日本語 
Marc, can you tell us about your professional background and your current role at UltraSuperNew K.K.?
I studied law at Leiden University, specialized in Media Law. After I got my LLM, I worked briefly in finance and found out fast that the financial world wasn’t for me. I moved into the creative industry and never looked back. In 2007 I co-founded UltraSuperNew in Tokyo, and today it’s grown into an independent creative agency with 75+ people across Tokyo, Singapore, Amsterdam and Colombo. My role now is setting strategic direction and building the leadership team….but I still want to be hands on with creative work because if I’m not, I get grumpy.
What led you to co-found UltraSuperNew in Tokyo in 2007, and what was the gap you saw in Japan’s creative and digital advertising market at the time?
Japan in 2007 had incredible creative talent but the industry was still very traditional, TV and print-led, hierarchical, slow to adapt to digital…and fully dominated by only 2 agencies. I saw a gap for an independent creative agency that combined global creative standards with a genuine digital first mindset, run by people who understood Japan from the inside rather than parachuting in with a Western playbook. Tomo Murakami (ex Hakuhodo, Ogilvy and BBH) and I started UltraSuperNew in Harajuku (the birthplace of many brands and youth culture) with that in mind. .
UltraSuperNew was founded with a strong digital first mindset and has grown into an independent creative agency operating across Tokyo, Singapore, Colombo, and Amsterdam. How has your vision for the agency evolved over the past 19 years, and what has remained unchanged?
An agency name like UltraSuperNew only means something if you keep evolving and right now that means being fully in the AI age. We have two dedicated AI specialists on the team, one covering US platforms, one covering Chinese platforms. AI gives us speed and scale, but I can’t say this enough: creative and strategic thinking is the core of our business, not the AI itself. That’s only going to matter more. As AI takes over the mechanical parts of the work, taste, feeling and a real sense of what’s actually good become the thing that separates the people who matter in this industry from the ones who don’t.
That drive to keep pushing forward goes back to the very start. Early in my career, someone I worked with made an offhand comment that the creative level in Japan and Asia wasn’t very high. Champions League versus lower league, more or less. That line became the engine behind everything I’ve built since. Not out of spite, out of a stubborn need to prove it wrong.
I didn’t just want a good agency in Japan, I wanted to help move the whole region up a league. That’s part of why we set up The KURA, our creative space in Shibuya, to grow talent that can compete anywhere. Look at where things have gone since. Korea is a cultural export machine. Japan is one of the most culturally influential countries on the planet. China, India, Indonesia are producing work that would’ve been unthinkable to dismiss twenty years ago. Asia isn’t catching up anymore, it’s setting the pace, and this will be the continent that defines the coming century.
Japan has a unique consumer culture, with strong local preferences and a deep connection to subcultures. From your experience, what do global brands most often misunderstand when trying to connect with Japanese consumers?
Take off your Western glasses and actually look at Japan. And never pretend you fully understand Japanese culture if you’re not Japanese, you’ll only make a fool of yourself. Even with close to 25 years here, I’d never claim I fully understand it and staying humble about that is the point. The biggest mistake brands make is treating Japan as one homogenous market you can crack with a single campaign idea. Consumers here are segmented by subculture and trust is earned slowly, not through a big splashy launch. Find the insight that genuinely connects to your target audience. If you don’t, you’ll waste your money and your message will just become noise. Our Red Bull work is a good example of doing it right. That relationship started in 2008 and has grown into one of Red Bull’s biggest markets globally, but it took years of consistent, culturally grounded work.
AI is rapidly changing how creative agencies approach strategy, content, production, and campaign development. How is UltraSuperNew integrating AI into its creative process, and where do you believe human creativity will remain irreplaceable?
We won the Anthropic Japan pitch in 2025, which puts us right at the center of this shift, and we have two dedicated AI specialists on the team, one American and one Chinese, covering the platforms on each side. AI gives us speed and scale. It helps at every stage, research, strategy, production, testing ideas faster and cutting the grunt work out. What it can’t do is judgment: knowing which idea is actually worth pursuing, reading a cultural moment correctly, making the emotional leap that turns a concept into something people remember. Creative and strategic thinking is our core and AI is just the accelerator, not the driver.
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There is growing discussion around AI-generated content making advertising more efficient but potentially more repetitive. As someone who has built an agency around unconventional and culturally driven ideas, how can brands use AI without losing originality?
AI is a super intern, that’s it. Used badly, it just makes noise. There’s a great example that is relevant to this: apparently when you live next to a church, after a while you stop hearing the bells. Plain vanilla content works the same way. People stop noticing it, so all you’re creating is noise, or nothing at all. That’s actually why I think AI is a blessing for our industry. It raises the bar, because now more than ever you need humans in the loop to make things human, with taste and feeling. Use AI to remove friction, not to think for you. If your brief is generic, AI will just produce generic plain vanilla content faster.
Independent agencies often position their ability to move faster and take greater creative risks as a competitive advantage. After nearly two decades of building UltraSuperNew, where do you believe independence gives an agency the biggest advantage over large global networks?
AI gives us scale and speed, which means you don’t need an army of people anymore, you need good people. That plays directly to independence. We can make a decision in a meeting instead of routing it through three layers of a holding company and every piece of work carries our name directly, so we’re deeply invested in it actually working. The network agencies are in real trouble, and honestly, years of underdelivering and mistreating clients caught up with them. Who wants to work for a company that lays off thousands of people right before Christmas. It’s time for this industry to be positive and real again, and I think the reset happening right now is a good thing. That’s also part of why we’ve been named Campaign Asia Pacific’s Independent Creative Agency of the Year multiple times.
UltraSuperNew has also built creative communities through its gallery and cultural initiatives. Why do you believe agencies need to engage with artists, creators, and wider cultural communities beyond traditional client work?
Because that’s where culture actually gets made, not in a boardroom. It’s our responsibility as an agency to keep a finger on the pulse of the creative scene in a city, the makers and creators working in art, spoken word, music and fashion. Tokyo is constantly shifting, with subcultures rising and fading all the time, and if you’re not close to that you’re interpreting culture secondhand. Our space/creative hub in Shibuya, The KURA, exists to give artists and creators a place to work and show what they’re doing and it keeps our own team plugged into what’s actually happening on the ground.
Japanese brands are increasingly looking beyond Japan and trying to establish themselves globally. What advice would you give Japanese companies that want to take their brands and creative ideas to international markets, particularly across Asia and the West?
Stop operating like it’s the 1980s and move into 2026. Stop assuming the big Japanese agencies have the answer and focus on media and communication that’s actually relevant to your audience. You don’t need celebrity endorsed marketing for everything, why does every brand need Shohei Ohtani? Stop thinking of marketing as sales and start building an actual brand. Look at what UltraSuperNew is doing for TDK under a genuinely visionary CEO in Saito san, or Mizuno, Suntory, Kewpie Mayonnaise, Uniqlo. Japan has so much to offer the world and is remarkably bad at promoting itself. Uniqlo’s founder Yanai san said something similar himself in his Time Magazine cover story a few years back. Don’t just translate a Japanese idea, localize the thinking behind it and bring in partners who understand both markets well enough to push back on your assumptions.
Looking ahead to the next three to five years, what major changes do you expect in advertising, digital experiences, and creative technology, and what should business and marketing leaders be doing today to prepare for them?
AI will keep compressing production timelines and costs, which pushes the real competitive edge even further toward strategy and original thinking, the things that are hard to automate. I also expect more brands investing directly in cultural spaces and communities instead of just paid media, because trust is getting harder to buy and easier to earn. The shakeout happening in our industry right now is a good thing. The people and agencies with real craft will be the ones left standing and I think we’re heading into a genuine renaissance where passion and craftsmanship get rewarded again. My advice to leaders: invest in your team now, not just tools. The ones treating AI as a shortcut for thinking will fall behind the ones using it to think faster and better.
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