Strategic Planner
About the job
- Lead frontline client proposals and client work for major brand advertisers, from strategy using SmartNews internal data through execution support.
- Work with sales representatives on client engagements and relay frontline challenges to product development to create new advertising solutions.
- Analyze contextual data, such as article-reading logs, and design user approaches suited to a cookie-less environment.
- Lead projects involving clients, agencies, and internal development teams through proposal, implementation, and effectiveness evaluation.
- Lead knowledge-sharing sessions and individual training sessions to raise proposal capabilities across JP Ad Biz sales.
- Have experience defining clients’ marketing challenges and proposing strategic solutions through strategic planning at a major advertising agency or global agency.
- Be able to engage directly in client work, build trust with stakeholders, and lead projects.
- Organize complex data and derive actionable insights that support customer business growth.
- Bring approximately 5–10 years of professional experience, or be able to independently drive strategy design, proposal development, and stakeholder coordination end to end.
- Produce work quickly while personally conducting analysis and preparing materials.
- Develop tailored advertising solutions for brand advertisers by combining SmartNews first-party data with marketing expertise.
- Lead client and agency work to identify challenges and define and execute new approaches, including contextual delivery to create shifts in consumer attitudes.
- Bridge the product and sales organizations by bringing client feedback to product development and shaping product improvements and new advertising solutions.
- Lead cross-functional projects from proposal through execution and effectiveness measurement.
- Improve proposal capabilities across the sales organization by sharing successful approaches and leading knowledge-sharing and training sessions.
- Experience in strategic planning at a major advertising agency or global agency, defining clients’ marketing challenges and proposing strategic solutions.
- Interest in providing feedback to product development and developing new advertising offerings.
- Deep practical marketing knowledge of brand advertisers, such as automotive and consumer-goods companies.
About the company
SmartNews aggregates news from over 3,000 publishers into a single app, letting users read a wide range of stories in one place. It relies on machine learning to analyze articles, social signals, and user behavior to surface trending and relevant news, with features like SmartView for fast reading and offline access. The service earns mainly from ads and revenue-sharing deals with publishers, plus SmartNews+ for premium content from many media partners. Its goal is to reduce information overload by providing broad, newspaper-like discovery rather than hyper-personalized feeds, while sustaining the business through publisher partnerships and advertising.
Company Size
201-500
Company Stage
Debt Financing
Total Funding
$486.5M
Headquarters
Tokyo, Japan
Founded
2012
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- April 2026 Docomo renamed My Magazine to SmartNews for docomo, expanding Japanese reach.
- May 2026 SmartNews Ads Conference named 64 partner agencies, including CyberAgent and Hakuhodo DY ONE.
- July 17, 2026 AI Transformation Division signals product velocity and cost automation focus.
What critics are saying
- Bloomberg's March 2026 Tokyo IPO report set up a likely down-round versus 2021 valuation.
- SmartNews depends on publisher traffic and ad agencies; AP, Reuters, and media partners can renegotiate.
- Google and Apple control distribution; App Store ranking changes can crush installs overnight.
What makes SmartNews unique
- SmartView and 4,500+ publisher network preserve a clean, cross-source reading habit.
- SmartNews Rewards, launched March 25, 2026, monetizes reading with gift-card incentives.
- Docomo partnership and 64 agency partners deepen distribution across Japan and ads.
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Benefits
Health Insurance
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
0%1 year growth
0%2 year growth
1%Our latest funding round was led by Development Bank of Japan, followed by SMBC Venture Capital and Japan Co-Invest L.P. (managed by Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Investment). The new funds will be used to accelerate growth, hiring and business development, and to expand research and development of our machine learning technology for news discovery.
TOKYO (August 8) -- SmartNews, the free, award-winning news-discovery app for iOS and Android, has raised $36 million in Series B funding, with significant investments from international investment firm Atomico and global mobile-social company GREE.
SmartNews has launched a rewards programme in the US that allows users to earn points for reading news articles, marking the first initiative of its kind amongst American news apps according to the company's research. Users are automatically enrolled in challenges to earn points by reading a specified number of articles within set timeframes. Points can be redeemed through the Tango Rewards platform for gift cards at retailers like Amazon or charitable donations to organisations including the Special Olympics. The programme follows a successful rollout in Japan and underwent beta testing in the US from December 2025, showing strong adoption. Founded in 2012, SmartNews serves millions of users globally through partnerships with over 3,000 publishers and uses machine learning technology for news discovery.
SmartNews, a news app available in Japan and the US, closed its Series E1 funding round in July 2019, achieving a valuation exceeding ¥100 billion, thus becoming a "unicorn." The funding was led by ACA Investments, with continued support from Globis Capital Partners. The company is focused on expanding in the US market, with plans for an IPO. Key figures involved in the funding include Tetsuya Matsumoto from SmartNews, Hiroyuki Ono from ACA, and Minoru Konno from GCP.
Japan’s startup sector, despite being one of the biggest in the world, has lagged behind other regions like the U.S., China, and the U.K., in terms of the number of unicorns and the scale of venture capital investment. For years, an aging population, overall economic deflation, and salarymen’s inclination to work at traditional, big corporations meant the startup life wasn’t an attractive one for many.For context: Per a recent IMF report that cites CB Insights data, as of October 2023, the U.S. had about 661 unicorns, China counted 172, and the U.K. had 52. Japan had a mere seven unicorns. (PitchBook pegs the number of Japanese startups at nine, so it’s possible we have more unicorns in the market than these datasets suggest.)But things are looking up — somewhat