An adtech startup is just muscle memory for this marketing veteran

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to many startup founders over the past few months, and one of the first trends that stuck out was the reaction I’d get when I brought up marketing – something like the way many of us felt when we had to sit through that cringe-worthy hug between Draco Malfoy and Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies.

Marketing’s a weird animal to figure out. You make your social media pages. You make aware your family, friends, and connections, but sharing the word only goes so far when we live lives over-saturated with ads. Take a walk down the street, and there are four billboards in front of you. The bench you pass has another ad, while some hipster small business has decided to try a good, old-fashioned chalk advertisement on the street. And you haven’t even pulled out your smartphone yet.

There are marketing guys who make ads their bread and butter, but they’re not always available on a startup budget. On the flip side, there’s a contingent of adtech startups that have popped up to tackle specific problems the ad corporates pass over – localization, for example, or marketing within a hyperlocal setting.

Then there’s adtech startup AdAsia, which wants to take Southeast Asia by storm, combining marketing, advertising, and publishing under one roof and one usable digital platform.

It’s a pretty lofty goal. It helps that its founders have done a lot of the same work before.

From Japan to Southeast Asia

Kosuke Sogo, co-founder and CEO of AdAsia.

In April 2012, Kosuke Sogo was working for MicroAd, a Japanese advertising agency under IT firm CyberAgent. After spending time in business development, he set up seven of the business’s offices in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines over the next three years. Last year, he became the company’s Asia-Pacific managing director.

What could be next? According to Kosuke: start up.

“I really wanted to start my own business,” he reveals, a desire that he attributes to his grandparents. First, however, he wanted a stable moneymaking job before the perils of entrepreneurship. He saw his opening in Japan’s tech sector seven years ago.

Naturally, I got the promotions very quickly.

“Naturally, I got the promotions very quickly,” he says. “Then, [MicroAd] sent me to Southeast Asia.” There, he set up a total of seven subsidiaries for MicroAd.

He enjoyed all the perks and opportunities that came with having a significant role in a pan-Asia ad firm, but it just wasn’t the same as running one’s own show. “I want to do whatever I want, but I have to get approval from headquarters,” he tells Tech in Asia. “It takes a little time.”

One of his concerns is speed, which he couldn’t accomplish to the extent he wanted at MicroAd, and he found himself thinking about how he would do things differently. Along with Otohiko Kozutsumi, Kosuke set up Singapore-headquartered AdAsia in March this year and hit the ground running. Earlier this month, it opened its offices in Indonesia and Vietnam. It plans to open offices in locations including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and China.

Keeping up with expectations