-cultures living in San-Francisco, a group of whiskey-lovers in London or people who love big Asian events living in Bangkok. In light of this, we cannot simply create one winning television commercial to sell. We have to use all of our ingenuity to ensure products and services achieve market penetration. This is the rather tiresome aspect of living in an era with so many media.