Since its establishment, SOPHOLA has tested and introduced various marketing technologies (Martech) and advertising technologies (Adtech) in Japan, and has provided support to many advertisers and advertising agencies. However, there are solutions that we have not been able to bring to the Japanese market that would raise the level of digital marketing in Japan if they were distributed in Japan as SOPHOLA. This time, I would like to write about that solution.

It is a solution that enables content creation by AI. As this article (in English) says, in 2021, 600 million blog posts will be made on 1.9 billion websites worldwide in one year. That’s 600 million blogs alone, so if you include other content, the number will grow several times or even dozens of times. For example, I was also greatly shocked at the time by the AI-based news article generation developed in-house by The Washington Post about five years ago. (Source: The Washington Post’s robot reporter has published 850 articles in the past year) In the first year of its release alone, the “robot reporter” generated 850 news articles. This was 5 years ago. Since this was five years ago, readers may have some idea of how much progress has been made in this area in the US and Europe.

In fact, according to a survey conducted by Capterra (one of the world’s largest SaaS comparison sites), about 30% of marketers worldwide are already using content creation AI solutions as of 2021-2022. In advertising and data analysis, 58% and 57% of marketers are using AI solutions, respectively.

I can’t say for sure since the above statistics are not available in Japan, but I personally have yet to meet a marketer who is using a content creation AI solution. As the title of this article states, 82% of marketers are using AI to create content of equal or better quality than humans.

Looking at the above alone, one might think, “Why not just have SOPHOLA bring it to Japan?” But we have not been able to do so due to a lack of power, because we need a separate technology development to develop a program for natural language processing in Japanese… I hope that companies with more financial resources than our company will actively develop this technology on their own or through alliances to import and additionally develop it, so that it will be widely used, as it is a necessary technology for the future development of the industry.

Companies with financial strength, innovation (the ability to take risks and explore new areas), and speed will continue to aggressively promote the use of AI, and the gap between them and other companies is expected to widen exponentially. (We don’t have much financial resources, but we will keep the other two in mind and continue to work on them aggressively so that we don’t get left behind!

Masaki “Mark” Iino
Founder & CEO
SOPHOLA, Inc