Having reached the benchmark of 49 million registered users and 3.66 million locations available for use nationwide, PayPay is a breath of fresh-and-cashless air in Japan, offering a comfortable and fun payment experience to its users and merchants who use the service multiple times every day.
Read on to find out about the Vanguard of marketing at PayPay – the team of diligent marketers driving campaigns and marketing strategies critical to this achievement. In the hope of climbing to further heights, they continue to push forward at greater speed and vigor as we speak. In this issue we will sit down with Yui Sugiyama from the Owned Media Planning Department.
Yui Sugiyama
Senior Manager of the Owned Media Planning Department.
After graduating from university, she joined a publishing and production company where she worked as an editor for magazines and publications for seven years. After this, she spent two years working as a director in the web industry, after which she began her career as a marketer in internet banking. She gained a wealth of experience in this role, ranging from mass promotion campaigns to CRM, UIUX improvements, service development, and start-ups before finally joining PayPay in August 2020. At PayPay, she worked as a dedicated CRM lead up until she was appointed Senior Manager of the Owned Media Planning Department in April 2022.
Tell us about the Owned Media Planning Department!
As you may have guessed from the name, this department is responsible for planning and the overall operation of promotions that leverage PayPay’s proprietary media.
The Owned Media Planning Department consists of two teams: a team that oversees PayPay websites that are used to provide information on our services and campaigns and another team that is responsible for running promotional campaigns via in-app banners, push notifications, emails, and SNS messages; essentially we are in charge of the planning and the design right from the link source where the user will click all the way through to the target webpage where they will be redirected.
Until the previous fiscal year, the team responsible for the website, in-app banners, SNS messaging, and push notifications and emails were working under a separate department, but from this fiscal year onwards this team and ours have combined to form a brand-new department so that we can work together both more effectively and efficiently.
Amid our ever-expanding user base, I felt that this organizational change well reflects both PayPay’s marketing policy of generating business through user-targeted owned promotional campaigns as well as PayPay’s culture of continuously fostering change.
So tell me about the highs and lows of working in the Owned Media Planning Department?
As the department was brand new, everything had to be created from scratch, which was no easy feat. Our arrival at this point was achieved through numerous discussions as a team on how to divide roles and what rules we should apply, in addition to adopting a process of trial and error to try and find a way in which departments working entirely independently of one another could join forces as a single team and deliver results. Finally, we are starting to see the fruits of our labor.
And as so many services are released in parallel with promotional campaigns, another challenge is getting up to speed on these details so that we can organize an action plan tailored to the characteristics of the specific media being used as well as coming up with various communication scenarios at a moment’s notice.
However, in both cases, being a new department gives us the opportunity to try out new initiatives, and since we are in a position of neutrality and are not affiliated with a particular campaign or service, we can communicate more effectively with our audience from a user’s perspective.
Tell us about the culture of the department.
At first glance, many of our members appear quite reserved. But looks can be deceiving!
First and foremost, the nature of our work requires us to understand requests from the Planning Department as well as the objectives of senior management, so we must approach any proposal with an open mind. But we also must consider them from a user’s perspective; if we think that something is not effective or that there is a better way of approaching the project considering the type of media used or its relationship with another project, then we need to make sure our stance is clear and work tenaciously to make sure any necessary changes are made. Personality-wise everyone is resolute yet composed, and this team maintains a very harmonious working atmosphere.
I heard PayPay is actively hiring? Give us your thoughts on the recruitment process and what you look out for in particular.
As part of the recruitment process, you’ll be asked about your career history, experience, and what you want to achieve at PayPay. While a lot depends on your compatibility with PayPay, I believe the rest is ultimately up to fate. I really value the importance of welcoming the right person at the right time to our team. I am genuinely impressed with all the candidates that apply to work here, and as I am met with new applications and new faces at interviews, I am always hoping to find that candidate who will be the missing piece of our team puzzle.
Do you have a message for potential new joiners?
Only a few years have passed since PayPay’s inception, and our department also has yet to see its six-month anniversary, so it’s the type of environment where you have lots of chances to create something from scratch. Each of our members’ ideas and personalities will directly influence how our owned promotion brand evolves in the future, so we look forward to welcoming new members who can be good team players whilst thriving in the challenges and expectations of the job. We look forward to hearing from you!
We’re hiring for the following positions!
*The recruitment status is current at the time of the interview.
Special Thanks：Yui Sugiyama / Planning：Sura Kim / Editing：PayPay Inside-Out Editorial Team
*Employees’ affiliations are as of the time of the interview.
