CARD

Avoiding unnecessary pitches and designing long-term partnerships built on trust. A service created for advertiser procurement and marketing departments -- the first of its kind in Japan.

"Invite three agencies.
Compare proposals. Decide."

This is how most Japanese advertisers select an agency. The ritualized pitch -- a procurement ritual that has gone essentially unchanged for half a century.

But ask yourself: does it actually produce the best partner?

Are you judging by the polish of a presentation deck? Ranking agencies by the theater of their pitch? And three months later, after the contract has begun, have you heard the refrain -- "this isn't what we expected," "no one remembers the original proposal," "they're doing the same thing the last agency did"?

On the agency side, the burden of unpaid proposals quietly but steadily drains their capacity. Time that could have been spent on the client's actual business disappears into pitch preparation for a contest they may not win. The effort of the two losing agencies vanishes entirely.

This is a loss for advertisers, for agencies, and for the market as a whole.

The ritualized pitch
serves no one.

In the West, this category
already exists.

ID Comms in the UK. TrinityP3 in Australia. Roth Observatory International in the US. Aprais in the UK. These independent specialist firms partner with the procurement and marketing departments of global advertisers to provide agency selection, pitch management, fee structure design, relationship health assessments, and contract optimization.

Many of the world's leading advertisers -- P&G, Unilever, Coca-Cola -- engage these third-party advisors to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing investments that run into the hundreds of millions. For these organizations, the agency relationship is recognized as a management asset.

In Japan, this category essentially does not exist.

The reasons are several. Japanese procurement departments have refined methods for sourcing raw materials and equipment, but the procurement of intangible creative services poses unique difficulties. Long-standing agency relationships rest on personal trust, and there is a fear that trying to structure them might destroy them. And above all, there are almost no third parties in Japan who truly know the inside of an agency.

The result: most Japanese advertisers make annual marketing investment decisions worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars using limited information and inherited convention, with no access to the methodologies the rest of the world has developed.

Experience from both sides.
Objectivity from the outside.

I, Hiroaki Mori, spent 33 years working inside the advertising industry -- from joining Hakuhodo in 1990 to going independent in 2023. At Hakuhodo I worked across account management, marketing, brand consulting, and global project direction. After a posting at TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles, I served as COO of TBWA\Hakuhodo\China in Guangzhou, working directly with local advertisers and teams. Upon returning to Japan, I spent my final five years and nine months as Representative Director and CEO of McCann Erickson Tokyo, connecting global advertisers with Japanese teams.

Over those 33 years, I came to understand how agencies operate, where they break down, and what conditions produce their best work -- observed from inside three different markets: Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Guangzhou. At the same time, through global networks, I closely watched the relationship-management methodologies that Western advertisers and agencies have developed.

Now, as an independent, I stand on the outside. Neutral. Affiliated with no advertiser and no agency.

Experience from both sides and an objective position -- this combination is rare in Japan. It is the reason Three Plus Six LLC claims the role of specialist firm for the redesign of advertiser-agency relationships in the Japanese market.

Someone who knows the inside in depth --
designing relationships from outside.

Who this service is for.

CARD is for any advertiser with one or more of these concerns:

You use agencies but lack the information to judge whether you have the right partner.

You have a culture of competitive pitching but question its cost and effectiveness.

You work with multiple agencies but struggle to manage scope and fee coherence across them.

You want to find a new agency but see no reason to mount a full-scale pitch.

You sense latent friction in an agency relationship but have no one internally equipped to intervene.

Industry and scale do not matter. From listed companies with annual marketing budgets exceeding one billion yen to startups preparing their first agency engagement -- we design the right form of involvement for each stage.

Start with a 90-minute
initial hearing.

CARD begins with a 90-minute initial hearing. This session is complimentary.

We will ask about your current agency relationships: the challenges you perceive, your pitch history, the number and roles of your agencies, and the broad outline of your fee structure. In return, I will offer a candid assessment of where your situation stands against Western benchmarks and where the most effective starting point might be.

From there, as needed, we design the optimal combination of modules and propose an engagement of three to twelve months.

All hearing content is handled under confidentiality. Even if you choose not to proceed, the insights gained during the session remain yours to keep.