Master Ad Campaigns: Control & Optimize Like a Pro — Mitsunaga Kikuchi and Rocco Baldassare | Why Automated Optimization Saves Time, What Improves Cross-channel Budget Performance, How ROAS Increased By 400%, Why Complexity Delivers Better Results (#366)

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In this episode, we explore strategies for regaining control over ad campaigns and driving higher long-term ROAS and customer lifetime value. 

Featuring Mitsunaga Kikuchi, CEO and Founder of Shirofune, and Rocco Baldassare, Head of U.S. Business Development (shirofune.us), the discussion delves into how their platform's human intelligence approach helps marketers overcome the challenges of managing complex, multi-channel ad campaigns while saving time and improving performance.


Topics discussed in this episode:  

• Why marketers save 70% of their time with automated optimization. 
• What makes cross-channel budget sharing more effective than platform silos. 
• How third-party attribution data drives better optimization than platform metrics. 
• Why clients see 400-500% ROAS improvement within months. 
• How account managers can handle twice the clients in less time. 
• What makes Shirofune's 1-hour onboarding and 2-month trial unique.
• Why account complexity matters more than size for results. 
• What's driving the unstoppable shift to marketing automation. 
• How staying curious keeps marketers ahead of the curve. 

Links & Resources 

Website: https://shirofune.us
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/shirofune-usa/ 

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at
https://tinyurl.com/244r2dnh 

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Transcript

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the eCommerce Coffee Break Podcast. I'm Claus Lauter, and you're listening to the podcast that helps you become a smarter online seller. In today's episode, we talk about how to regain control of your ad campaigns and drive higher long term return on ad spend and lifetime customer value.

Joining me are Mitsunaga Kikuchi, CEO and Founder at Shirofune and Rocco Baldassare, Head of U. S. Business Development at shirofune. us. So let's dive right into it. Hello and welcome to another episode of the E Commerce Coffee Break podcast. Today, we want to talk about the challenges of AI driven ad campaigns and strategies for marketers to regain transparency.

control over their ad campaigns for better return and better customer lifetime volume. So that's a mouthful, but obviously ad campaigns page traffic is a big part of every market here out there. And we want to look into the latest technology that is there. And I'm not an expert there. So I have two experts with me and I'm joined by two amazing guests from Shirofune, a company that's changing the way business manage online ads.

First, we have Mitsunaga Kikuchi, the CEO and founder. He used his experience at Japan's biggest digital agency to create Shirofune, which now helps to run over 300, 000 ad campaigns in the world. That's a big number. And joining him is Rocco Balassare, Shirofune's head of business development in the United States.

Rocco works to grow the company's reach, build partnerships, and help business succeed. So let's welcome them to the show. Hi there. How are you doing? Pleasure meeting you. Thank you so much for having us. So, we want to dive right into it. Marketers running ad campaigns are confronted with ever changing platforms, algorithm, trends, and are under the pressure to drive positive return, ad spend, and customer lifetime value.

Now, that's not an easy task. Tell me from your side, maybe Rocco, to start with, what do you see paid marketers struggling the most with? Paid marketers have a lot to manage these days, specifically when it comes to data. And there is a lot of data out there and there is only a limited amount of time that people can really utilize during a day to make optimization.

So essentially, are they going to optimize their accounts or are they going to focus on pushing the business? This is something that, uh, essentially has created a problem in the market, a problem that Shirofune is trying to solve. But let me take a step back on your question, Claus. Uh, the step back I want to take is about how automations work.

Automations these days. They're really, quote unquote, fake. They behave like a machine. And that's not something that we like. We like our automation to behave like a human, like a person. And I think it would be very important, uh, for Mitsu to explain how Shirofune was born. to understand why he developed a human intelligence.

That's how we like to call it. So maybe Mitsu, if you don't mind giving us a little bit of an explanation about how Shirofune was created, that would be like a great thing, I think, for our audience to understand the concept behind Shirofune. Yeah, thank you for Rokko. So let me talk about myself and how I started Shirofune.

I began my career at the largest dis advertising agency in Japan, and their working overtime to optimize campaigns was a major issue. So I tried all the automation tools from the US and Europe, but our ad managers still outperformed them. Because human experts always do the things that AI cannot do.

That's why, you know, there are a lot of human ad managers in agencies and brands, uh, even though Google and Meta got so smart with AI. So I realized that we need the system that replicates what human experts do in order to save time while improving the performance. So I started programming and I spent over 20, 000 hour coding.

to look at what human experts do. So now we can save time for the tasks that you, you still have to do, even though AI got so smart, that's very unique. And that's why we have over 91 percent market share in Japan. And we have some friends in us and Australia, and we can, you know, prove that concept is working all over the world.

So I'm really happy to share this, you know, product and experience to all of them, all of the people here. Okay. No, that's very interesting. I mean, um, you put a lot of work in that to basically find out what people usually do. And I want to dive a little bit more into this now. Big ad platforms have become incredibly complex and they're adding new features by the day.

And it's very difficult to keep up with all of that. Tell me where a IT system, a system like yours. Is much better suited than somebody doing this manually. Yeah, it's not about better suited than doing this manually. It's about do you really want to take the time to do this manually. The problem of doing it manually essentially takes away from work that will essentially increase your profitability.

Let me give you an example. Negative keywords on Google ads, pausing ads, looking into placements that are not working. All of that requires time if done right, maybe a couple of hours a day at the minimum. That time is time you're not using to create new campaigns, new creatives, to strategize on conversion rate optimization, eventually wear out, you are not going to be able to think about that.

So a system is able to analyze more data, is able to find more patterns within that data. That doesn't decrease the value of having an ad manager managing the campaigns. It simply enhances the fact that you can leverage its strengths to things that really matter for the business. It's similar to saying, like, Are you going to invest your time in optimizing things that requires to know to read and write, or would you like to use your college degree for something more valuable?

So essentially, we allow companies to do that. On average, we see a 70 percent decrease in overall time saving for companies, and we usually double performance within six months at the least. This is something that particularly we are seeing very Defined with one of the latest things which we have released, which is called the Lifetime ROASP, where essentially we are able to optimize over long term performance of a campaign, rather than short term gratification.

And I don't know, Mitsu, if you want to add something about the Lifetime ROAS technology, but essentially that's one of the reasons as to why we keep pushing for data analysis done with human intelligence. So right now we can already see the performance like Rocco said, we can see the low in terms of e commerce industry, we can see the lowest.

That is combining the, uh, new customer acquisition and the existing customer acquisition. So, but it's not that, you know, uh, what Advertisers wants to see because, uh, existing customer can be, you know, acquired, can be got, uh, anyway, uh, without ads, maybe, but, uh, new customer acquisition is, uh, you know, uh, ultimate goal for delivering ads.

Sustainability, right? Like you want to say acquire new customers because those are the ones that will buy later on. If you keep up paying to acquire the customer that already know you, you are leading nowhere. So we cannot, you know, divide the performance of a new customer and existing customers. So for example, the branded keywords.

may only get the existing customers, you know, acquisition because the branded, uh, you know, campaigns is for, uh, the people who knows the brands or, you know, products. So we need to, you know, divide the performance by integrating with the like, uh, Shopify's, uh, purchase data, CRM's data. To, you know, connect all their data so they can understand what to add a performance.

That's very important, but it's impossible to do that. Because to achieve that, a lot of, you know, data integrations and analyzing, like parameter UTM parameters or any other parameters to integrate all of the data. So we are the only player that allows advertisers and agencies put together all the data in one place.

I think that's a very important, um, fact that you mentioned there that the data is all over the place and it becomes very difficult to even with integrations to have an overview. And Rocco, you told me before that you are a omni channel platform and obviously marketers are on plenty of different platforms.

So when we're talking omni channel, what does that mean? So essentially, uh, when you look at advertisers. You have raised a very important point, which is how do advertisers manage being on multiple platforms? So the typical method is You go to the marketing manager and they tell you that they're doing an omni channel strategy.

An omni channel strategy, however, is not really an omni channel strategy if all of your budgets are in separate silos. So there's a budget for a campaign on Google, another campaign on Google has another budget, TikTok has its own budget, it's own with Meta. What's going on with Shirofune is that we actually have the opportunity to create budgets cross channel.

So now you can have campaigns on Facebook, share budget with the Bing or with Google or with TikTok. What happens is that you can let our intelligence, Optimize budget, bids, and modifier cross channel to maximize your performance. And that doesn't happen in a static way. It could be that in a certain period your Facebook is doing better, and more budget is going to go towards Facebook, but next month it could be Google.

So we are very reactive to that. So now you have an omni channel strategy, because it's not only about adding the same message across the board, but utilizing your resources to do that. Take advantage of the swings. Yes, you can do it manually, but good luck doing it on a daily basis, analyzing all the data.

Right? I think that's exactly the point. And I think that's great. I've never heard that, that there is a platform that actually can serve all the ad platforms out there. Now tell me a little bit, you're running, I have run over 300, 000 campaigns. So there must be a lot of experience from your side. How does that reflect the, the experience that you made in your system?

What was the outcome? The 300, 000 campaigns, we can talk about 1 or 2 billion in ad spend a year that we manage. The learning essentially is a very straightforward learning. We are able to determine trends that lead to higher performance. And those trends usually help us optimize our algorithm. One of the things, for example, that we have seen Over the past few years is that companies that prefer to group campaigns into bigger budget rather than separate those budget long term, they get better performance.

And to give you an example, what I see very successful is remarketing campaigns, put them all in one budget. prospecting campaign, put them all in one budget. The concept of you have a budget for prospecting on Facebook because they perform different than prospecting on Google is a very old concept. If you look at how the platforms are interacting, let's think about Google.

They started using performance max, broad match keywords. They are basically telling you let the AI do its work. What they're essentially telling you is create a group and let us take care of that. The reason why competition is growing so high That the more targeted you go with budget and beats, the least you're going to use pockets of opportunities and optimization across the board.

So this is what trends we are seeing with the 300, 000 campaigns we manage. But of course it also tells us one thing, performance has been considerably better. Our customer retention rate is incredibly high because we are able to see those performance raise over time. Uh, we just onboarded a client not too long ago, I think it was October.

They gave us a goal of 190 percent ROAS. They said, this is low season, we are not going to see performance. And guess what? The first months we should have put in, there was so much that wasn't done because they were focusing on those time consuming task, we reached 400 percent ROAS within one month. And that's not because it's a magic trick.

It's just a machine can analyze data faster than a human being. And they didn't fire anybody. They actually hired more people to focus on strategy. So I think what I'm trying to get to is, It all depends on, of course, the unique scenario of a client. But there is also one more component which I would like Mitsu to add on, which is about attribution.

Attribution is a key, critical part of what we do. Because you know better than I do, Claus, that the way campaigns are optimized is through pixel installation from different platforms. But Mitsu is a very forward thinking person. And he said, why don't I give the opportunity to advertisers to leverage attribution companies and optimize through real data?

Mitchell, do you mind telling me a little bit about the attribution work at Shirofune? So attribution is, like Rocco said, very, very important. Uh, in terms of, uh, optimized campaigns across all the platform, because all platforms have own, you know, measurements way. So, for example, Google, how the Google counted conversions and how Meta counts conversion.

It's different, right? So, uh, in terms of omni channel optimization, we need to one. career, you know, the number that tell us the true performance. So attribution is a key component. And of course, DFO is doing attribution and some attribution company. And now the incrementality missile is riding in this industry.

So my focus is On connecting all their, you know, attribution tools or measurement tools or CRMs and eCommerce platform to, you know, see the true attribution to optimize the campaigns. Yeah, because, you know, you probably heard a lot by people, Facebook is overreporting. Let's say you have a third party company that actually tells you what is converting and why.

This data can actually be imported in Shirofune and optimize your campaigns with that data rather than on platform data. And that's the work of attribution that we do through our platform. I think it's a very smart move. Then we all know that every platform tries to claim the conversion and that's where things become a little bit tricky.

And if you have your own system, that's basically out of the game. Now, tell me a little bit about the day to day work of a. at manager working on your platform. Um, how much time do they spend on your platform? What are sort of the KPIs they're looking for? Give me a bit of an overview, how that looks. So essentially, you log in in the morning, and you check out your account performance directly on Shirofune across all of your channels.

You're actually able to do a forecast of all the months we land. So let's say we are in December 11th today, actually meets is on December 12th. And, uh, we are going to essentially look at your prediction for the end of the month. Well, what's going to happen is that you're going to see if a campaign is underperforming, overperforming, if there are budget opportunities, uh, to maybe decrease one campaign and increase another.

You can do that in one screen for all platforms. Once you do that, you go into Shirofune and on the right side of the screen, you get optimization opportunities, negative keywords, active keywords, pausing ads. That's going to take five minutes, essentially in 10 minutes of work, you have done the work that would have taken you three to four hours if you were doing it correctly, that forecast.

feature is extremely helpful and I would like to precise that we are never going to overpace on budget. Our system makes sure that you spend to the dot but we are going to tell you if you could spend more. So you might see that your budget opportunity is at 140 percent it means that you could spend 40 percent more and you're capping your campaign.

So you can make that decision instead of December 26th you can make it December 10th and plan for it. Okay. Now that's very smart. Now, besides the one who's managing the campaign from the budget side of things, who else is working on the campaign? Do you have your copywriter, your whoever sets up the artwork on like meta?

That's a good question. We do not handle creatives and we do not handle creating campaigns. We handle tossing ads that are underperforming through recommendations. So essentially is the ad manager that is going to be the most in our platform. But think of that, if I'm changing their account checking to a 10 minute stack instead of a few hours, by the way, most account managers do not get to check the accounts on a daily basis.

Nowadays it's unrealistic. You can increase the amount of clients that an ad manager can manage if you're an agency. That's going to boost your agency profitability overnight, essentially, because it's not going to create more work for the ad manager. It actually will decrease the work considerably. So doubling the account they manage They're going to work less hours, believe it or not.

And they're just going to spend a bit more time on creatives, uploading ads, but that's a work that they're used to, you know? Okay. Tell me about the onboarding process. How long does it take? What kind of steps are involved? So the onboarding process takes probably an hour. It's very, very easy to onboard and very easy to use.

Uh, after somebody on boards on the platform, we are basically having calls for a week, for a week, for a, for a call per week with our customers, meaning that they can ask questions, they can help, we help them with the setup. Uh, but essentially within that first call, they're good to go in terms of account setup.

With that said, uh, we usually do a two months trial with our customers. These months trials and in a decision on whether they want to continue working with Shirofune or not. That's a nice part with such a high customer retention rate is unimaginable high that we do not have contracts. It's a month to month engagement with the company and that's like testify the work we do because you know, whenever somebody tries to lock you in a contract, it means that it's not as good.

You're trying to plan their income for the next year, right? We do not need to do that. We, we know that if you start working with Shirofune, we can plan on you being for us with us for a few years. And, uh, that's one of the biggest selling point for us because we are very sure about the results and, uh, essentially are always going to get access to people like myself or Mitsu to answer questions at any point in time.

And we customize teachers to client needs, which is things that most tech companies don't do. Earlier you gave some examples on success on KPIs that companies saw. Can you share some success stories or case studies of businesses that were effectively using your system? The one we onboarded in September, I was mentioning here.

We are now at the 500x ROAS with their goal being 190. They are seeing a 50 percent increase month over month and the budget distribution changed from being 70 percent Facebook focus to being 30 percent Facebook focus because we identified opportunities in other channels. And essentially this client, uh, really thought they could get maximum 210 because they never exceeded that performance in Q4.

In any year. So that's an example. Another example is Dentsu, one of the largest advertising agencies in the world, if not the largest, Dentsu Japan, they exclusively use our system across the board, they publicly like for, for us to talk about that. Rakuten is one of the other very large agencies in the world.

They use Shirofune across the board. And we are starting to work with Amazon brands now because we developed a system for all Amazon related management that you can think of. So the list is endless. Uh, I mean, we have 95 percent market share in Japan, so we will probably give you a lot of case studies and yet in the US we are growing very rapidly because when they see what we offer.

If you know what they're doing, you know, you need something like ours, our solution, and I think that the future is very bright considering the results we are seeing. We do not have a single American based or Australian based client that are not seeing improvements. And that's like remarkable. Now I definitely can see the advantages and benefits of having a system where you basically manage all platforms and the time saving aspect is huge.

Now you gave a couple of examples on the big end, who's your perfect customer on the low end or how big does my brand need to be to become a customer of yours? So in terms of size, I would say size is not necessarily what we focus on, but rather complexity. If you have one campaign and that's all you're running, you're probably going to see the same result as if you're running 10 campaigns, 12 campaigns, right?

Because you're giving us very little to work with. So of course, the largest an account is, the more data, the biggest and fastest impact they're going to have. But somebody spending 30, 50, 000, they're already starting to see that performance. Uh, very fast results, uh, agencies, their biggest number one differentiator that they're going to notice is the time saving performance is going to happen naturally, but whenever we onboard an agency, the first thing they say, Oh, you're setting us time.

So performance, yes, is going to be dramatically higher, but you know, they're focused on their profitability. That's what they focus on first. Uh, so I would say it's more about. If you know what you're doing in creating the campaigns, you are a good fit. If you think that you can come to Shirofunek with a smart campaign on Google and you're going to become rich the next day, it's not a good fit because clearly you're not doing the right setup to begin with.

We do not create campaigns. So that's the human component that is still needed. We do believe that human component is quintessential for brands or agencies. Now, you're at the forefront of technology there right now. What changes do you see coming to advertising, online advertising that marketers should be aware of, let's say in the next 12 months?

Automation is going to become bigger and bigger and bigger. United States particularly is a country where there is a lot of resistance, particularly with agencies where they believe marketing managers that they know better than a machine. There needs to be a change in mentality where we understand that the machine is not that it's better than us, it supports us.

Because this trend in automation, whether we like it or not, is coming not from Shirofune, it's coming from Google, it's coming from Meta, it's coming from TikTok. Now, Shirofune gives you a layer of control over that. It gives you a layer of omni channel approach. It gives you a layer of, I want to implement my strategy.

So from what is going to happen over the next, uh, probably 12 to 24 months is an even bigger focus on this automation. And, you know, that's why people are creating performance max campaigns because they perform. That's why they're using advantage plus campaigns because they perform. So essentially that's the trend.

It's not going to be a change where it's going to revolutionize the industry, just continuing in that direction. I think we had a pretty big change in the last two years already, you know? No, absolutely. I think since AI came into the game two years ago, there was a big change and I'm a big fan of AI. All listeners know that already.

Um, and I think as you said, it's a big time saver, it supports you, it helps you, and it just makes you work so much better than without. Now, Before our coffee break comes to an end today, is there anything that you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? What I would like to share is that you need to keep yourself curious, meaning this is an industry where it works very well for yourself to stay curious and learn about things.

For example, let's say you're curious about Shirofune. There is nothing wrong in scheduling a call and learn about something new. The staying curious is going to keep you ahead of the curve. So schedule a call with an attribution company. Learn how they operate. Expand your knowledge. Expand your, uh, horizon because that's gonna guarantee a future for a career that is, uh, a leading future rather than a chasing future.

And then of course, anybody that is interested in knowing more about Shirofune, we have free demos, free two months trial, no credit card required, months to months contract, essentially, uh, we call it a guaranteed bet because I challenge you to go out there and find another company that offers the same thing.

Uh, they don't, they simply don't. If you're lucky, you get a month free, if you're lucky, and then. You don't get the support you get in setting everything up. They usually charge you to set up things. So just give it a shot to anything that you might be curious about, might not be Shirofune, might be Shirofune, and keep learning.

Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. Stay curious. Specifically, if you're in digital marketing and you're not curious, you will be out of business very, very quickly. Where can people go to find out more about you guys? I invite you guys to go on www. shirofune. us. And you can also look up both Mitsu and I on LinkedIn.

Should you have any question in regards to the content we cover today, if you want to be in direct touch with us for any reason. And of course, Mitch is a very involved CEO, he loves answering questions, he loves giving you technical details. So if you're curious about how the detail, the nitty gritty stuff works, he's the right person to contact.

Okay, perfect. I will put the links in the show notes as always, then you just one click away. I hope a lot of people will approach you. I think the time saving aspect and I'm doing paid marketing for a company. 20 something years. Um, and I would have wished that something like this came up years ago, so that would have helped a lot.

So links in the show notes, people click through and get in touch with you. Thanks so much for your time today. Thank you so much, Claus. Thank you, Claus. Hey, Claus here. Thank you for joining me on another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you.

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com. Thanks again, and I'll catch you in the next episode. Have a good one.