Fractional Retail Media Lead for Japanese Marketplaces

You get one operator, named in the contract, sitting in your Monday meeting and carrying the retail media number in front of your CFO. Not a pod, not an account manager relaying questions to a specialist in another timezone. We hold six retainers at a time and that constraint is the reason the arrangement works rather than a line in a deck. The number we report: Contribution margin after retail media spend, by SKU, monthly, built from your COGS, fulfilment fees and return rates. ROAS appears once in the pack as a diagnostic and never as the headline, because a rising ROAS on a shrinking business is a report nobody should accept. Every month we name one thing we intend to stop spending on. If we cannot name one, we say that too, and it is worth asking why. The calendar runs the year: Rakuten holds お買い物マラソン or スーパーSALE in nearly every month, so your baseline resets twelve times a year and any month-on-month comparison across one is fiction. Amazon.co.jp has タイムセール祭り, Prime Day in July and ブラックフライデー at the end of November. We plan spend against when inventory actually lands in the fulfilment centre, and we will tell you to sit out an event when the stock cover says the ranking you win cannot be held afterwards. Inventory decides more than bidding: We cut spend on any ASIN with less than three weeks of cover, before the stockout rather than during it. A stockout costs you the organic position along with the sales, and rebuilding the position takes considerably longer than the outage did. This is the recommendation clients argue with most, and it is the one we hold hardest. Compliance we will not bend on: Japan's stealth marketing rule under 景品表示法 took effect on 1 October 2023: paid endorsement without a visible 広告 or PR disclosure is a violation, and the advertiser carries it, not the creator. Any creator or review work under our management is disclosed. We do not work alongside agencies selling サクラ reviews or review-gating, and finding one inside a client account is grounds for us to resign the retainer rather than a matter to negotiate. What we do not do: Paid social, paid search, CRM and lifecycle. Media rebates, of any kind, from any platform. Percentage-of-spend fees, because half our recommendations reduce spend. We also decline to be both the buyer and the auditor: once a year we hand your finance team the queries and the method so they can check our numbers without us in the room, or we bring in an outside reviewer at our cost. Who this is not for: Companies that want daily campaign babysitting, which is a coordinator's job and we would be an expensive one. Brands with nobody on their side owning inventory and price, because retail media cannot compensate for either. Anyone who needs a language we do not work in; we run Japanese and English, and we will not manage a market we cannot read. How it ends: The engagement is written to end. From month twelve we document the runbook, sit in on the hiring for your in-house retail media lead and train them on the account. We will tell you when you no longer need us, which has happened, and we would rather be the practice that says it than the one billing a retainer nobody can defend at renewal. If you want us to stay past that point, it is because you decided to, not because the account only runs while we are holding it.