Hello, my name is Yoshifumi Takeuchi. I am a former Dentsu employee. I retired from Dentsu in March 2022 and worked there as a senior employee until September.
After that, I worked for about a year and a half as the head of the marketing department at Kinjiro Co., Ltd., a venture company that provides an employment management system. However, when my wife told me that she had seen a TV program asking people if there was anything they wanted to do in their lives, I began to think about starting my own business.
I had been volunteering to help with the social implementation of Originator Profile (OP), a caller identification technology that I invented, in my position as a senior member of the Keio SFC Research Institute, but the work was left unfinished, so I decided that I wanted to start my own company and fully assist in the social implementation of OP.
I explained my thoughts to CEO of Kinjiro, who had been so kind to me, and he understood, so I left the company on good terms and started my own company, Y&H.
The title of this page, “Advertising supports people’s freedom of expression,” is the title of a paper I wrote when I was an employee of Dentsu. This paper won the silver prize in the 49th Essay Prize Competition of the Japan Advertising Agencies Association. You can read this paper(Japanese only) here, so if you are interested, I would be happy if you would take a look.
Here are some of the points I wanted to make in this paper. Many people are probably wondering, “How does advertising relate to freedom of expression?”
In fact, in 1950, one year before the first commercial radio broadcasting in Japan began, Hideo Yoshida, who was then president of Dentsu and chairman of the Tokyo Broadcasting System’s founding preparatory committee, was invited to a House of Councilors hearing to deliberate the Broadcasting Bill in preparation for the start of commercial broadcasting, where he made a statement about the “freedom of expression in broadcasting” in Article 1 of the Broadcasting Act. The “freedom of expression in broadcasting” in this Broadcasting Act means that “commercial businesses other than NHK are also permitted to use radio waves.” The full text of this statement is reproduced here(Japanese only).
Yoshida explained logically from the current state of the Japanese advertising market at the time that while NHK has a large and stable source of revenue in the form of reception fees, commercial broadcasting is premised on operating solely on advertising revenue, so if too many commercial broadcasting stations were to spring up, advertising revenue would be dispersed among the individual stations, leading to a high likelihood of them all going bankrupt.He proposed that commercial broadcasting start with one broadcasting station per region for the time being.Yoshida’s proposal was adopted.
Radio wave use is a government-approved business, and originally, only NHK was allowed to use it. When radio wave use was opened up to the private sector, that is, when commercial broadcasting was established, advertising was used as a source of funding. Therefore, it is certain that advertising has supported the “freedom of expression of commercial broadcasting.”
It was in this age of widespread internet use that I wrote in my thesis that “advertising supports people’s freedom of expression.” I myself post my daily outfits on Instagram, and the reason Instagram is free to use is because of advertising. My freedom of expression is certainly supported by advertising. Speaking of which, around June 2024, META, the company that operates Instagram, began an initiative to return a portion of advertising revenue to influencers, and I received an invitation to be included in the initiative. After completing the required procedures, I was indeed given a regular bonus, albeit a small amount.
It’s great that the spread of social media like Instagram and YouTube has given everyone the freedom to express themselves, but the business model surrounding the digital advertising that appears on these media outlets is becoming quite strange.
If a video that slanders celebrities or other famous people is posted on YouTube, people will watch it out of curiosity, and then platform systems such as Google will automatically identify the person watching and deliver ads optimized for that person. However, it must be extremely inconvenient for advertisers whose ads are delivered to videos that slander people.
The paper I introduced at the beginning of this article was the proposal I came up with after thinking about ways to solve this problem. This paper inspired me to think about “technology that can identify senders” while I was still an employee of Dentsu. Currently, in order to popularize this technology, I am making my own contributions, however small, by participating as a member of the secretariat of the Originator Profile Collaborative Innovation Partnership in my position as a senior member of the Keio University SFC Research Institute.
From the perspective that “advertising supports people’s freedom of expression,” there is a company that proposed investing in Dentsu around 2018, believing that it could change the way online advertising is currently done. That company is the browser vendor Brave. The photo below was taken when I visited the Brave office in San Francisco and proposed a collaboration. I am on the far left, and the man with glasses on the far right is Brave CEO Brendan Eich, who is also the inventor of JavaScript, a standard technology for the web. Unfortunately, it seems that Dentsu and Brave no longer have a special relationship.
Brave has a unique business model. In exchange for removing all advertisements from web pages, users of the Brave browser are paid virtual currency as a reward when they choose to watch an advertisement. I am, of course, a Brave user, and although it is only a small token amount of about 5,000 yen per year, it is deposited into my virtual currency account.
Furthermore, if the operator of a website is registered as a Brave publisher, you can also pay a tip in virtual currency if you want to support that website. I am a PR advisor for LOOM NIPPON, a support group for Minamisanriku Town, and I run the website for the group, so I am registered as a Brave publisher. About once a month, someone donates to LOOM using Brave’s virtual currency, BAT.
This photo is an example of an ad that appears in the browser Brave. When you create a new tab, the ad is displayed full screen. It’s nice to have this much space, even as an ad creator.
I’m very happy that there are advertisers who choose Brave as their advertising medium. I retired from Dentsu, so it’s a shame that I can’t sell directly to advertisers, but MINI has a great sense of style.
I recommend Brave because it also removes annoying YouTube ads. It also has excellent privacy features, and since it is a company that invented JavaScript, it also has excellent security measures. By default, it turns off all dangerous software, so you can use the Internet with peace of mind. Please download it from here and try it out. I currently have no business relationship with Brave.
It is thanks to ads that we can use such an excellent browser for free. I know that many people dislike ads, but I hope that even if they are just a little, they will come to appreciate that advertising can also be useful in our lives.
However, there are people who abuse the advertising business, so please be careful not to be deceived by advertising scams that impersonate famous people. The Originator Profile (OP) technology that I am helping with in my role as a senior member of the Keio SFC Research Institute can also be used to solve this problem, so I think that OP needs to be implemented in society as soon as possible.