The advertising industry is largely automated. Algorithms handle customer targeting, and systems handle budget allocation and ad execution. However, the core of advertising—the creative—remains a human domain. Jeong Beom-jin, CEO of Pion Corporation, calls this point "the final bottleneck in the adtech industry."
Producing 1 million advertising materials annually… Targeting the global market with an AI marketing platform.
"Targets were segmented into hundreds or thousands, but messages were limited to a few. 'Personalization' was technically possible, but it wasn't implemented in practice. Furthermore, while 'segments' increased, we couldn't create content that suited them. Ultimately, advertising performance was limited by the limitations of the materials." To solve this problem, CEO Jeong founded Pion Corporation in 2019.
CEO Jeong began his career at Caully, a domestic mobile advertising network. Overseeing both domestic and international operations, he experienced firsthand how data-driven advertising automation was transforming the industry. Working with Jeon Chan-seok, then CTO and founding member of Caully, he led the company to a KOSDAQ listing. The two are now co-CEOs of Pion Corporation. Throughout this process, CEO Jeong posed a single question: "Why wasn't advertising creative the only area automated?"
Advertising content created with a single URL
The first service launched by Pion Corporation is "VCAT," an AI-powered automated advertising creative production platform. Upon entering a product URL, the service automatically analyzes information like product images, prices, and descriptions to generate banners, videos, and ad copy. Through this platform, VCAT currently automatically produces over one million advertising creatives annually.
Over the past four years, the service has served over 100,000 brands. It is used to create marketing content for major companies such as Hyundai Motor Company, Naver Shopping, Gmarket, SSG, and Lotte.
CEO Jeong said, “Currently, over 30,000 product thumbnails are automatically generated through Vcat on Gmarket every month,” and explained, “In the process, Pion Corporation has accumulated tens of millions of pieces of content creation and advertising performance data.”
In the era of generative AI, what matters most is "operation."
The advent of generative AI has made content creation significantly easier. Anyone can now create banners and videos in seconds. However, what companies truly value is not "speed of creation," but "stability in management and operation." These include ensuring adherence to brand guidelines, compliance with banned words and regulations, and maintaining a consistent tone and manner across global campaigns. This means that the more important issue is whether AI can control these elements within corporate standards.
CEO Jeong explains it this way: "Uncontrolled AI is nothing more than an experimental tool. Only when it operates reliably within a corporate system can it truly become a real marketing infrastructure."
To address this issue, Pion Corporation launched Creagen, an AI marketing operations platform. While Vcat focused on automating content creation, Creagen integrates AI into a company's marketing operations system. It structures data based on product URLs, automatically applies templates that conform to brand guidelines, and is designed to integrate with a company's internal approval system, from reviewing prohibited words and regulatory standards to collecting performance data on generated content.
CEO Jeong explained, “The goal is for AI to become not just a simple production tool, but a marketing infrastructure that operates within a company’s internal systems.”
Verification in the Japanese market
Pion Corporation is expanding its business into the Japanese market, known for its strict brand standards and quality control. In this environment, Pion Corporation is collaborating with major e-commerce platforms like Rakuten and Qoo10, and is also being used to create marketing content for Mitsubishi Motors. CEO Jeong states, "Our experience in the Japanese market is crucial."
"The fact that our AI marketing platform has been adopted and adapted in the demanding Japanese corporate environment with its stringent quality standards demonstrates that it can also be used globally."
Pion Corporation plans to further enhance its AI marketing capabilities, including automatically adjusting messaging strategies based on future performance data, multilingual optimization that learns tone and mannerisms across countries and languages, and direct integration with internal corporate approval systems. CEO Jeong summarized the essence of AI marketing competitiveness as follows:
"AI has become sufficiently intelligent. What matters is not 'how much it can produce,' but 'how reliably it operates within the company's standards.'"
Building on its proven track record in the Korean and Japanese markets, Pion Corporation aims to expand into Southeast Asia and North America, establishing a global standard for AI-based marketing operations platforms.
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