Although I think that our results-based pay per action (PPA) business model—in which revenues are generated when users purchase our clients’ products via our Internet-based advertisements—is no different from that of other firms, I think that our strength lies in the sense of size of our company. While major advertising agencies carry out comprehensive marketing including PR, advertising, websites, and social media account operation in order to achieve client objectives, there are actually only a small number of advertising agencies that employ elite, small-sized teams to offer the same kinds of services for small to medium-sized companies. We feel that there are business opportunities to be found there. It is important to make comprehensive marketing proposals, including search engine optimization (SEO) solutions, and to keep costs per user acquisition (CPA) within the client’s budget. Being able to do this is one of our company’s strengths, and also something that we keep challenging ourselves to achieve. In recent years, an increasing number of companies are realizing the value of web advertising and investing in this area. The volume of web advertisements being submitted is consequently increasing. However, since the number of users viewing the advertisements has not changed much, bidding prices are rising. As a result of this, the cost-performance ratio for these advertisements becomes unfeasible, and agencies begin to withdraw.
Even if, for example, a client’s web advertising expenditure is zero, Blue has the technology to generate revenues using SEO solutions. We can also provide comprehensive consulting services, such as influencer and casting strategies and social media strategies (including account operation/administration for Instagram and other social media accounts), which is another positive advantage for us. Although our company is small, with only 10 employees, we are able to deliver a wide range of consulting services by forming alliances with partner companies with various strengths, rather than conducting operations using our company’s resources alone.
When we launched the company in August 2017, our sales were between around five and seven million yen. Last month, they exceed 100 million, which shows that the scale of our business is undoubtedly growing. As our business performance improves, the number of people with hopes and expectations for our company has also increased, and we have come to receive offers from various companies. While this is pleasing, there are also some cases in which we are unable to handle this increased workload, and I am thinking that I would like to increase the number of members on our team. However, my basic policy with regard to HR recruitment is to only hire good friends. I think that refined working skills are often polished when we are subjected to pressure and harsh conditions, but on the other hand, under such conditions, there are times when it is hard for us to say that we don’t understand, and work doesn’t go as smoothly as it should. Although my initial motivation was simply that I wanted to work together with my friends, I realized that by hiring friends—where we had relationships of being able to say anything to one another to begin with—it was possible to ask each other immediately when there was something we didn’t understand, and so our working speed was much faster than it might be at other companies.
Although one might think that having such close relationships would make people likely to slack off, I think that actually on the other hand we feel more obligated to one another, that there is still honor and respect between good friends, and that it enables us to take a more balanced approach to our work. I have found this to be the greatest advantage of working together with my close friends. One friend who recently joined the company is a former hairstylist, who had never been involved with web-related work before joining us. I believe that there is no problem in having no web-related experience to begin with. We have a well thought-out policy on the division of labor, so we never ask new recruits to do anything difficult right off the bat. The best thing is when people say for themselves, “I want to try that!” so I like to have new employees start off doing work that is almost too easy for them, and to widen the range of work that they are able to do one step at a time.
Moving forward, I would like us to use this sense of speed to enable clients to make use of advertisements that are ideally tailored to users using the ever-growing range of new services that continue to be released. I also want to propose various solutions for the media providers that offer these services. Currently, the web advertising industry is so concerned with user acquisitions that advertisers are often called out for using exaggerated or misleading expressions, and I feel that the ad-posting environment is becoming more turbulent. We must create ads that are not misleading, and find ways of posting them that will satisfy both makers (clients) and users. I want to investigate the creation of platforms for doing this, and methods of positing online ads. One possible good strategy might be to buy and acquire existing media and use to it display proprietary clean advertisements. I think one reason for the turmoil on the posting side is that the media providing the posting functionality leaves advertisements up to other firms. If the media providers themselves had the know-how to put out advertisements directly, then this problem could be solved in a single sweep.
It would also enable the companies submitting the advertisements to maintain a clean image. While it might seem like something obvious, and there may be companies who are already doing the same kind of thing, I think that the current state of affairs exists because it is not being done to a sufficient extent, and I think it is something that we must investigate further. Since web technology is common to the world, we are also considering the possibilities of overseas expansion in the future. As the first step in this expansion, we started a web advertising company in Taiwan in January 2018. In developed countries with sufficiently advanced Internet infrastructure, we must compete against various services provided by other companies. In countries where this infrastructure is not yet fully developed, there are fewer services to be compared against, and we believe that in such environments it is easier for really good services to penetrate and establish themselves. I want our company to expand first into Asia, and then go on to achieve the realization of new ideas on a global scale.
