【Marbull X Corporation】Revitalizing Local Communities by Unearthing Niche "Buried Content" Through NFT & Gamification

Unearthing Buried Content by a Team of Strategy & Creative Experts from Accenture

Hello everyone. I am Shotaro Ogawa, CEO of Marbull X Corporation. It is a pleasure to be here today.

Our company was founded in May last year and is currently in its second term, based in Tokyo. One of the unique characteristics of our founding team is that all three of us were colleagues at Accenture, a global consulting firm.

During our time at Accenture, we belonged to the strategy team, where we mainly worked on new business development and medium-term corporate strategy planning for large corporations. Within our current team, I handle overall business strategy, another member specializes in creative fields such as design and product management, and our CTO manages the engineering aspect. With this strong combination of strategy, creative design, and engineering, we are driving our business forward dynamically.

The area we are targeting is maximizing the value of "buried content" or "latent content."

What is "buried content"? We define it as valuable data or content owned by companies, regions, and local governments that, although highly valuable to the right audience, has been left unused, sleeping in PCs or storage rooms. Our mission is to excavate, refine, and transform these assets into high-value services for end-users.

Let me give you some concrete examples of what buried content looks like.

Let’s look at a local railway company. They often have archives of historic photos of train stations dating back to the black-and-white era, or rare train vehicle images. While they might have countless photos, details like maintenance scenes or destination signboards (headmarks/direction rolls) are completely uninteresting to the general public. However, to enthusiastic railway fans, these are absolute treasures they would die to see.

In the context of local communities and municipalities, examples include historical archives of traditional sake breweries or wineries, records of local sports teams, and photos of historic festivals or firework displays.

The key point we emphasize is: "The content does not need to appeal to 80% or even half of the general public." On the contrary, we believe that niche areas, where only a select group of people show interest, are precisely where deep affection and high engagement reside, holding the greatest potential.

Even in private enterprises, there is latent value waiting to be refined everywhere—such as original drawings of old mascot characters or past cover designs of magazines.

One-Stop Offering of Gacha, Quizzes, and Digital Maps Quick Launch via LINE Mini Apps

We provide a one-stop system for companies and municipalities to unearth these latent assets and boost their appeal.

To spark fan engagement, we offer modular gamification features, including:

1. NFT Collection: Converting rare digital images into NFTs, allowing users to collect and own them.
2. Gacha (Random Distribution): Making the collecting experience fun and game-like.
3. Quizzes & Certification: Satisfying fans' intellectual curiosity and desire to prove their deep knowledge of the content.
4. GPS-Linked Digital Maps: Connecting physical movements with digital collections, offering rewards when users visit specific real-world locations.

By providing these packaged modules, companies and local governments can quickly launch their own fan engagement services at low cost, typically via LINE Mini Apps.

However, there is an important caveat: simply introducing a tool does not solve everything.

Fundamentally, success depends on excellent planning (concept design) that excites fans, as well as continuously launching new campaigns. However, most companies and local governments do not have professional planners in-house who can design such fan-centric campaigns.

Therefore, we do not stop at being just a SaaS tool provider. Utilizing our expertise as former Accenture consultants, we offer a one-stop co-creation model—assisting clients from initial concept design to creative production and post-launch operations.

Frequency Up via Oigawa Railway's "Daitetsu Gacha" and Plugging the Leaky Bathtub

Let me share a concrete case study.

We partnered with Oigawa Railway in Shizuoka Prefecture, a local railway company. We launched a LINE Mini App for them and released "Daitetsu Gacha Collection," an NFT-based digital collection of their rare vehicle photos.

To spin the gacha, users must physically visit stations and sightseeing spots along the railway line to "check in." Checking in rewards them with in-app points (miles), which they can use to play the gacha and collect rare train images, such as historic steam locomotives (SL).

This system successfully changed user behavior. Fans who used to visit Oigawa Railway only once every six months started visiting monthly to complete their collections, and they began exploring different stations to gather check-in points. It is a prime example of unearthing latent content to maximize real-world fan engagement.

In other cases, we helped JTB Publishing build a fan club where past magazine cover designs were turned into digital cards for gacha. This helped JTB gather demographic and survey data, deepening their customer understanding.

We have also built digital stamp rallies for Kakegawa City and light-touch fan clubs for local sports teams.

We are confident that this model is highly effective for regional revitalization. While presenting a comprehensive tourist brochure rarely grabs the attention of the general public, refining a single niche content asset with enthusiastic fans can powerfully draw people to the region.

The core value we bring to regional revitalization is "user retention (stocking)."

Currently, many local governments host stamp rallies or events that attract thousands of participants. However, once the event ends, contact with the users is completely lost. When the next event is held a year later, they have to run ads to acquire users from scratch.

A local government official once told us, "It feels like we are pouring water into a bathtub without a plug."

Our solution acts as that "bathtub plug." We register and stock acquired users in the LINE Mini App and maintain their excitement through continuous gamification (gacha, quizzes), leading to repeat visits and sustained active rates.

B2B Co-Creation Consulting Model Over Pure SaaS Sales

Our monetization model has two main pillars: B2B and B2C (transaction fees).

Currently, the majority of our revenue comes from B2B system usage fees and consulting fees (co-creation support) for planning and creative production.

Of course, we also have a B2C model where we take transaction fees when users purchase digital collections in the app. However, transaction fees require massive user scale to generate significant volume. Therefore, we currently bundle system usage with consulting to secure solid deal sizes, ensuring a higher success rate for both our clients and our business.

We launched our fan engagement solution commercially in December last year, and we already have 5 to 6 active commercial contracts with companies and municipalities.

We are now entering the expansion phase, looking to collaborate with more content holders and local governments. We look forward to hearing from you regarding business collaborations, events, and partnerships. Thank you very much for your time today.

Q&A and Feedback

Commentator (Mr. Fukutani): Thank you, Mr. Ogawa, for the wonderful presentation. Unearthing buried content, visualizing fans' enthusiasm, and connecting it to regional revitalization is a highly valuable business with great potential.

It feels very similar to a "digital trading card (Trekka)" experience. Is that understanding correct?

Mr. Ogawa: Yes, you are absolutely correct. From the user's perspective, the experience is very close to collecting and enjoying physical trading cards, like Pokémon cards.

Mr. Fukutani: Thank you. Since the trading card market is expanding rapidly, should we view this as a service specialized for "tourism" and "regional revitalization"?

Mr. Ogawa: We are still exploring whether to specialize solely in tourism. However, the core function is to make digital image content fun to collect like trading cards, so your interpretation is correct.

Mr. Fukutani: Understood. Whether you specialize in tourism or expand to wider genres like entertainment will change your future strategy significantly. I look forward to seeing how it unfolds.

By the way, how do fans of these niche contents (like railway enthusiasts) discover this service in the first place? How do you acquire users?

Mr. Ogawa: We rely on our clients' existing channels for initial user acquisition.

In the case of Oigawa Railway, they used their official SNS channels, posters inside stations and trains, and announcements during events to reach their existing fanbase.

Mr. Fukutani: So you have the partners engage the core fans first.

Mr. Ogawa: Yes. Our main value lies in "what happens after they join."

Unlike traditional stamp rallies that face the "one-time event problem," we pool and retain users on the LINE Mini App. By keeping them engaged with monthly updates, new gacha, and collections, we maintain a high active rate.

Mr. Fukutani: I see. It’s about putting a plug in the bathtub to keep the warmth of the fans' enthusiasm from escaping.

Is the system designed so that content providers (railway companies or local governments) can easily upload and update content themselves?

Mr. Ogawa: Yes. For the simplest and most cost-effective operation, clients can design the campaigns, input the data into a template, and we upload it mechanically.

However, to maximize success, we recommend our co-creation consulting option where we support them from concept design to production. This also helps us increase our B2B average deal size.

Mr. Fukutani: So instead of just handing over the tool, you bundle it with consulting support—leveraging your Accenture background—to ensure both customer success and solid business metrics.

It is impressive that you already have 5 to 6 contracts since launching in December. I look forward to your future expansion. Thank you very much.

Mr. Ogawa: Thank you very much.