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SmartNews

AI-powered news aggregation and curation app

Account Executive (Strategic Domain Sales)

Account ManagementConfirmed live in the last 24 hours
Full-timeTokyo, JapanNo salary listed

About the Job

Requirements

  • At least 3 years of digital advertising sales experience.
  • At least 3 years of account sales experience directing advertising operations.
  • Knowledge of the Japanese digital advertising industry.
  • Ability to independently plan and take action to achieve team targets, with ownership.
  • Strong commitment to results.
  • Logical thinking, problem-solving, and impact-oriented thinking.
  • Ability to independently consider and execute sales activities while accounting for internal and external factors.
  • Ability to prioritize impact and develop a medium-term roadmap.
  • Deep understanding of advertising agency businesses and the perspectives of the different transaction flows in digital advertising.
  • Ability to form hypotheses and assess situations from multiple perspectives.
  • Ability to flexibly use AI tools to optimize work efficiency.
  • Ability to work in the Tokyo office at least three days per week.
  • Ability to adapt through unlearning in a startup environment that is not yet mature.
  • Native-level Japanese.
  • Strong communication, energy, and motivation.

Responsibilities

  • Drive revenue growth by maximizing the advertising effectiveness of SmartNews Ads.
  • Propose and support execution of advertising-operation optimizations for advertisers and advertising agencies.
  • Analyze delivery data to identify improvement opportunities for advertising-operation optimization.
  • Support agencies in adopting advertising products.
  • Make proposals to operational contacts at advertisers and advertising agencies.
  • Build relationships with clients, agencies, and business leaders.
  • Build long-term relationships with executive-level decision-makers, including CMOs and department heads, and make proposals to them.
  • Create and conduct proposal opportunities with operational contacts.
  • Understand customer needs and identify fundamental challenges at advertisers and agencies, securing new opportunities and expanding existing accounts.
  • Develop proposals based on current challenges, including proposals to activate untapped opportunities and dormant accounts.
  • Propose and agree on commercial terms, including incentive deals.
  • Develop sales strategies and analyze data using AI and internal tools; use the tools to improve efficiency while personally driving sales activities that cannot be replaced by AI.
  • Use AI tools to streamline analysis while developing logical, substantive solutions aligned with customers’ business environments rather than relying only on numerical data.
  • Derive insights for deeper analysis of target audiences and the development of messaging based on data such as article-viewing data.
  • Break down available data from multiple perspectives.
  • Run data-driven PDCA cycles and present growth strategies.
  • Propose KPI designs that maximize advertising effectiveness and align measurement methods and KPIs with client challenges.
  • Propose planning and advertising-operation policies aligned with KPIs.
  • Develop proposals that drive revenue growth by deeply examining client challenges and designing new KPIs.
  • Win additional budgets based on improved advertising performance and capture budget share from other media within existing digital marketing budgets.
  • Secure additional budget by proposing increases to digital marketing budgets.
  • Maintain deal volume by improving churn rates.

Desired Qualifications

  • At least 3 years of sales experience at a digital-only agency or digital advertising publisher.
  • At least 3 years of sales experience with Google Ads, Meta, LINE, or Yahoo.
  • Experience in advertising operations.
  • Sales experience with SmartNews Ads or display advertising.
  • Organizational management experience.
  • People-management experience.
  • Experience building dashboards with data visualization tools such as Looker Studio, Tableau, or Redash.
  • Practical experience extracting and aggregating data with SQL.
  • Experience improving business processes using generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.

About the Company

SmartNews

AI-powered news aggregation and curation app

SmartNews operates a news aggregation app that pulls stories from a network of over 3,000 publishers. The app uses machine learning to analyze millions of articles, social signals, and user interactions to select trending and relevant news, with features like SmartView and offline reading. It earns mainly from ads and publisher revenue-sharing, and offers SmartNews+ for premium content, plus SmartView First licensing for publishers. The goal is to provide a broad, newspaper-like reading experience that helps users discover trustworthy news and reduce information overload while sustaining its business through ads and partnerships.

Company size
201-500
Company stage
Debt Financing
Total funding
$486.5M
Headquarters
Tokyo, Japan
Founded
2012

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