I already forgot when they established their Tokyo office, but I can still very clearly remember the good & old days of this very characteristic software startup because it was actually my first software company where I worked as an account manager. I can’t believe more than 10 years already passed after I left there. Now, let’s start revieing what they (we) achived in the early 2000s.
With WILLCOM & KDDI
The device, “KYO-PON” was made by KYOCERA and sold by Japanese operator, WILLCOM in 2004. It was the first device sold in Japan with Opera Browser which supports HTML rendering. In that era, people here are typically only viewing compact-HTML websites from the mobile devices so that device was kind of disruptive at that stage. KYO-PON had micro-ITRON OS. TRON operating system was not very popular choice for the mobile device but KYOCERA was somehow using it.
Write Once Run Anywhere..?
Although that tagline is popular for the decades, actually make broswer running on multiple OS turned out to be a lot of hustle in terms of quality assurance (and also bug-fixing). Opera delivered “Opera for BREW” for Jpaanese big MNO, KDDI. That deal generated rougly $3 Million per year in the busiest years but required to have some big QA engineer team on the ground.
It was a good growing opportunity for me to some extent!
Work in Norwegian Software Company
It was always my biggest pleasure to go to Norway and make friends there. The people were friendly and the nature was awesome. Really beautiful country but somehow things there were very expensive.. Yes, Oslo is known as the most expensive city to live in! At that time, Opera already had more than 300 employees globally. The management there did not have good reputation actually. When I was visiting the headquarter, some people said that their salary is even cheaper than Oslo bus drivers so it is definitely impossible to hire good QA engineers 🙂 I could not confirm if it is true or false but it was probably true, I guess.
In front of former Opera headquarter in Oslo.
What I learned There
One of my colleague decided to leave the company and on that departure day, in front of the whole office members, he said “I love this people but I think the leadership of the company is wrong!”. It was kind of a shocking experience for me when I was only 27 or 28 YO. I was probably agreeing that leaving colleague. On the other hand, I was thining how I could manage this difficult business assuming if I was a board member. Opera completely failed and eventually acquired by some Chinese private equity. I am quite sure that with good leadership, maybe Opera could have better future by acquireing more share on this desktop browser market. (embedded browser license business was good in terms of revenue but from long-term viewpoint, getting more user must have enabled longer life of the entire company by increasing valuation.
Who to work with is very important
I am a bit sorry for this obvious conclusion, but still my biggest key take-out is this! Founder of Opera was trying to work with his old friends so those friends are taking very important roles in the company. For example, CCO did not have much experience in commercial terms and CMO did not have good marketing expereince.. like that 🙂
It happens even in Facebook so people says the friend of Sandberg is occupying important positions there. Nonetheless, the overall performance is not such bad so far so she happens to have “good” firneds maybe.
Especially in Opera’s Swedish office, they had many great developers, I remember. I was always enjoying working with those smart guys. They were aso kind and friendly. Afterall, here is what I got from my days in Opera Software 🙂
BizDev Expereicne
Handled the contrac with more than 1M EURO value after developing the deal. Gave me good confidence.
v
Language
I started speaking English everyday. My first experience of global organization gave me a lot of choice later on.
Computer Science
Learning about computer was a lot of fun. Embedded software eco-system gave me a lot of basic but important knowledge.
That is pretty much it!
After my departure, I heard that one of their ex-JP country manager was about to getting sued for the harassment by ex-employee and the company was forced to pay some settlement.. (led by legal team in Oslo) That might be something I could not experience if I was working in a typical Japanese public established big corporates.
In the tech startups, I can see more “wild” world therefore both of the wild beautiful things like passionate engineers, friendly foreigners, etc & wild dirty things..! Maybe better for me because that is the “real” world.
If you want to be “innovative” in online advertising, it might be tempting to use geo-IP based targeting technology depending on your campaign objectives.
Some Options Available in the market
OK. Here we have several options when you want to run geo-IP based tarketing promotion. “X-locations” is spinned off from the global player named “Near” back in 2017. I believe it was MBO (management buy-out). Because their data still come from Near Pte, Ltd. they have strong audience data all-over the east asia. Thus, you can target the Chinese, Honkonese, or maybe Korean people who is visiting Tokyo or anyother cities by using their data. That geographic IP data is something they are getting from the bid-request, it is not as accurate as WiFi data. Please note that when you use the locations data, the most accurate data is WiFi data followed by the bid-request data.
Softbank also has some presence in this field
Softbank is one of Japan’s biggest MNO (mobile network operator) and agressively collecting the user’s data for the advertisers. Because their data is based on WiFi usage, the accuracy of the data is high.
Arrange the KPI for the geo-IP targeting promo
Basically when you do that kind of campaign, we assume that you would like to make purchase happen at the offline venues (stores). If the conversion of the campaign was a purchase event that happens offline, your measurement strategy is really important to evaluate the performance of the campaign. Here is how that measurement strategy works.
Measure the effectiveness of the campaign by using “Foot-fall report”
By utilizing the tracking capability of the geo-IP type of the media, we can find out which location actually those users have visited. By appying this technology, we can find our the “foot-fall” of both of following GROUPs.
1). the users who have been exposed to the adverts (a.k.a. “Exposed group”)
vs
2). the users who have NOT been exposed to the adverts (a.k.a. “Controled group”). When you measure the uplift of the footfall of the exposed group, you can successfully find out how effective your campaign has been performing.
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Because there is a tight regulation imposed on the religious organizations by the government, we have to prepare for the following things to make it happen.
Presence of your local organization and its “corporate registry document” (In Japanese, Toukibo-Touhon)
The promotion over the radio is known as an effective approach when we consider the awareness improvement, but the total time-slots that is sponsored by religious organization must be less than 2% of that stations’s all broadcast time of the month.
In order to let your promotion run on the publishers (e.g. Radio Stations), your organization needs to go through media’s screening processes. On that process, your organization must submit the corporate registry documents of your registered local organization.
Also, there is another regulation imposed on the publisher side related to the promotion of the religious organization. The total broadcast time of the religious organization-sponsored program must be less than 2% of all the broadcast time of that applicable station.
Restrictions on The Content
When your organization works with the radio stations to run your promotions, there is also some restrictions on your program itself and also the “commercial announcement” that you submit to the radio stations.
That “commercial announcement” should not be direct invitation to your religious events. Typically, your organization can get 40 seconds commercial time-slot during the sponsored program but even that 40 seconds need to be compliant to that regulations.
The program can be typically some around 5 mins or 10 mins program but you can be “sponsor” of the program rather than you becoming the “director” of the program.
Regarding the CM, you can take very popular workaround solution like promote your educational events taking place at your venue so that the audience might be interested to come to learn more about your organizations.
For the content of the program, ORANGE FOX would work with the publisher or station’s production team to create the program that reaches the maximum audience so that your message can be delivered to the very broad audience.
Reach Your Audience of the Program
The publisher or the radio stations can not share any PII (person-identifiable-information) with your organization due to the local regulations but still you can reach those audience by using the social media for example. Getting more audience on you social media channel is good idea provided that it is the channel that is owned by your organization.
Using Both of Awareness Media & Performance Media
The traditional media such as the radio can be useful when you want to improve the awareness of your organization. Once you get the broad audience by using that legacy media, it might be possible to get some direct responses (such as channel subscription, etc) by effectively using the internet advertising media. ORANGE FOX can help you handling both of those 2 media channels by leveraging substantial experience on the ground.
Hi there! Today’s case-study is about the B2B marketing. I have done a campaign briefing with one of our client and found the summary of the campaign as following.
What is the Campaign Briefing?
The campaign briefing is really important and successful campaign can’t be made without this process. As an agency, we have to agree with the client regarding the objective, success criteria, and the approach.
How to build your tailored audience?
Once we agree regarding the budget, objective, and the flight period, we have to come up with the way to build our tailored audience. It is not easy process but we can make something like following in order to target the client’s preferred audience. In this case, we have to target the “marketing people” by utilizing the national job database.
Performance Simulation
A perfect performance simulation requires the historical data of similar campaigns but in most cases, we do not have very “similar campaign” provided that each client’s business is unique to some extent. However, we have to do this simulation otherwise we can’t have the success criteria. The following data is a real performance simulation of us.
Sorry it is partly based on Japanese but one of the important thing is pricing model. In case we use DSPs (demand-side platforms), it is typically based on the CPM (cost per each 1,000 impressions). Thus, the CPC varies depends on how much CTR you can get. The performance of the creative is also very important.
Optimize Your Campaigns towards the agreed Success Criteria
Once we set up the audience and also the ad-group, we launch the campaign and start optimizing. Typically, the objective is to lower the CPA (cost per acquisition), so there are two big strategy here.
One idea is that allow high-CPC and get “quality audience” on your landing page. Aim to get higher CVR (conversion rate) and then try to lower the CPA.
The other idea is that, keep very low CPC and collect as much users as possible on your landing page. This would sacrifice your CVR but the CPA can be lower than above strategy in case your CPC is indeed cheap.
Deliver the weekly performance report and explain next planned actions
Seems like this campaign design is well agreed with the client so the remaining actions is to keep optimization efforts and then deliver the report to them on each agreed timing. One thing you have to note is that this campaigns can be done even without the presence of your local legal entities provided that you have your trusted agency on the ground 🙂
