The U.S. retail media ecosystem is in the middle of a high-stakes arms race—one defined not just by shopper data, inventory access, and marketplace dominance, but increasingly by automation. With ad costs climbing and campaign complexity bordering on unruly, the winners are the players who can optimize faster than everyone else.
Japan’s leading advertising automation platform, Shirofune, believes it has the answer. And with its latest strategic partnership, it now has a major foothold in America’s performance marketing landscape.
Shirofune has officially partnered with Direct Agents, an independent performance marketing agency with U.S. hubs in New York, Los Angeles, and Austin. The collaboration cements Direct Agents as a flagship partner in Shirofune’s stateside expansion—giving the agency first-mover access to the platform’s AI-driven automation stack while positioning Shirofune as a major new entrant in the U.S. ad tech market.
For the 10,000+ advertisers already using Shirofune in Japan, the value proposition is clear: automation eliminates operational drag, unlocks smarter budget allocation, and tightens campaign efficiency. Bringing that formula into the hypercompetitive Amazon Ads landscape? That’s where things get interesting.
Why This Partnership Matters in a Crowded Retail Media Landscape
Retail media is one of the fastest-growing advertising sectors in the world—and one of the most chaotic. Amazon Ads continues to dominate, but retail media networks (RMNs) from Walmart, Target, Kroger, Instacart, Best Buy, and high-velocity CPG platforms are fighting fiercely for brand dollars.
The challenge? Running retail media campaigns has gotten significantly more complex.
More ad formats. More signals. More competition. And more ways to make expensive mistakes.
The Shirofune–Direct Agents partnership launches at a moment when marketers are desperately seeking operational relief and better predictability. Automating campaign optimization isn’t a “nice to have” anymore—it’s fast becoming a survival strategy.
A Big Moment for Shirofune’s U.S. Expansion
For Shirofune, the timing is strategic. Its platform has become a mainstay in Japan’s digital ad ecosystem, trusted by thousands of agencies and brands for its ability to automate the routine—and often painful—parts of campaign management.
Now, the company is making a full-scale push into North America, where advertisers face rising CPCs, more sophisticated retail media networks, and shrinking margins.
Shirofune’s AI suite—covering real-time bidding, dynamic budget reallocation, ongoing campaign calibration, and predictive planning—is engineered to cut operational hours while boosting precision. In Japan, this has made the platform a default choice for many agencies scaling Amazon Ads and marketplace campaigns.
Partnering with Direct Agents gives Shirofune an established U.S. operator with deep marketplace experience and a track record of driving performance for category-leading brands.
This is Shirofune choosing to enter the U.S. through a high-performance lane, not a side route.
Announced at Amazon Ads unBoxed: A Signal to the Industry
The two companies officially unveiled the partnership during a joint session at the Amazon Ads unBoxed Conference on November 12—a symbolic and strategic stage for a U.S. debut.
The presentation, “The New Frontier in Ad Optimization: Unlocking Long-Term Value with Automation,” paired Rocco Baldassare (Shirofune’s Head of Business Development) with Megan Conahan (Executive Vice President at Direct Agents).
The message was decisive:
Automation + Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) insights = long-term business growth—not just incremental wins.
As AMC becomes mainstream—enabling lifetime value modeling, path-to-purchase mapping, and audience sequencing—the real challenge becomes applying those insights at scale. Shirofune positions itself squarely at the intersection of these capabilities.
Short-term bid tweaks alone won’t cut it. Automation is evolving into a system-level necessity.
A Clear, Measurable Operational Impact
Direct Agents’ internal results after integrating Shirofune’s automation tools speak volumes. The agency reported a 27% to 47% reduction in ad management time, depending on campaign complexity and format mix.
That’s not a productivity boost—it’s a budget shift. Hours once spent on repetitive optimization tasks can now be reallocated to:
- strategy
- creative experimentation
- AMC-driven insights
- competitive analysis
- innovative test-and-learn frameworks
This has led to not only time savings but also meaningful business outcomes for clients.
A Case in Point
For one household CPG brand, a 12% increase in Amazon media spend—guided by Shirofune’s bid governance and Direct Agents’ marketplace expertise—generated a 44% lift in attributed revenue.
This kind of nonlinear ROI is exactly what advertisers crave in a world where CPC inflation is eroding margins. Incremental dollars must work harder. Automation ensures they do.
What Direct Agents Gains—and What It Signals
As a flagship partner, Direct Agents gains early access to advanced features, beta testing opportunities, deeper integration support, and priority collaboration with Shirofune’s product and engineering teams.
But the bigger implication is market positioning.
Direct Agents is effectively becoming one of the first U.S. agencies to operationalize Japanese-grade ad automation at scale—a differentiator in a fiercely competitive performance market.
Co-founder Josh Boaz put it bluntly:
“We’re redefining retail media efficiency—accelerating decisions, increasing precision, and driving stronger results for brands.”
This isn’t a passive reseller arrangement. It’s a co-development ecosystem where technology and performance teams operate in lockstep.
What Shirofune Gains: A Strategic U.S. Lighthouse
For Shirofune, Direct Agents is more than a customer—it’s a lighthouse account.
Direct Agents operates across categories where automation yields meaningful impact:
CPG, electronics, beauty, household goods, and emerging DTC challengers.
Its teams are fluent in marketplace strategy and have longstanding relationships with brands adopting AMC, Amazon DSP, and multi-marketplace distribution.
Shirofune CEO Mitsunaga Kikuchi underscored the significance:
“Direct Agents brings the ideal combination of technical sophistication and performance focus that aligns perfectly with Shirofune’s mission. Together, we’re enabling marketers to scale smarter and faster.”
Translation: the U.S. market is too complex to tackle alone. Shirofune wants partners who can help translate automation into revenue reality.
The Bigger Picture: Automation Is the New Growth Multiplier
Why is this partnership resonating across the industry? Because it hits on a fundamental shift in digital advertising:
Manual optimization is no longer compatible with modern retail media.
The marketplace has become too dynamic.
The auctions too competitive.
The datasets too vast.
The formats too fragmented.
Automation doesn’t replace strategy—it amplifies it. The most successful marketers will be those who combine:
- deep marketplace expertise
- AMC-driven intelligence
- creative experimentation
- and automated tactical execution
This partnership is an early signal of what the next stage of retail media maturity looks like.
Industry Implications: What Comes Next
1. More agencies will adopt off-the-shelf automation tech.
Building proprietary automation is costly; partnering with platforms like Shirofune is faster and more defensible.
2. AMC will become the cornerstone of long-term strategy.
Advertisers will move from short-term ROAS chasing to lifetime value optimization—automated platforms will make that practical.
3. Amazon Ads competition will increase.
With better optimization tools, mid-market agencies and brands can close the gap with enterprise players.
4. Expect more Japan-to-U.S. AdTech partnerships.
Japan’s automation technology has historically been ahead of U.S. workflow tools; Shirofune may be the first major wave.
5. Retail media standardization is coming.
As partners like Shirofune and Direct Agents create unified processes, expect more standard taxonomies, benchmarks, and automation frameworks.
Building an AI-Enabled Marketing Ecosystem
Beyond immediate campaign automation, the partnership includes joint initiatives around:
- advanced beta testing
- feedback loops for product development
- educational content and workshops
- ecosystem building across agencies and brands
This long-term collaboration model mirrors the playbooks used by major advertising platforms—and signals that Shirofune is planning not just expansion, but influence.
Final Take
The Shirofune–Direct Agents partnership isn’t simply another “tech + agency” announcement. It’s a strategic blueprint for what the future of retail media operations will look like: AI-driven, insight-led, and built around hybrid teams where automation does the heavy lifting and humans push the strategy forward.
With one of Japan’s most established automation platforms joining forces with one of America’s most sophisticated performance agencies, retail media optimization in the U.S. may be on the verge of a major efficiency reset.
If rising CPCs are the problem, automation—done right—may be the new competitive advantage.
