Rakuten Kobo Automation Case Study:
Global Marketing Campaign Automation Across 24 global Regions
Rakuten Kobo is a global digital eBook and audiobook retailer operating across 24+ regions worldwide, including regions defined by different geographics and languages. The company runs recurring monthly marketing campaigns to promote Kobo digital gift cards, requiring coordination between multiple teams and regions.
As campaign complexity increased, the operational workload became unsustainable without adding headcount—a constraint that prompted a shift toward automation and process optimization.
The Challenge
Rakuten Kobo’s monthly campaign execution relied on a highly manual workflow:
A large shared Excel document used as a central coordination system, not a traditional spreadsheet
Manual creation of 40–80 ClickUp subtasks per campaign, each with extensive custom fields
Coordination across seven cross-functional teams, from ideation through launch
Repeating campaign structure with changing regions, dates, and languages
Increased risk of human error, delays, and misalignment
No budget approval for additional campaign management headcount
The process worked — but it required a full-time role to maintain.
The Approach
Over the course of an eight-week optimization push, The Juice Internet Marketing overhauled the campaign workflow, using automation, systems integration, and AI-assisted content creation, all in a pretty big way.
Centralized Campaign Input
Their process already used Excel for a “planning sheet,” which, once complete, would be manually referenced when creating the individual ClickUp tasks and the shared working Brief Excel document. Using this as a process starting point, we
Automated Task Creation in ClickUp
With the help of some Zapier magic, we now get complete ClickUp task hierarchies for each campaign, auto-generated for us, which includes:
40-80 subtasks per campaign—that's a whole lot of tasks to go through
predefined owners, dependencies, and deadlines—so everyone's on the same page
custom fields are also auto-populated, which saves us a bunch of time each month
This pretty much eliminates all the tedium of setting up all these tasks every month.
Scalable Localization with AI at the Forefront
An LLM-assisted workflow was created to generate campaign messaging that's tailored to each market and takes into account things like:
the local language and cultural context\
any regional events that might be happening around the time of the campaign
This has really speeded up the localization process without sacrificing consistency across all the markets.
Streamlined Proofing and Review
We overhauled the content review and proofing process for designers and regional stakeholders to make it faster and more accurate—especially when it comes to multi-language approvals