New Member: 5&5 Studios

The British Chamber of Commerce in Japan (BCCJ) is pleased to welcome 5&5 Studios as our newest member. Based in Tokyo, 5&5 Studios is a performance marketing agency helping international brands enter, establish and grow in Japan.

5&5 Studios works with companies across consumer tech and apps, education, lifestyle and consumer brands, e-commerce and D2C, beauty and wellness, and travel and hospitality. Its clients include established international names as well as startups making their first moves into Japan.

5&5 Studios believes Japan should be treated as a market in its own right, rather than simply another entry in a global rollout. The agency sees localisation as going deeper than language, with consumer expectations, communication styles, platform behaviour and trust-building all potentially differing in Japan. This can mean adapting language and messaging, but also creative, the customer journey and, in some cases, the product itself.

Performance Marketing

Paid media sits at the centre of 5&5 Studios' approach. The agency uses performance marketing to test demand, understand how Japanese audiences actually behave and generate measurable growth, with creative, influencer and social work built around it.

5&5 Studios usually starts with strategy, identifying the Japan goal and the most efficient route to achieving it before moving into execution. Its engagement model is flexible, allowing companies to work with the agency on the full scope of work or on a single part, either on a retainer or project basis.

A Flexible Way of Working

How 5&5 Studios works is deliberately flexible. Clients can take all of it or one part of it, on a retainer or as a defined project. Where a company needs someone inside the team rather than a supplier outside it, Anna Silifonova joins directly as a fractional marketing lead. That flexibility matters for companies testing Japan before committing to it. 5&5 Studios also combines market understanding with AI-assisted creative analysis, which helps the company find patterns in hooks, messaging and visual structure faster than testing alone would. The technology accelerates the learning; the market knowledge is what makes the results readable.

While the focus is helping international companies grow in Japan, 5&5 Studios also supports Japanese businesses reaching international audiences, particularly in inbound tourism and cross-border digital marketing.

5&5 Studios was founded by Anna Silifonova after more than seven years in Japan at both Japanese and international agencies.

Working with large international brands, she saw the same thing repeatedly: global recognition and a serious budget are not enough to make Japan work on their own. The hardest problem is rarely translation. It is the gap between what a global team assumes and what the local market actually rewards. She founded 5&5 Studios to close it.

'Japan is not simply a market to localise for. It is a market to learn from. We help international brands close the gap between global ambition and local reality, combining strategy, cultural understanding and hands-on execution to build growth that lasts.'

In Conversation with Anna Silifonova, CEO of 5&5 Studios

Why did you decide to join the BCCJ? 5&5 Studios sits directly at the intersection of international business and the Japanese market, which is exactly where the BCCJ operates. We work with companies from overseas looking to enter or grow here, so a community of organisations that already think across borders is a natural home for us. We also joined because we wanted a room where we could both contribute a perspective on the Japanese market and learn from businesses solving similar problems in other industries.

What are you hoping to get out of your membership? Long-term relationships with companies and professionals working across Japan and internationally, rather than a list of contacts. We are interested in exchanging views on market entry, international growth and the practical difficulty of adapting a global business to Japan. We would also like to be useful to the community rather than only present in it, through knowledge sharing, events and conversations about marketing and growth here.

What sets 5&5 Studios apart from other performance marketing agencies? Three things, and it is the combination that matters rather than any one of them.

First, paid media is genuinely at the centre of what we do. It gives brands a measurable way to test demand and read Japanese consumer behaviour, and the creative, influencer and social work is built around it rather than sold beside it.

Second, we do the strategy and the execution. Plenty of firms do one or the other, and a great deal gets lost in the handover between them.

Third, we are flexible about the shape of the engagement. A client can take everything or one piece, on a retainer or as a project, and where it makes more sense Anna works inside the team as a fractional marketing lead instead of from outside it.

Underneath all of it is the view that localisation in Japan often goes much deeper than advertising. Depending on the business it can mean rethinking the customer journey, the communication style, the offer, or the product itself.

What recent achievements or milestones are you most proud of? We are proud of how the business has grown from campaign execution into a full Japan growth partnership, supporting companies from first market validation through to ongoing growth.

Across that work we have managed more than $5 million in advertising spend on more than ten Japanese platforms, using paid media not only to acquire customers but to test demand and build a real understanding of Japanese audiences. Our campaigns have averaged a return on ad spend of more than 4x.

The results we are most pleased with have come from very different kinds of client. For an international market research platform entering Japan, for example, our market validation campaign exceeded the initial target by 20x, a strong enough signal to move straight into an ongoing growth partnership.

For anatae, an e-commerce gifting startup, we worked across paid media, influencer marketing and social, launching more than 20 campaigns across 15 channels, recruiting over 100 influencers and generating more than 30 million in organic reach through creator partnerships.

What kinds of connections are you most looking to build through the BCCJ? British and international companies looking to enter, grow or strengthen their position in Japan, first and foremost.

We would also like to know the firms that support international expansion from other angles: professional services, technology companies, investors, distributors, hospitality businesses and other agencies. We partner and refer a great deal, and marketing is often the piece nobody has covered yet when a brand arrives.

We are equally interested in Japanese companies looking outward, particularly in inbound tourism, hospitality and consumer brands.

And we would like to contribute, not only connect. We are happy to run events, workshops or sessions on Japanese consumer behaviour, market entry, localisation and performance marketing for anyone in the membership who would find that useful.

Find out more via their official homepage or connect with 5&5 Studios on LinkedIn.

A very warm welcome to 5&5 Studios.