We are here at eTail Palm Springs and seeing and hearing the latest and greatest in e-commerce and retail.

In digital advertising, are we chasing the wrong metrics? While short-term ROAS might look impressive, are we missing the bigger picture—whether those customers actually return? What happens when we shift our focus to Lifetime ROAS instead?

Today, I’m joined by Mitsunaga (Mitsu) Kikuchi, CEO of Shirofune and Rocco Baldasarre, Head of Business Development for Shirofune in the USA. Shirofune is a leading digital advertising automation platform that has transformed how advertisers optimize campaigns with long-term growth in mind. Shirofune helps brands reduce ad management time by 50% while unlocking greater ad performance beyond just short-term wins.

About the Guests

Mitsunaga Kikuchi is the CEO and Founder of Shirofune, an automated advertising management tool that maximizes the efficiency and productivity of major digital advertising platforms. He joined CyberAgent, the largest digital agency in Japan in 2006 as a new graduate and in a few years, became the Director and the representative of a subsidiary (CA Advance). There he was responsible for providing the in-house ad management system and operational scheme to hundreds of Ad managers at CyberAgent. From the experience at CyberAgent, he then decided to develop a platform which automates the works done by those Ad managers so that anyone, with the limited knowledge, could get the same results from online advertising as what a professional Ad manager brings. Shirofune is an automated advertising management tool that maximizes the efficiency and productivity of major digital advertising platforms. The Shirofune platform is designed to maximize advertising effectiveness by automating day-to-day digital ad campaigns using a single, easy-to-use interface for management, budgeting, monitoring and analytics. Over 10,000 accounts have been automated using Shirofune, including 300,000 active ad campaigns.

As Head of Business Development for Shirofune in the USA, Rocco Baldasarre leads the charge in expanding the company’s market presence and driving strategic growth. With a focus on establishing Shirofune’s footprint in the U.S., Rocco builds and nurtures strategic partnerships with key industry players, eCommerce platforms, and advertising agencies to foster collaboration and mutual success. He develops and implements forward-thinking business strategies, aligning with Shirofune’s mission and growth goals. A dedicated leader, Rocco mentors a high-performing business development team, identifies new revenue opportunities, and ensures customer success by tailoring solutions that maximize client value.

Resources

Shirofune: https://www.shirofune.com

eTail Palm Springs: https://etailwest.wbresearch.com/

Don’t Miss MAICON 2025, October 14-16 in Cleveland – the event bringing together the brights minds and leading voices in AI. Use Code AGILE150 for $150 off registration. Go here to register: https://bit.ly/agile150

Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom

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The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company

Transcript

This was AI-generated and only lightly edited

Greg Kihlstrom:
We are here at eTail Palm Springs and seeing and hearing the latest and greatest in e-commerce and retail. In digital advertising, are we chasing the wrong metrics? While short-term ROAS might look impressive, are we missing the bigger picture? Whether those customers actually return? What happens when we shift our focus to lifetime ROAS instead? Today I’m joined by Mitsu Kikuchi, CEO of Shirofune, and Rocco Baldassarre, head of business development for Shirofune in the USA. Shirofune is a leading digital advertising marketing automation platform that has transformed how advertisers optimize campaigns with long-term growth in mind. They help brands reduce ad management time by 50% while unlocking greater ad performance beyond just short-term wins. Mitsu and Rocco, welcome to the Baldassarreshow.

Mitsu Kikuchi: Yeah, thank you for, you know, introductions and, you know, inviting us.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Good to see you here in Palm Springs. Before we get started, why don’t you each tell a little bit about your background and your role at Surefune?

Mitsu Kikuchi: Yeah. Thank you. I am founder and CEO of Shirofune Mitsukikuchi and I began my career at the largest digital advertising agency and we, you know, replicated what actual human do every single day and Our platform is like really human so we can, you know save time for the tasks that a human needs to be needs to do, and that our algorithm is not like AI or machine learning thing, so we can do the things like human, and we can save the time, the tasks that AI cannot replace.

Rocco Baldasarre: Thank you so much for having me here. I am Rocco Baldassare, and I’m the head of business development at Shirofune. My career has encompassed 16 years in digital marketing, working with any size of clients you can think of, from small to large clients, small to large agencies. And I joined Shirofune because I truly believe in what we are doing here to really simplify the work while bringing bigger results for both agencies and clients. and I’m very excited to share some more with you today.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, great, great. So, and Mitsu, I know you shared a little bit about this in your intro, but can you tell us a little bit more about what Shirofune does and how it compares to some of those other platforms?

Mitsu Kikuchi: Yeah, thank you. So, the biggest difference between Shirofune and other platforms is how to create the algorithm. So like I said, our algorithm is really like what actual human do. So I, you know, did a lot of coding to replicate what human experts do every single day. And we don’t use any AI or machine learning.

Greg Kihlstrom: So let’s talk a little bit about, you know, in the intro, I talked a little bit about the idea of short term versus lifetime ROAS, return on ad spend. ROAS and cost-per-acquisition are kind of the gold standard in paid media, but do you think that advertisers over-rely on these short-term metrics?

Rocco Baldasarre: Oh, they absolutely do. Every time we look into clients using return on ad spend, we are essentially seeing them constricting themselves with performance. And why do I say that? I say that because most businesses nowadays, they rely on people buying products over and over again from their brands. Just think about Amazon. Now, if Amazon were to tell us that they were judging the performance of their advertising based on a customer buying once a product, you would think they’re crazy because each one of us buys from Amazon over and over again. So brands have got to have that same mentality. They need to understand that acquiring a customer at, let’s say, $60 might be unprofitable today. But how many times that the customer buys from you? Let’s assume they buy 10 times. Now that’s $600 versus the $60 you spend to acquire the customer. And of course, you need to implement strategies to retain those customers. But the whole concept is, what is the value of that one purchase over time for the business? When you understand that, now you’re moving toward a much more holistic approach to marketing. Your budget is going to be used toward a lifetime goal, and you’re actually going to be able to grow your company. We are actually seeing companies not growing, especially because the focus of the instant gratification metric, which usually limits them over the course of the years to competitors that are actually using those kind of approaches.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, so the term then, lifetime ROAS, what is that? I’m familiar with customer lifetime value and things like that. How would you define lifetime ROAS?

Rocco Baldasarre: The best way to define lifetime ROAS is to give you an example. Let’s assume you have two campaigns running, campaign A and campaign B. Campaign A is getting you a ROAS of 200%, campaign B, 250%. Marketing managers, next time they need to allocate budget, they’re going to put more money on campaign B because it gives them 50% more ROAS. However, let’s take a step back and let’s see how historically those customers, the customers of both campaigns, have done. It’s not uncommon to find out that campaign A, over the course of 12 months, that 200% becomes, let’s say, 800%. And the 250% of campaign B might become a 600%. So now, 800 versus 600, campaign A, which was doing worse in month one, does 200% better. So if you optimize for lifetime ROAS, you’re optimizing for the 800, enjoying the 200% markup compared to the 600 for campaign B.

Greg Kihlstrom: So, you know, a lot of advertisers are struggling with managing ad campaigns and all this. I think there’s a lot of reasons why they focus on short-term goals and metrics, but one of those could also be just it takes a lot of effort to manage things over time and the effort to put into measuring something like lifetime ROAS seems or at least feels like it would be too much. What are some of the biggest efficiency gains that advertisers see when they switch to an automation-driven campaign management?

Rocco Baldasarre: Let me go to the beginning of your question, where you told me they prefer to do short-term ROAS because it’s complicated to do the long-term approach. Do you own a dishwasher? I do, yeah. Let me tell you, why do you use a dishwasher? Why don’t you wash dishes by hand? It’s much simpler, right? Right. Same thing with advertising. The fact that something is difficult is because a company like ours is successful. We make it easy for you. In addition to that, we save you money because it’s not only about increasing the profitability, the time that is needed to perform all the optimizations that we do, you don’t need to do that anymore. So we free up time from you. So now instead of washing dishes, you can watch some TV with your wife. Same thing with Lifetime ROAS and Shirofune. We do the work for you so you can spend the time strategizing, making new creatives, talking more to the client. Now, with that example made, it’s easy to understand what the benefits are. The benefits are, first of all, time savings into getting all of that process automated. And Shirofune does much more than Lifetime ROAS. Lifetime ROAS is a little piece of what we do for clients. But in addition to that, you’re going to be able to grow the company. Because if you are an e-commerce and you’re focusing still on short-term ROAS, chances are you’re losing a lot of money because in many industries the cost to acquire a customer has become higher than actually the profit on the first sale. So there is really no other way. And many companies right now, for example, they bid on getting a customer. Why don’t you bid on acquiring a first-time customer? And how do you acquire a first-time customer by having the data and using the data to figure out who is a first-time customer? So it’s all about survival for the business and growth of the business. So it’s not, why should I do that? It’s, why don’t I do that?

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, got it. So I want to talk a little bit about, you know, there’s been a lot of talk about third party cookies and their impact on or third party cookies going away, or it’s a little up in the air, I think exactly what’s going to happen necessarily. But there’s certainly a move to first party data in general. How are you know, how does this impact, you know, what you’re seeing from advertisers and how they should think about measurements and things?

Rocco Baldasarre: It basically goes down to first party data has been around for years. Right. But only a few companies have adopted it because coming back to our dishwasher, why do I need to do that? Right. Why you need to do that is because we are now in 2025 and people are getting scared that third party cookies are not going to be a thing. I know that Google postponed the whole issue for a year. It comes down to you need to equip yourself to perform at your best. And first party cookies have always performed better than third party cookies. So the question always is why haven’t you used them before? First party data allows you to create audiences, it allows you to track better, it allows you to do a lot of things. So we believe that it is simply forcing advertisers to do something more efficient to begin with, rather than forcing them to do something less efficient, which is not the case at all. I hope that answers your question.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. So I guess, you know, we’ve talked a lot about the Lifetime ROAS and that component of it. Certainly Shirofune does. a lot more than that, as you were saying. As we’re wrapping up here a little bit, what’s something that listeners should check out in addition to what we’ve talked about, about Shirofune that could benefit them?

Rocco Baldasarre: I’m going to leave that question to Mitsu to talk a little bit about the AI, because we are seeing a lot of AI happening in the market. So Mitsu, maybe since you are the genius behind all of that, you might be the best person to answer that.

Mitsu Kikuchi: Yeah, definitely AI can do bigger things, and I think AI can do a lot, but especially for analyzing the data, which is the coming part of what AI can do, because data the amount of data is really increasing and we can see all the data at the same time. But AI can correct all the data and analyze instantly. So we can just ask AI what happened or what this data is saying. So we can just ask and ask and answer and ask again. So we can get a whole picture of what’s going on. This is going to be the next big thing for marketers, I think.

Rocco Baldasarre: And, Mitsu, something that I think is important for the listeners to know is that I don’t want your listeners to think that we are an AI company. Because we created Shirofune 15 years ago when AI wasn’t a thing. We essentially hard-coded our whole platform. We. Mitsu hard-coded the platform. Give credit where credit is due, right?

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, exactly. I didn’t code a line of that code.

Rocco Baldasarre: But the reason why I’m mentioning it, Greg, is because we believe that AI is good, but people are better. And as a result of that, we call what we do human technology or human intelligence. Why do we call it a human intelligence? Because what we automate is automated as if a person would be doing that. So essentially, whenever you apply lifetime ROAS, whenever we apply our recommendations, whenever we do budget and bid modification for clients, it’s as if Rocco or Mitsu or George would be literally sitting down and spending countless hours to analyze the data and take that decision. And that’s, to me at least, is a key element because a lot of AI companies out there nowadays, but not a single human company that uses technology to improve performance.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, that’s that’s refreshing to hear. So, yeah, I like that. Well, before we wrap up, I mean, Mitsu and Rocco, thanks so much for joining. One last question for both of you before we wrap up. I like to ask everybody, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?

Rocco Baldasarre: Always speak to people. You can learn things from everybody and I always believe I don’t know everything. That allows me to learn something new that I didn’t know the day before and sharpen up my skill set. An example I can give you, I got an email the other day from Amazon offering me a $500 coupon to run ads, video ads on their streaming platforms. I didn’t care about that, but I actually checked in, logged in, read all the documentation. Now I know how to do it. That’s one more thing I learned. So that’s my advice to your audience. And Mitsu, you probably have a better advice than mine.

Mitsu Kikuchi: So I’m always improving our algorithm to be better. So the important thing is don’t miss any small signal, even if it’s so small, and if we found something like, you know, we feel it’s not different from what I saw, we have to stick it to be better. So that’s my advice to, you know, stick to the tiny little things to when you want to do something bigger, you need, we need to, you know, stick to this real thing.