FBA sellers, are you ready to turn the lessons of 2024 into a winning strategy for 2025? Navigate the complexities of Amazon in 2025 with expert guidance from Destaney Wishon of BTR Media in this must-listen episode of The Seller’s Edge podcast. Learn a few battle-tested strategies for leveraging AI, optimizing ad campaigns, and staying agile in a rapidly changing marketplace, all distilled from a year of real-world experience. Read the full transcript from the episode below.
Episode 28 of The Seller’s Edge – Destaney and Jonathan talk about:
- 00:00 Introduction
- 00:57 General Thoughts on 2024
- 02:46 How Amazon Opened Up Analytics
- 03:23 Retargeting with AMC
- 04:46 What Made Brands Stand Out in 2024?
- 06:04 The Power of Image Carousels & VideoÂ
- 08:55 Moving First and Learning Fast
- 09:36 AI has Leveled the Field for Creatives
- 11:48 Amazon will Roll Out Ads on Rufus
- 13:56 The AMZ Platform is Changing Quickly
- 14:48 Marketplace Mix
- 16:39 Rise of TikTok Shop
- 19:17 Specific Optimization Techniques
- 20:36 The Path to Purchase is Never Linear
- 23:38 Sellers Should Focus on These Strategies
- 25:20 Search Query Performance Dashboard
- 27:26 Excitement for 2025
- 29:01 “We are going to see increasing complexity…”
- 32:45 Are keywords dead?
- 35:22 Review of Actionable Insights
- 36:31 Recap and Closing Remarks
Key Takeaways:
- Focus on Quality & Differentiation: Ensure your products are high-quality, your listings are optimized, and your brand stands out from the competition.
- Embrace Creative Assets: Explore AI tools to generate visually appealing product images and videos for your listings and ad campaigns. Update your headline ads with seasonal creative elements.
- Leverage AMZ’s Analytics Tools: Utilize Amazon analytics tools like AMC, the Search Query Performance dashboard, and more to gain insights into customer behavior and optimize advertising campaigns.
- Be Agile and Reactive: Stay informed about emerging trends and algorithm updates, and be prepared to quickly adjust your strategies to take advantage of new opportunities.
- Explore AI Integration: Explore different AI tools for use within your business, from keyword research to ad copy and image generation.
Full Transcript of Episode:
JONATHAN: I mean, overall, what were your thoughts on the year in general? Any takeaways?
DESTANEY WISHON: It was exciting. I think we saw a lot of maturity in the space, which made things interesting. Good or bad, Right? I think Amazon had a lot of changes that people weren’t happy about. Introduction to fees. You know, they did the whole vendor disruption, trying to move some of the lower vendors to seller central. But at the end of the day, it’s copying Amazon’s roadmap for maturity, I would say. So it’s really not that big of a surprise. Anyone who’s following the Amazon playbook shouldn’t be shocked that they’re pushing out smaller sellers. Amazon no longer needs 30 people selling one blue pin. They need five really good blue pins on the platform. So I think it makes sense. But it also caused a lot of difficulty for brands, and I think we’re starting to see the distinction between who will succeed in the future of Amazon.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I agree with you. I feel like instead of death by a thousand paper cuts, it’s like every year it’s like death by a thousand and one paper cuts or death by a thousand two paper cuts.
DESTANEY WISHON: There’s always something new to hop onto. But, like, I don’t think that’s a bad thing for the end customer, and I think it’s a. It’s a good thing for the brands who really care and want to succeed. It’s not easy. It’s not a money printer anymore. But, like, should it have been in the first place? Probably not.
JONATHAN: Probably not. That’s true. But, like, you know, great for everyone that got there in time for the Gold Rush.
DESTANEY WISHON: It was a fun place to be when. When we were there for sure.
JONATHAN: And then, I mean, looking back, is there, like an unexpected challenge that came up that you took something valuable away from, whether it’s a lesson or a new strategy?
DESTANEY WISHON: Um, maybe not so much unexpected. I, like, I said, like, there was a lot that happened, but I feel like once you’ve been in our space for as long as we have in those Gold Rush days, like, everything is just thrown at you and you figure it out. I think it was really cool seeing Amazon open up as much as they did on the analytics side, whether it was AMC and providing kind of a lot of that, because I know everyone who’s been in the space for a while has always struggled with Amazon attribution issues. They’ve always not been the biggest believer in moving upper Funnel or dsp. But, like, AMC solved a lot of that. And then to also see it rolled out to seller Central and just general ad console where you don’t even need to run dsp I think was huge, huge. And that’s been something that I think will be a huge competitive advantage for brands.
JONATHAN: Yeah, for sure. I mean have you seen any specific for the AMC which I think is great, like product targeting. Has there been like a specific, I don’t know, a specific like category or type of product that you think that does better than others with?
DESTANEY WISHON: Not quite. I think like you know, sponsored display, you could make the argument that higher price point products and consumables or high repeat purchase does better. But like AMC is just audiences. So like if you run it really granular and very strategic like we recommend doing with dsp, I think it could be powerful for everyone. So we’ve been doing as simple as like for our brands who maybe aren’t the high price point products or high repeat purchases. We’ve been running like retargeting with sponsored product ads. So we’ll say everyone, you know, within this audience who viewed but did not purchase and we’ll do a bid up because we want to pay more for the people who are already aware of us. Like I’m okay bidding a little bit higher because the conversion rate’s so much higher if they’re aware of us. So that’s kind of at the simplest where we’ve started, but it’s pretty unlimited. If you can create the AMC audience, you can run it as a bid multiplier and ad console.
JONATHAN: Yeah, it takes a lot of the guesswork out which is really nice. Yeah, for sure. And then is there a specific success story as far as the you’re concerned as far as like a counterintuitive approach or something novel?
DESTANEY WISHON: Man, I, I hate to be the like bid budget combination hack style person but I would say like all of our brands that leaned hard into creative this year did exceptional. Like we had some really crazy case studies with you know, just sponsored brands utilization. So we had one brand that has like 700 products. So it’s a lot to go through and update every single sponsored brand ad for the holidays. But the team went in and they leaned into the new AI tool that is within ad console and they updated every single headline ad to just like have a snowflake or Christmas image and immediate increase in click through rate throughout the holidays. And we actually saw a decrease in overall ACOs because one, it’s the holidays but we are getting more clicks and better conversion because the headline ad now looked exactly like what the customer was shopping for.
JONATHAN: It’s so funny because I was just having this conversation with somebody about email marketing and the use of emojis and how like I saw some tests with emojis working really well. And it’s something that just. I always think emojis and stuff are gaudy, so it always kind of turns me off. But it’s amazing how the common consumer.
DESTANEY WISHON: Will respond to that 100%. There’s so much that I feel like we’re almost in an echo chamber of our own performance. Like every time I’m on LinkedIn or I’m on a podcast, it’s with a ton of other people that are doing the exact same thing as me every day. But then as a customer of Amazon, I opened up Amazon and the headline ad’s still the first thing you see. So when they have the vertical or when they have the vertical videos up there, or when they have like the image carousel, you gotta think how powerful that is to a customer. It stands out on the page and it’s crazy. Sponsored display retargeting and sponsored brands video have been around for four years now, which is insane to think about. I like had a post come up in my like time hop and it’s like I was posting about the same things four years ago. People still aren’t using it. Like I need to shout it from the mountaintops. That like video and image and anything that makes you stand out on the page does so well in Amazon search.
JONATHAN: What do you think that the reason for that lag is? Do you think people just don’t have the creative resources so they’ve been hesitant about video or something else?
DESTANEY WISHON: Resourcing is definitely an issue. I mean I, I only have 40,000 followers on LinkedIn, so there’s obviously a big part of the population that may not be seeing my content, but I think at the end of the day it’s mainly resourcing. It’s keyword research and bid management are the problems the majority of the tech providers solve from like Amazon advertising software. And a lot of people don’t have the time to go update every single headline search yet. It’s a lot of work if you don’t have the right systems and processes, which is, you know, the slight benefit we have as an agency is being able to solve that problem because it’s not easy. I mean, you think about all the things that were just updated on the seller central side, not even inclusive of ads. We have the AI title updates, we have a bunch of AWS changes. Like a brand has enough on their plate. Are they really Going to log into ad console and update their image from a static image to a holiday image? Probably not.
JONATHAN: Yeah. I worked for an aggregator where that was just like part of the team’s task was just to do all of the seasonal changes. And it was just like so burdensome. When you have like 300 brands.
DESTANEY WISHON: Yeah, a hundred percent it’s burdensome and sometimes you can’t see the results directly. So I think a lot of people give up on it. But as mentioned, as the platform’s gotten so much more competitive, the people that are doing the little things right are the ones that are standing out.
JONATHAN: Yeah. I always ask this question, usually later, about a specific question, but I’m going to ask it now. Do you like. Is there a different approach you have for smaller sellers versus larger sellers or do you treat them all the same?
DESTANEY WISHON: 100%, not the same. That’s why I sometimes struggle in just general Q and A’s because it’s so dependent on the context of the brand. It’s also depend on the brand owner. If a small seller is just wanting to exist and make some in like side income, it’s very different than if they want to be the number one, the platform or if they want to exit. But at the end of the day, like, you have to use what’s at your fingertips. And as a small seller, I would say your number one advantage is flexibility and reactivity. I think a lot of big brands, it’s too risky to make updates to a whole catalog, but it’s. It’s that ability to move quickly on things. TikTok Shop is an example. A lot of large brands didn’t move on it because there was a risk of it being shut down. It was only shut down for six hours. But the small brands could move really quickly with a lot less risk. And we saw, I mean, dude, Wipes is doing insane numbers. They’re not necessarily a small brand anymore, but they’re not a traditional brand. They’re not a P and G or Johnson and Johnson. So the playbook’s definitely different. And you have to understand, like, what are your key advantages in the space and how do you move on those quickly?
JONATHAN: I mean, as far as sellers being able to, I mean, whether they’re small or large. Like, do you have any examples of a seller being willing to pivot in one fashion or another and how it paid off?
DESTANEY WISHON: Yeah, creative is 100% the biggest one that I see. You know, 20 years ago, before AI was accessible to everyone, the big brands did creative really well. They had the lifestyle photo shoots, they had the incredible videos and that’s because they had the six figure marketing budget to go invest in those things. The small brands now have AI where you can do a six figure photo shoot pretty quickly. It may, may take some time to reiterate and adjust your prompts, but I would say like all of our small brands that are leaning into those aspects are doing incredible. Because my big brands, they can’t lean into AI from a legal perspective like they can, but it takes forever from like a legal marketing perspective. But the small brands can now produce creatives that are on par with the big brands and they can be a lot more flexible with their budget distribution. So they can go run the sponsored brand video ads or the headline search ads in a fashion that is 100% outperforming the big brands.
JONATHAN: I mean, as far as, I mean you brought up AI like outside of creative. Are there other ways that you’re utilizing it for ads or anything else?
DESTANEY WISHON: Yeah, I think on the copy creative side it’s like the easiest. On the keyword research side, we’re 100% leaning into it as well. Bid management, I think it’s pretty good for teaching different philosophies on bid management. I think the majority of the softwares out there are still using some level. It’s rules based and then they slap a fancy AI label on it. But those are the things that we’re really leaning into as well as small things like opening up Rufus and figuring out what my competitive advantage is against another product. Right. You can ask Rufus so many questions. Is this good for athletes? Is this good for children? And start to understand where you stand out on the page by using AI to kind of accumulate the audience insights. And that’s been really cool.
JONATHAN: Yeah, it’s funny because I was just looking at a, there’s a commercial or an ad something and it was something that was so obviously not AI. But I feel like everyone’s just leaning into the AI thing and it’s like. And we use AI And I’m like, you don’t use AI?
DESTANEY WISHON: Yes, it’s a marketing ploy at this point.
JONATHAN: It’s really funny. But you brought up Rufus. I’m curious, I mean, with that rollout, how have, how has that kind of affected your approach to ads or anything in general?
DESTANEY WISHON: It’s one of those areas where Amazon’s just like full steam forward and they’ll worry about introducing it later. So I mean we can see the update in ad console that ads will roll out into Rufus. And from what I’ve heard, I think it was sponsor brands. Video or sponsor brands is supposed to be the first one to be introduced to Rufus, but that’s all we know. There’s no placement controls, there’s nothing else. So it’s, it’s fun and exciting. But we’re not changing anything with ad strategy so far other than just getting sellers comfortable with it. Like start using it, start again figuring out your competitive advantages and playing around with it. With the addition of AMC and with kind of the changes in like placement modifiers, I have a feeling that we’re going to be able to do more with it in the future. But I think Amazon has to be a little bit careful about how they roll it out and making sure that still driving advertising revenue and ad value from a customer perspective, like we all crap on Amazon for, you know, introducing so many ads into search. But again from a customer perspective it’s not too overwhelming. It’s always very native sponsored ads that are really relatable. Like on Google I never click on the ads. I’m like, that’s sponsored and doesn’t really relate to what I’m looking for. Right. It’s always B2B or something. But on Amazon I feel like you don’t have that problem. Like I click on ads all the time. Not ad karma, but sometimes it’s, it’s.
JONATHAN: True because I just remember in the heyday of Amazon where it wasn’t as, I mean it was a very plain page and then you had more and more ads being implemented all over the place. I’m really, I’m just like waiting for them to eventually like throw a pop up in there for an advertisement at some point.
DESTANEY WISHON: 100%
JONATHAN: I do think you’re right that it’s not too overwhelming, at least from a customer perspective.
DESTANEY WISHON: Because it’s so relevant. Relevancy filters are so strong that who cares if it’s sponsored or not if it’s exactly what you’re looking for. That’s where Google didn’t do as good of a job.
JONATHAN: Agreed. Yeah, that’s a really good point. As far as sellers kind of being, it’s funny that you brought up Amazon kind of like rolling things out. Do you find sellers kind of being reluctant or like kind of scared by the, the idea of Rufus or anything like that?
DESTANEY WISHON: I think there’s a lot that’s concerning as a seller. I think the platform is changing so quickly. Right. Manipulating Rufus is always a question, but I think that’s where sellers are split into kind of two sides. The people who are always going to live in the glory days and be afraid of change and think that Amazon’s out to get them with every single update or the other side of the coin of the sellers who always see it as an opportunity to compete. We’ll have the people, I guarantee you in the next three weeks someone will release a white paper on how to hack Rufus or how Rufus is a part of 8A13 and they’re going to come up with, you know, click Rufus twice, ask it these questions in a row and I guarantee your product will be number one. Like it’s fun, it’s a big, it’s an opportunity to stand out. If you can figure out how to better utilize Rufus.
JONATHAN: Yeah, that’s funny for sure. About the white paper, I’m curious, you mentioned the other platforms from like an ad perspective, like cross platform advertising, is there a specific sort of mixture approach? Obviously it’s, there’s going to be some nuances and it’s going to be client to client. But what sort of things have you seen?
DESTANEY WISHON: For one, everything’s a lot easier to run than Amazon at this point. Maybe, maybe not easier. So we actually don’t play with meta ads. But when it comes to the other retail media networks, it’s all a simplified version of Amazon. So for us it made sense because it didn’t add a lot of operational complexity, but it added a lot of value for our clients. For our clients they need to think about the operational complexity. But what we found is it’s a unique opportunity to, to drive demand in a market that may not be as expensive. You know, Walmart’s a great example. Walmart’s not great for any brand. But Walmart still hedged out being the largest retailer in the world last year. Amazon was supposed to surpass them at that point in time. So Walmart has the same audience ish or the same customers. They don’t need to sell that story, they just need to clean up a little bit the dot com sign operations. But you gotta think they don’t have to reinvent the will. They’re following Amazon’s playbook, they’re hiring Amazon’s talent. So it’s a good bet on brands to get in early like we did six years ago with Amazon before it was too competitive. And then the other ones are the same, you know, instacart, super easy to run to manage, different style of audience. So you definitely have to like weigh those pros and cons. And then not to mention at CES this year, Amazon announced the ability to run Sponsored ads across other retail media networks. So we got one up and running earlier this week. It served $4 in spend so far, which is cool I guess considering we’re running on a whole different ret media network. But you can kind of see the vision that the platforms are going when you see a rollout like that.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I mean now that TikTok probably won’t get banned, I’m going to say that hopefully that just sticks around. I mean do you see that in any way competing with Amazon?
DESTANEY WISHON: I don’t know about competing. I think that there’s a place for every one of them to play and I think they’re all going after different consumers. Amazon’s trying to do social commerce well with, you know, inspire, live and post. I think that they have some work to do but they’re not a social media platform so they’re going to struggle in social Commerce. I think TikTok shop’s doing well but the fulfillment play that Amazon rolled out I think is going to allow them to monetize on TikTok success without having to directly compete with TikTok. So I think that’s been really cool like the access to creators. At the end of the day almost every brand I’ve talked to when they, you know, have TikTok and TikTok shop doing well for their brand, their Amazon actually does better. It’s going to directly compete in small areas but I think it’s more mutually beneficial than anything else.
JONATHAN: Yeah, for sure. There’s definitely a symbiotic relationship there. I’m curious influencer wise, do you see are there product categories that you’ve seen do better than others? I feel like probably apparel probably does better than anything else in the cosmetics.
DESTANEY WISHON: But any others beauty. You know it’s funny, when I was home for Christmas, my dad is 52, hopefully he’s not listening. 50, 52 and he loves TikTok. I, I’m not a tick tocker. I am like the boomer who scrolls Instagram reels and is six months behind on all the trends. But my dad apparently has been buying non stop off TikTok shop and it’s a lot of like automotive things like the gloves with lights on the little fingers. He was so excited about them because like he works in the shop all the time. So I, I’ve seen it like be across the board so dependent on more just curating products to your audience. But like I would have never expected you know, 50 year old men to be buying items off TikTok Shop like they were.
JONATHAN: That is one of the best examples I’ve heard so far. And that’s great. I love that.
DESTANEY WISHON: My little sister was like, dad’s obsessed with TikTok. It’s weird. And I like get cat videos from him pretty frequently. I’m like, what do you do with your free time? Like, I know you like he. My dad invents work for fun runs in the family. But I’m like, how. How does he TikTok? It just doesn’t. Something doesn’t make sense to me there.
JONATHAN: I think Covid is probably the thing that changed social media across demographics because I think probably before that it was probably the younger generation, but I think once we were all sort of inside and just stuck on the streets.
DESTANEY WISHON: Yes. There’s nothing to do.
JONATHAN: Yeah. I think that it was like a perfect recipe for TikTok to just flourish.
DESTANEY WISHON: Absolutely.
JONATHAN: Yeah. Is there a specific optimization technique that you tried to use in 2024 and would you walk us through it?
DESTANEY WISHON: Yeah. So I think this is where AMC was really valuable for us. Like I mentioned a little bit about brands moving upper funnel and creating demand versus capturing demand. I’ve been managing Amazon ads since it was AMG and AMG was Amazon Media Group. Amazon Media Group brand dsp. And everyone hated DSP because two things would happen. They would run DSP and they would only run retargeting and their Robos would be $20 and they would think it was a miracle and they would realize their sales didn’t increase at all and it was just retargeting. Or the flip side, they would spend a hundred thousand dollars on a crazy Amazon campaign and Amazon would be like, we served you 7 million impressions. You’re welcome. And there’d be no sales data, there would be no conversion data, nothing. So many brands I talked to hate DSP because they had one of those two things happen. They never found the middle between upper funnel and retargeting that work together. AEMC has been their missing piece, in my opinion. So we’ve been leaning into a lot of AMC on like the reporting side, like path to purchase and ad type overlap because it’s really valuable to see when a customer viewed my streaming TV campaign on a my sponsored product ad increased over here because, like, the path to purchase is not linear and people still don’t quite realize that I’m preaching that nonstop to brands. Like someone could have viewed your video ad six months ago and still end up purchasing today. So that’s one of the things that we’ve been using to optimize upper funnel. A Little bit better. The goal for us has not been improving roas necessarily or decreasing ACOs. The goal for us has been creating that demand and understanding where our customers are shopping.
JONATHAN: I’m actually one of those people with the six months later because I’ll see an ad and I’ll just not click on it, but I’ll be like, oh, that’s an interesting product. Jot it down in my notes and then I’ll lose complete just knowledge of it. And then six months later I’ll be scrolling through and be like, oh, I meant to go buy that.
DESTANEY WISHON: And then I yes, I, I do similar or like I add things to cart and then don’t end up purchasing or I save them on social media. Like I’m such a binger with how I purchase. It’s never at the moment of seeing an ad or a product and that’s everyone’s spoiled by Amazon because anyone who goes on to Amazon and types something in is looking to purchase. That’s why you go to Amazon. Like we’re all spoiled by like this instant gravity, gratification. But the end of the day, like that’s not how advertising psychology works. That’s not why Coca Cola still puts a billboard on the side of the road. Like there’s something to be said about awareness and disruptive marketing that I think kind of brands who are native to Amazon need to lean into in order to compete because like someone’s always going to spend more. You can’t continue to just lower your a cost, lower your bid, lower your bid, lower your bid because the moment you do that somebody else will spend more, I guarantee. So you’re just going to fall off platform. Like you have to find a way to be creative and to meet the customer first and then when they go later, you’re already standing out. Nobody wants to hear that. I mean it’s not easy and it’s again, a lot of us, we’re all spoiled by how successful Amazon sponsored product ads were back in the 5% ACoS days.
JONATHAN: I think at this point in time like all the and I don’t believe snake oil salesmen who are out there just like saying the same thing. Like I feel like the path to success is probably going to be the road less traveled. So it’s going to be like it’s going to be not a popular opinion. So you’re probably onto something.
DESTANEY WISHON: It’s been two years of having to preach and break it down for brands because I mean it was a golden period for people to create in a brand and Exit a brand, which is what we saw within the aggregator model. And as those kind of CPC started increasing, competition started increasing. It was hard because a lot of people had these perfect playbooks for success and they were being really disrupted. And advertising’s a hard one.
JONATHAN: I just remember those days when you could do something and actually.
DESTANEY WISHON: Yeah. Catch all campaign. 7 cent bids. Yeah, it was incredible. Now you’re probably going to get less than 10 impressions with a 7 cent bid.
JONATHAN: Yeah. I mean it’s making us more creative though, so we have to think outside the box, which is great.
DESTANEY WISHON: Yeah. 100%.
JONATHAN: If you had to like kind of going into looking forward to the year ahead. If there were sellers out there and they could only implement one or two strategies, like what would you have them focus on?
DESTANEY WISHON: One to two strategies. So the first thing I would recommend is start breaking out your campaigns by objective. Because we’re seeing such a variance in bidding, we break out our campaigns by objective. We’ll bid on the same keyword. Let’s say I’m bidding on chapstick. I’ll have chapstick in one campaign with my bid being focused solely on profitability. Maybe it’s a 70 cent bid, but I know it’s not going to get as many impressions. And I’ll have chapstick in another campaign focused strictly on scalability. So it’s going to be a high bid. And the reason being is if you increase and decrease your bid from $5 to $1 frequently trying to balance both of those, you’re not going to drive incredible results. It’s going to be really hard to figure out that consistency and figure out what your bid threshold is because your last 30 day look back is going to be bouncing up and down. So we like to segment our campaigns and then adjust our budget to achieve both goals. So if I need have a month where I’m focused more on driving more sales, I’ll put more budget on my high bid campaign. If I have a month where I’m focused on driving less sales but higher profit, I’ll shift my bid and budget over to that. Now, we don’t do this for every single keyword because that doesn’t make sense. We don’t run single keyword campaigns across the board. We only do it for the keywords that really control our organic revenue growth and our sales opportunities. So there’s usually five to six keywords that control the majority of your sales opportunities. So we use those as kind of our lever to increase and decrease our scale.
JONATHAN: I like that. Do you look at SQP a lot?
DESTANEY WISHON: Yes. Search Query Performance report 100% because that’s good for your year over year volume changes and making sure you’re referencing like impression share. Like I can get really in the weeds here on this.
JONATHAN: Love it.
DESTANEY WISHON: But I think like the two biggest things I’m going to lean into search query for is volume changes and just changes in what’s being tied to our keyword. Like if we found frequently like a random phrasing will go viral on TikTok and it’ll start showing up in search query performance. I’m like I’ve never called this product this in my life. Like this the marketing play. The second thing is is your conversion rate comparison. So it’s a pain to pull and manipulate the data of course but you can see how well like you’re converting on a keyword versus your competitors and we’re going to look for those opportunities because I’m not going to drive additional traffic at a loss on a keyword I’m converting worse than category on. That’s not going to do me any good on the organic ranking side. So that’s the secondary piece we overlay.
JONATHAN: I love that search query performance is such a rabbit hole that I will go down. And it is interesting the sort of search terms that get t specific products and you’re like I, I’m. This is a spatula. Why is like Honda Civic in here?
DESTANEY WISHON: Yes, yes, absolutely. Like what went viral? What hack for I don’t know. Removing the side panel of a car went viral. That’s now associating this term like that’s how it happens. Social media man.
JONATHAN: Yeah. I also wonder like it’s interesting just like doing a breakdown of like the keywords that are used in reviews and how products will range rank for that.
DESTANEY WISHON: I have like a, a random specific example like when slugging went viral. So slugging was like influencers who are say suggesting putting like aquaphor certain types of lotion all over your face in a thick enough fashion that it like soaked it overnight. And the term was called slugging. So all these beauty brands that we were managing all of a sudden started seeing the term slugging trending with their lotion or their moisturizer. And that’s like a great example of it’s a big opportunity if you can jump on it quick enough and like reacting to trends. But also who the hell would think that Slug Inc. Would be referenced to a beauty product? Like that’s kind of gross.
JONATHAN: Yeah. And then what sort of things are you excited for in 2025?
DESTANEY WISHON: I’m just incredibly excited to keep producing content and educating the market. Like, I know that’s not an actionable answer for your audience, but it’s probably what excites me the most is everything changes and moves so quickly and not everyone does a great job of breaking it down. And like, that’s the part that I absolutely love is like taking these complex matters with retail media and educating others in a similar fashion. And I think that Amazon’s going to continue moving forward at an insanely rapid pace. We’ve already seen so many updates. I feel like the CES updates of. We now have a look back window of five years for amc. What is anyone going to do with, you know, historical data from five years ago? I don’t know the big brands are going to use it, but like that’s cool, you know, having the cross retailer sponsored ads, that’s incredible. They’re now doing their long term attribution. Like there’s so many cool things I think are going to keep us on our toes. That that’s like what I’m passionate about. I still log in probably 90% of every morning. I log into Ad console and I go through every single tab and filter just to see if I can find any new updates. Like it’s the, it’s the nerdiest thing that I do.
JONATHAN: It’s the little things. That’s really great. So that’s what excites you by 2025, are there certain things that you’re looking out for or obstacles or challenges or implementations from Amazon other than Rufus that you’re kind of anticipating and keeping an eye on?
DESTANEY WISHON: We’re going to see increasing complexity and I think it’s going to challenge a lot of brands to really dial in their operations. I would say that’s a big one. Amazon’s trying to solve that operational load with more AI. But as we know, that causes a lot of stress for brands. Small things like, you know, their, their title and SEO optimization. The plan is to ease that burden from brands of doing their keyword research. But at the end of the day it’s not perfect and it’s causing issues. Right. So that’s something that we’re trying to be really cognizant of. Balancing is like operational load, of doing every shiny new thing. I would say I’ve said it again and again. AMC and Creative, they have a lot more updates coming in the future. Expect a lot more with video in the future and video accessibility. We’ve seen you know, streaming TV can now be ran directly in ad console with no minimums, no commitments. That’s insane. For $5, you could go in any brand listening can log on to ad console and run a streaming TV ad that you could see playing on your own tv. So I expect a lot, lot more with video and probably a lot more with social commerce as well with like connecting the influencer dots that we’ve seen.
JONATHAN: You brought up good points throughout. And I feel like Amazon is sort of always implementing new things and it always feels like there’s too much too fast or whether it’s that or just competitors or all, all of these things. Like, how’s the, what’s the best way for you to kind of keep up and keep your finger on the pulse of everything? Is there a routine other than logging on every morning and checking for updates?
DESTANEY WISHON: I would say, you know, following the right people is a big one and people that have like, similar values to you as well are going to produce the same style of content. Like I alluded to it earlier, but I’m always pro the people who are seeing the changes as a competitive advantage. Right. If you’re looking for I hate Amazon, Amazon’s out to get me person like, don’t follow me, that’s, that’s not going to be beneficial to you. So I would say really lean into those sources of content that follow the direction you want to go and just never getting complacent. It’s hard. Even as an agency, I’ve been asked multiple times, like, when are you going to exit? When are you going to do X, Y, Z, do you want to be acquired? And at this point, I’m so passionate about the space that I don’t see myself, you know, driving an exit. And you have to understand that in order to, I feel like, understand what direction you want. Because what that means is I need to absorb the content every single day if I’m going to be competitive. If I saw myself exiting in a year or two, I could probably slow down a little bit and spend more time on TikTok with my dad. But, like, it’s not how it works.
JONATHAN: I really appreciate your positive energy, especially because I feel like there are so many people out there. I mean, this is just sort of rampant throughout the Internet of just people who are critical and saying Amazon is out to get me. So it’s nice to have people who are looking at the silver linings.
DESTANEY WISHON: 100%. Like, yeah, they’re not always going to do things that are in the brand’s best interest. But you have to ask yourself, like, is it in the customer’s best interests? Or if Amazon does anything, they move and iterate so quickly, which is why they roll things out way too soon because they know that they’re going to deal with the 10% of mess ups and correct the problem and keep adjusting rapidly. So it’s like if you understand that full roadmap of like, yes, everyone’s operations are going to be a mess when the AI title changes are rolled out, but as that AI model continues to be fed, no one’s going to have to do keyword research or SEO anymore, which is going to be really beneficial once it gets to a point of being good. It can’t, I was going to say it can’t be bad, but that may be too, a little too optimistic on my end. Sorry, guys.
JONATHAN: Yeah, we, we do have to keep our eye on that at least. I’m curious like, as far as that’s concerned, because I think some, at some point in 2024, Amazon expanded the 250 characters in the back end to 2500 characters, which just to me made me think like, maybe that doesn’t even matter and they’re just put whatever you want back there.
DESTANEY WISHON: Yep.
JONATHAN: But I’m, I’m curious, like, is that something that you think is heavily weighted as far as putting things in the title bullets and backend?
DESTANEY WISHON: At the end of the day, we’ve, we’ve talked in and out about relevancy. Amazon’s relevancy is incredible. You rarely type in a search term on Amazon and see a product that’s not relevant. So whether it’s the backend keywords or the title or just customer searches and images, they’re doing something right. So any way that they can figure out how to automate that process is going to be huge for sellers. And I think the secondary aspect is Amazon’s opening up because they’re moving from search attributes to just general behavioral attributes. So if anyone saw the Cosmo white paper, one of the examples they used is they found out that it was something along the lines of shoe inserts or shoes with thicker cushioning were more likely be purchased by pregnant women. And if you just looked at a keyword to keyword relationship, you couldn’t find that right, because pregnant women weren’t typing in pregnancy shoes, the pregnant women were typing in shoes with additional cushion. But because they have the behavioral insights on the backside to say that person also bought a prenatal, they came up with this whole correlation that these shoes should be listed or more so branded targeted towards pregnant women because their conversion rate was so much higher. So that’s really important to understand is it’s no longer going to be a one to one keyword relationship. Amazon is broadening that to understand audience and behavioral insights with purchases. That is incredible. And that is where I think the building the AI model becomes so much more powerful one to two years from now.
JONATHAN: That’s a really great point and a really great example. And every once in a while I will go on Amazon and type something completely unintelligible into the search just to see it.
DESTANEY WISHON: Yes.
JONATHAN: Yeah. And it is amazing that sometimes you will type something in and it will give you one product and it’ll be like kind of related to what you type. Yes. And you’re like how somebody’s doing their job out there. So that’s a pretty good thing. And then is there anything else that you feel like we haven’t touched on that you would like to.
DESTANEY WISHON: I think we’ve given all the big ones. So just running through the list of small things we’ve seen in the last year. Have a dialed in bid management solution. If you don’t have bids bid management on your account. You’re leaving so much money on the table. It’s probably the number one mistake you have to expand a sponsor brands and sponsor display. Both of them are incredible if being ran appropriately like any there’s no sponsored brands doesn’t work. Sponsored display doesn’t work. It’s 100% up to how it’s being used. I’ve rarely seen instances where either one’s just broken unless it’s a terrible product. Lean into placement modifiers and understanding how to use replacement modifiers in an account and take advantage of all the creative opportunities given to you. Whether it’s Sponsored display videos, Sponsored Display, custom image, sponsor brands, Vertical video. Every new creative placement is an opportunity for you to move quicker than your competition and get a creative up. Love that I went high level with a lot of our answers so I figured I’d give something a little bit more actionable to end the note.
JONATHAN: I love it. No, that was a perfect way to tie it up. And Destiny, you’re great. So I really appreciate you taking the time and chatting with me today.
DESTANEY WISHON: Of course. This is my absolute favorite thing to do in my free time. So more than happy to hop on at any point in time.
