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Demonstrating the New Hakuhodo’s Value with Sei-katsu-sha Value Design

Happy New Year.

Finding ourselves amid great change has become almost the norm in recent years. For Japan, 2025 was a year in which we felt the powerful energy of tides of change, including a major political realignment, the Nikkei Stock Average reaching the 50,000-yen level, the vibrancy of Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai and inbound tourism, and remarkable achievements by Japanese athletes in the world of sports. These active shifts in society have been closely intertwined with rapid advancements in technology, including in generative AI. In the advertising industry, surging waves of competition intensification and transformation have meant that we, too, must transform and grow in response to a changing environment.

In April last year, Hakuhodo and Hakuhodo DY Media Partners integrated and embarked on a fresh journey as the “new Hakuhodo.” The primary objective of the integration is to respond to organizations’ increasingly complex and multilayered challenges—especially business-related challenges—with proposals that provide solutions. Communications with sei-katsu-sha (our term for the holistic person) now go beyond conventional advertising and media, shifting toward interactions through various interfaces that permeate everyday life. It was with these changes in mind that we rebuilt our structure to integrate marketing data, media data and other data obtained from various touchpoints and support full-funnel marketing.

Hakuhodo positions itself as a Sei-katsu-sha Value Design Company, with a vision to design value and happiness that do not yet exist in the world. Our mission is to leverage our creativity to provide completely novel sei-katsu-sha experiences that deliver new surprises, excitement, and happiness through vast sei-katsu-sha interfaces. We are confident that this will lead directly to solving clients’ challenges and driving our business growth.

To realize this vision, we will mobilize all the resources of the new Hakuhodo. Beyond advertising communications, various actions are already underway, including brand-centered management support services, development and implementation of customer touchpoints, and innovation-based projects in collaboration with various partners from industry, government and academia. As for AI, we advocate AI-Powered Creativity, which is grounded on the idea that beyond automation and increasing efficiency, AI expands human capabilities and creativity. Accordingly, we aim to leverage it to further evolve our sei-katsu-sha insight.

Collaborating with many partners, we will continue to provide new value at every touchpoint with sei-katsu-sha and in sei-katsu-sha’s every moment, working beyond the framework of an advertising company.

Our goals will be achieved with the contribution of each employee. Hakuhodo is a company whose greatest asset is its people. We are a collective of eclectically talented people. To ignite the hidden inner aspirations of each employee and allow them to carve out one-of-a-kind careers as they challenge never-done-before work alongside their colleagues, we offer support through various company systems. In this way, we are working to achieve fulfilling and prosperous growth in which the growth of our employees overlaps with that of the company.

Together with all our stakeholders, we will demonstrate our value as the new Hakuhodo as we work to make 2026 a fruitful year.

I look forward to your continued support this year as well.

Kenji Nagura
Representative Director & President
Hakuhodo Inc.