Hakuhodo DY ONE and GVA Professional Group to Start Collaboration to Commercialize THE MAESTRO
〜Building an ad screening system to bridge the gap between legal and creative〜

Tokyo, November 7, 2025 – We are pleased to announce that Hakuhodo DY ONE and GVA Professional Group are to start collaboration and provision of a beta version in order to commercialize THE MAESTRO, an AI-powered legal platform that provides comprehensive support for ad screening.

Successive reforms of the Act on Securing Quality, Efficacy and Safety of Products Including Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices, the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations, and the Medical Advertising Guidelines in recent years now demand even greater legal compliance and transparency for business communication through social media and digital advertising. With the evolution of creative expression and generative AI, advertising must now proactively reconcile “security” and “appeal” if it is to be trusted and then selected by sei-katsu-sha.^*1

At present, however, the traditional concept of division of labor persists in many companies between lawyers, who are responsible for legal affairs, and creators, who are specialized in verbalization, thus necessitating the outsourcing of legal and regulatory compliance matters. As a result, issues affecting the quality of ad expressions and organizational growth have emerged, including the rising cost of screening, slower decision-making and stalled accumulation of internal know-how.

Thus far, we have provided marketing support services driven by AI agents including ONE-AIGENT^*2 and a variety of services leveraging the latest generative AI technology as part of the Hakuhodo DY Group’s cross-Group AI expert initiative HCAI Professionals.Concurrently, we have offered AI-powered legal services and promoted the development of an internal “creative legal” function.^*3 Building on these achievements, we entered into collaboration with GVA Professional Group in order to advance AI adoption in the advertising/creative area. This collaboration culminated in the development of THE MAESTRO, a new AI-powered legal platform to deliver DX for ad screening by marshaling the expertise of the two companies and feeding our respective insight and know-how into AI. By embedding into AI the creative legal insight of Hakuhodo DY ONE in the field and the latest legal knowledge of GVA Professional Group, THE MAESTRO simultaneously delivers DX for ad screening as well as enhancement of the internal legal structure. The resulting swift, high-quality ad screening allows clients to build trust and brand equity in the eyes of sei-katsu-sha and drive sustainable growth while reconciling security and appeal.

About THE MAESTRO

THE MAESTRO is a next-generation ad screening platform that visualizes the legal risk of advertising copy and integrates the insights of AI, lawyers and creators. It reconciles security with appeal by automatically analyzing complex legal requirements including those under the Act on Securing Quality, Efficacy and Safety of Products Including Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices, the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations, and the Medical Advertising Guidelines, and by combining AI-powered rapid processing with the expertise of professional lawyers. With the engagement of Masanori Fujii, Creative Legal Executive at Hakuhodo DY ONE in creative oversight, and Tomohisa Hayasaki, attorney-at-law at GVA Professional Group in legal oversight, THE MAESTRO helps advertising content to be screened more rapidly, accurately and creatively with the power of AI and legal expertise.

Features

• AI-powered automatic analysis of advertising images and copy to identify legal risks including under the Act on Securing Quality, Efficacy and Safety of Products Including Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices, the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations and other regulations on media.
• AI immediately proposes alternatives in case any risk is detected, in addition to pointing out expressions to be avoided.
• The system is legally supervised by lawyers to reconcile “legal assurance” and mental ease.
• AI learns from internal screening data to reproduce the logic of decisions made by supervisors who are professionals in legal affairs and help practitioners to take the lead in turning knowledge into assets.

 Merits of adoption

• Increases the efficiency of production work by substantially improving the speed and accuracy of ad screening.
• Accumulates expertise and know-how in ad screening as internal assets.
• Enhances responsiveness to legal risks with AI-powered judgment and final review by lawyers.
• Promotes coordination between the legal and creative departments and extends the limits of expression.
• Avoids the recurrence of problems and enhances internal controls by visualizing risks and recording the actions taken.
• Builds an organizational structure capable of flexibly and swiftly responding to regulatory and industrial trends.
• Improves the trust of consumers and business partners and enhances brand equity.

*This service is currently offered as a beta version. Accuracy is still being validated with multiple clients having adopted the beta version.

Next steps

Hakuhodo DY ONE and GVA Professional Group remain committed to the functional enhancement and application of the ad screening AI THE MAESTRO in the area of legal DX. To that end, we are planning to enhance specialized legal databases in strictly regulated industries such as medical care, beauty, finance and foodstuffs, improve the accuracy of the function that proposes generative AI-powered alternative text, and optimize the screening process through automatic learning of internal and external knowledge. Particularly in Asian markets where GVA Professional Group has a strong presence, we will reinforce the response to advertising regulations in coordination with local offices, while Hakuhodo DY ONE will take the lead in Europe and America in addressing the complicated legal environment including personal information protection schemes such as GDPR. Going forward, the two companies will continue to integrate technologies and expert legal/creative knowledge to build an infrastructure to ensure legal security and freedom of expression in global advertising, thereby supporting the international business growth of clients from various aspects.

*1 “Sei-katsu-sha” is a term we use to describe people not simply as consumers, but as fully rounded individuals with their own lifestyles, aspirations and dreams.

*2 ONE-AIGENT is an AI agent-driven marketing assistance service offered by Hakuhodo DY ONE to provide comprehensive support throughout the marketing activities ranging from market analysis to creative production and effectiveness measurement through the coordination of multiple specialized AI agents.

*3 “Creative legal” refers to a brand-new domain of legal affairs to reconcile freedom of expression with the maximization of brand equity, premised on legal compliance. The creative legal function actually accompanies account managers and producers on the ground while providing risk analysis under the Act on Securing Quality, Efficacy and Safety of Products Including Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices, the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations, the Copyright Act and the Trademark Act, among others. It is capable of making strategic decisions while ensuring both security and appeal.