All advertising is local. "We thought that differences in ethnic groups, market place, languages, cultures and media situations were absolute," says Mr Inose. "I think Japanese people and the worldwide ad industry will be the last to understand globalisation."

Ironic, then, that Japanese companies like Sony and NTT Docomo are leading the surge toward globalisation. Mr Inose believes there are two reasons for this: one is brand management, where companies realise the importance of their brands. They are trying to unify and control their brands all over the world.

The other is increasing operating efficiency – in this case, the efficiency of marketing and advertising operations.

"Once advertising activities are under central control, there will be two big changes," he says. "First, the number of decision makers will become smaller. …Those decision makers are located far from a market. The other change is that subjective criteria will be required in making decisions. Those two changes will focus the importance of accountability of ads."

Dentsu, one of the world's largest advertising agencies, has been dealing with these changes by developing scientific analysis methods. For example, Mr Inose introduced two studies, one which involved television and the other both TV and newspapers.

"According to the results of this survey, using only newspaper ads cannot contribute much to brand name recall. However, using newspaper ads and TV together will be more effective in understanding the product and intention to purchase it."

That is good news for newspapers. "I think that those changes are good chances to promote newspaper advertising," he said. We believe that newspaper ads have strong advantages over other media, especially TV."

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"It has been thought for a long time that globalisation would never be adopted by the advertising world. Advertising is local, and we have thought differences of ethnic groups, market place, languages, cultures and media situations among countries were absolute. I think Japanese people and the worldwide ad industry will be the last to understand globalisation."