Document ads and sponsored content, Japanese-first

In Japan the download is not the point of a document ad. The material gets forwarded, printed and put in front of people who never saw the ad, so it has to be written for the second and third reader. That changes the artefact: eight to fourteen pages, a named customer and a real figure on page one, and one page in the middle built to survive being screenshotted into somebody else's internal deck. What the document has to be: A case study with a named company, a before figure and an after figure, cleared by that customer in writing. If your reference will not be named, the document becomes a category piece and the response falls, and you should know that before it is built rather than after. Banking and insurance run under a different constraint again: any performance figure carries the disclosures your compliance office requires, and those have to be legible on a phone, which means they are designed in from the first layout rather than appended at six point on the last page. Typesetting: Japanese feed creative fails on typography more often than on argument. Gothic faces hold at feed resolution and Mincho does not. Line breaks fall at clause boundaries so a particle never opens a line. Headline length is set to what survives feed truncation, not to what the brief wanted to say. Vertical setting is handsome in print and unreadable in a scrolling feed, so it does not appear. The Japanese is written first and the English adapted from it, never the reverse, because translated Japanese reads as translated Japanese to precisely the audience you are paying to reach. The post above the document: The feed copy does one job. It names who the document is for and which decision it helps them make, inside the first line and a half, because everything after that sits behind the fold. Readers swipe the opening pages inside the feed before any form appears, so those pages carry the argument. A cover page with a logo and a title spends the only free impression the format gives you. Measurement: I read completion depth rather than download count. The share of readers who reach the case study page tells you whether the document deserves to exist. The download count tells you what your targeting cost. Both appear in the report and only one drives the next version. Where a placement runs with a creator or a media partner, the paid disclosure required since the Consumer Affairs Agency's October 2023 rule goes into the creative itself, and I will not ship a placement that reads as editorial when it is bought. Not included: Content strategy programmes, blogs and SEO. Design system or brand guideline work; I typeset inside your existing system and will flag where it breaks in Japanese, but I do not rebuild it. Translation of your existing English collateral, which a translation agency does more cheaply and which I would only be pretending to improve. Video, motion, and anything requiring a shoot. Who this is not for: Brands with no customer willing to be named and no data of their own. An importer with a handsome furniture catalogue and a pet food brand holding a feeding study are two different engagements, and only one has a document worth gating. Also not for teams who want the file in a week. Customer sign-off in Japan takes longer than the design does, every time, and the schedule is built around that rather than around my availability.