Sohee Han, Head of Global Media Partnership, “Dable’s objective aligns with what the media pursues”.

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Jan 15, 2021

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Sohee is the Head of Global Media Partnership at Dable. She is responsible for global media partnerships and managing Dable content recommendation solution products. Prior to joining Dable, Sohee has worked at Hankooki.com, an online service platform affiliated with Hankook Ilbo (one of Korea’s big media groups), for 13 years. She has a wide range of experience as an editor, advertiser, service planner, and content manager.

Please tell us about yourself

My internship at hankooki.com — the online platform of Hankook Ilbo — in my senior year of college led me to start working as an editorial reporter. Since then, I have been in charge of various tasks like editing articles, online advertising, service planning, and content partnership for over 10 years at that company. Although I have worked at one company for a long time, I am very fortunate to have gained extensive experience in a variety of fields. Personally, I was interested in programming languages enough to study CSS, HTML, Java script and a lot of my family and friends were working as developers. Motivated by the people around me I was able to build various careers.

Even though my job was stable and promising, I came across a growing mannerism. Rather, my desire to work passionately with a sense of accomplishment had accumulated. In the meantime, I received a job offer from Dable — a startup that was just over a year old since its founding. I decided to join them to free myself from repetitive work. Now I am responsible for global media partnerships and manage content recommendation solution products at Dable, achieving my desire of working with a passion.

What brings you to Dable?

In general, people who work for media companies often interact with people in other media. It is also a characteristic of the industry; media company employees tend to actively share information with others and this is how I first got to know Dable.

I encountered Dable as a counter partner in the past. At the time, I was in charge of renewing the media’s website. While revamping the site, I was searching for ways to achieve better results comparing the performance of the website before the revamp. Then, naturally, I had a meeting with Dable, and tested their solution for 3 months. Such a connection and experience led me to join Dable.

I judged that there was enough potential for success since I had the experience of using Dable News, the content recommendation solution, before joining Dable

In addition, my career in the media certainly seemed to contribute to Dable’s growth. Above all, I decided to join Dable because the working environment — a startup — seemed to be another challenge and experience.

What is the most rewarding thing at Dable?

The most rewarding thing is that the value of our products has been recognized in the market.

Dable’s personalized content recommendation solution and native ad platform were new types of services in the Korean market. Hence it was important to gain the client’s understanding of what value this service was going to offer. What we noticed was that the behavior pattern of internet users was already mature.

A mature internet user is keen to judge the value of the experience.

Dable’s service is specialized in grasping the needs of users sensitively. Content recommendations not only became a source of revenue for the media, but also increased units that measure user experience : dwell time, returning visitor rate, reach rate etc.

Media that value user experience have become our initial customers, and Dable has grown into a platform with the highest share in the media market within a short period of time.

What advantage does Dable carry?

Dable has 2 big advantages.

The first advantage is Dable’s quick decision-making as a startup. Dable has a culture where employees are empowered to make decisions for themselves and don’t have to wait on leadership for direction. When a client makes a product request, Dablers (those who work at Dable are referred to) immediately reflect the client’s needs and improve the product, growing a step further.

Dable began its service in Korea and is expanding into overseas markets: Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines. Starting with the media, it has stretched its business scope to magazines, blogs, communities and apps. Compared to when it first started in 2015 Dable has grown tremendously in terms of the number of employees and partnerships. I think such growth and achievement was possible because of Dable’s fast-decision making and challenging culture.

The second advantage is that Dable contributes towards the media to play its full role. The media forms public opinion and creates a mature society by delivering a variety of information to the general public. The content recommendation solution of Dable matches with such media’s mission. Dable distributes high-quality content produced by the media to mature users and provides the media with necessary resources for the next content production.

In order to maximize profits, there are cases of confronting disagreements with some customers due to their tendency to focus on commerciality. However, Dable is able to constantly grow because the direction that Dable pursues is identical to what the media is pursuing. Is there anything more advantageous than pursuing the same objective as our customers?

What is your goal at Dable?

I wish that Dable News becomes the service that users seek first. I think that users from all languages, not only limited to English or Chinese users, hope to see the desired content on the media website. Therefore, I look forward to finding Dable’s products on global media that provide services a user desires.

To achieve this goal, we are constantly improving our recommendation quality and providing ads that may be of interest to users. We are also aware that our users’ expectations can change at any time. One of the important things we do to achieve our goal is to ponder with the media about what we can do to live up to our users’ expectations.