Rethinking the fixation on ad efficiency: creative diversity and the Team X rebuild (2023)

The paradox of efficiency undermining efficiency

The core of this turnaround does not fit inside the phrase “V-shaped recovery.” It lies in the fact that an organization that had layered optimization upon a single metric — efficiency — had lost the power to generate anything new. As Kinoshita himself put it, looking back, the company “had become unable to create something from zero”: repeating the winning pattern raised short-term efficiency while thinning out the long-term work of opening new ground. The starting point of the rebuild appears to lie in that paradox, where the pursuit of efficiency damages efficiency.

Even so, a thirteen-fold figure in one year also carries the character of a rebound from a prior year in which operating profit had fallen to ¥510 million. What supported the recovery was not only the replacement of advertising methods but the patient reconstruction of the organization — resetting KPIs, basic education, building a shared language — and that took a corresponding amount of time. Loosening an organization stiffened by pursuing efficiency to its limit, so that it can move again: the totality of that effort is what sat beneath the return of the numbers.