PEOPLE
02
There Is No One Right
I like working with clients as part of one collective team.
I decided to join the Dentsu Runway because I knew some of the senior staff members who had supported me at my previous advertising agency. Because I highly respect them, I decided to follow in their footsteps. I was convinced that the company had to be an exciting place if they had chosen to work there.
My main duties are to plan and produce social media posts for Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms, as well as to propose, produce, and implement digital promotions for specific products.
My work can be small or large in scale. For compact projects, I am expected to multitask and complete everything by myself. Although I have a naturally timid personality, I have moved forward one step at a time and overcome my fears by repeatedly having to make quick decisions within a limited timeframe and budget.
I enjoy experiencing firsthand how people can be moved by advertising. Some say that “advertising is the sexiest part of marketing,” and it is fascinating to see how society and trends change as a result. Also, advertising cannot be done alone. I love how the agency, with its sales and accounts executives, strategy, and creative departments, works with the client as a single team to achieve our collective goal. That is what makes the job fun.
What is great is that there is no one right way.
I have participated in many projects to date. For those projects, we have always started from scratch and joined forces with multiple departments to produce amazing results that would have been unimaginable from the brief alone.
One of my most memorable projects was an interactive event in which celebrities and fans could meet each other online. Our client wrote us a brief requesting that we come up with something to spark interest in the product and achieve conversions by implementing social media promotions involving celebrities and their fans. Based on my research on fan insights, I thought it would be more effective to get fans involved to achieve success. In addition to typical announcements made through social media, I aimed to maximize conversations and exposure through social media campaigns and online events.
I requested the cooperation of other teams in charge of commercials and PR, and we collectively prepared to launch the complex campaign and event. After one hour of streaming, social media was abuzz with fan comments, putting us at the top of Twitter Trends.
In addition, when I participate in a global project, I aim to drive conversations on social media. Besides campaigns and video production, I produce proposals to coordinate real-life events beyond the social media sector, even if they have not been requested by my clients. Seeing people enjoy the products or events we have been preparing in coordination with the client’s local team and a global team for over six months is a special kind of joy!
Standardized patterns for how to produce great adverting or textbooks on how to navigate social media marketing do not exist anywhere in the world. That is what makes it interesting—looking for the right answer through repeated trial and error. To be honest, I have experienced many failures. Nevertheless, my main client has a very positive attitude, and is constantly looking to the future, saying things like, “Let’s use this to inform our next steps.” Working with social media can involve unforgiving numbers, but it can be gratifying when clients have that attitude.
I learn from qualities I respect in people.
To improve my skills, I think that opportunities to learn from others are so important. The greatest strength of this company is that it offers many opportunities to learn about how senior team members and colleagues approach the job, how to stimulate their creativity, how they deal with clients, and so on. Worrying about a task for a long time only to have a senior completely change my perspective with some advice and suddenly finding that I am working smoothly has become an everyday occurrence for me.
My colleagues at Dentsu Runway come from various careers and backgrounds, each with unique strengths. I try to consciously find things I admire about them and acquire them for myself. Of course, most conversations in my day-to-day job only involve my team, so there are still many colleagues I know very little about. Looking at it from the wider perspective of the Dentsu Group, it helps me to see the endless possibilities. In the future, I want to pursue assignments across departments and company boundaries and adopt my various colleagues’ best qualities. I believe this attitude might even improve the company as a whole. Dentsu Runway is a relatively new company, and some standards have yet to be established, so I have great expectations for how Runway will evolve.
Going forward, I want to actively dive into new work and environments and continue growing while enjoying new challenges.