Delivering More Marketing Value for Clients with AI

SMN Corporation (SMN) is a Japan-based developer of marketing technology powered by big data processing, artificial intelligence, and financial engineering. SMN provides a wide variety of products and services including marketing analytics and advertising management and distribution.

Exponential data growth in Japan’s advertising landscape

The nature of advertising in Japan is shifting along with its increasingly digitally connected population, and the surge of digital interactions from customers is fueling a marked rise in data. In 2022, the country saw 5.3 million more cellular mobile connections, while the number of internet and social media users grew by 844,000 and 8.2 million, respectively.

As digital channel usage rose, SMN faced a huge increase in advertisement interactions and the associated data it had to manage. In addition, the company has been handling a steadily increasing volume of digital transactions, which have risen sevenfold from a decade ago and continue to grow each month.

SMN relies heavily on artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) models to process these transactions and data to help drive marketing return on investment (ROI) for clients. Its offerings include VALIS-Engine, an AI engine; Logicad, a demand side platform; and VALIS-Cockpit, a marketing analytics tool.

SMN required a technological platform that could scale with its data growth and accommodate the increasing workload of its AI/ML engines. The company needed a flexible solution to efficiently store, process, aggregate and analyze its data in order to deliver the marketing insights its clients require for their campaigns to succeed.

Establishing a data foundation for business growth and AI

To accommodate its growing workload, SMN switched to Cloudera in 2014. “Eight years ago, we reviewed many data warehousing solutions that could help us store and analyze our ad data at a fast pace. Only Cloudera gave us enough capacity to store up to five petabytes of our data and processing capabilities that could grow with our business. Their ability to integrate with programs like Apache Hadoop and Apache Impala also meant that it could also give us the capabilities to amass and analyze large amounts of data to help drive our customers’ marketing success,” said Takahiro Yasuda, General Manager and Executive Officer of Technology Department and Operation of Advertising Distribution Platform Management, SMN.

In 2021, SMN upgraded to Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) which allows them to access and analyze its marketing and ad data. With CDP, SMN has the capacity to scale its AI engines to process data, helping them take on additional workloads to grow the business. CDP also allows SMN to deploy the solution’s capabilities on a variety of IT environments, empowering the company to choose the most suitable option and save on costs.

Delivering marketing insights to create more value

With Cloudera, SMN can confidently analyze its massive volume of ad and marketing data to extract more value, as well as draw insights to help its clients achieve their marketing goals.

Using CDP, SMN’s data platform and AI engines can process about 700 billion transactions monthly, up from 100 billion a decade ago. CDP’s hybrid data platform is fast and easy to use, allowing SMN’s systems and AI engines to flexibly take on more data from more demanding client requests.

SMN teams are also able to deliver more accurate insights to customers and help them make better decisions for marketing campaigns. Using CDP as the base, SMN can create more than 200 types of reporting, including Sales reports and ad delivery result reports. By giving more visibility to clients over marketing performance, they can adjust campaigns to improve ROI and generate desired results, such as better click-through rates and impressions.