Last time, I wrote about my personal history of establishing alliance partnerships with global tech startups and creating our own additional values as our unique business feature in SOPHOLA’s consulting and outsourcing. Yet, there was too much to write about the topic for a single post, so I divided it into two parts. lol

This time, I will try to continue to tell about the moments when I felt the global tech could make a differentiating difference.

■What Made Me Realize The Reasons Why The Tech from Global Tech Startups Are Not Widely Used: Convertro (US, Attribution), Criteo (France, Retargeting Solution), TVTY/wywy(UK/Germany, TV Analytics/Sync Actions）
At Irep, my 3rd company in 2013-2015, Attribution Analyses is one of the digital marketing topics which attracted my biggest interest.  “How do internet users visit the advertiser’s website, recognize and understand the brand leading the item purchase?” “Based on the path patterns, how can we accelerate the process by changing the budget allocation and marketing actions?” I was very fascinated by these questions that every digital marketer who has an interest in internet users’ behaviors considers at least once.

At that time, we were using the data provided by Values which possess the action logs of 300,000 Credit Saison’s online members who consent to be monitored in Japan. The data was sent with a large volume of CSV data, and I spent a huge amount of time processing data for attribution analysis. I was repeating the data processing and analysis, thinking that “I think there may be a change in behavioral tendency by the end of the analysis…”.

At the same time, remembering my encounter with RocketFuel, I started to research, thinking, “What is going on with attribution analysis tools overseas?” Surprisingly, there are several tools overseas that can complete all the “visualization”, “budget allocation”, and “action planning” of attribution analysis such as Convertro and Adometry, which are later acquired by AOL/Google, all on one platform. It was when I started to wonder, “Why aren’t these tools coming to Japan?”

On the other hand, Criteo, which had been considered to be one of the most popular overseas tech startup technologies in Japan’s digital marketing history, also entered the Japanese market at this time. It was an epoch-making retargeting display ad that can increase the number of conversions with lower CPA than any display ad simply by embedding Criteo’s retargeting tag etc. on the website. I was watching this situation with a bitter smile, “Why is it so popular here?” lol

I was able to get my own answer to these questions because of what happened when I participated in the “Integrated Marketing Project” of Hakuhodo x Irep. One of the missions of the project was to “test the proposal of offline/online marketing measures by linking the brand recognition activities by mass media such as TV commercials with the activities for understanding/purchasing products on the Internet”. In the meantime, when I searched the domestic market, “Is there any tool that can link the keywords and ad text of paid search as well as the landing page synching with TV commercials?” Similar to attribution analysis tools, there were tools such as TVTY and wywy overseas. WPP, the world’s largest media agency, has formed a trading desk team called XAXIS, was using wywy as an OEM solution as a “TV Sync solution.”
*Of course, I advised Hakuhodo people to test these tools, but I still remember that it took more than half a year to consider it. lol

Through these experiences, language barriers, nationality barriers that are reluctant to take risks, commercial customs barriers where in-house reviews and approvals are overly repeated, cultural barriers that emphasize followability rather than innovation. I was keenly aware that due to the existence of many barriers, the utilization of technology by overseas tech startups, which is a few steps ahead of Japanese digital marketing technology, is not progressing.

I couldn’t write again about how I built the style of building a collaborative system with overseas startups. lol I’ll write more about it next time, so stay tuned!

SOPHOLA, Inc
Founder and CEO
Masaki Iino
PS: Shinanomachi’s Gold Rush corn has become a delicious season!