Prime Day 2026: Key Highlights and Takeaways With Team Acadia - Episode 436

Speaker A: This is the E Commerce Brain Trust, a podcast about building momentum online for established consumer brands. Join our hosts and their expert guests for high level conversations about e commerce strategies, trends and innovations. Access our brain trust and boost your brand's e commerce potential.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the Ecommerce Brain Trust podcast. I'm Julie Speer, head of Retail Marketplace Services at Acadia, alongside my co host, Jordan Ripley, Director of Retail Account Management, and I'm going to timestamp this. We are recording today's episode on, um, June 29, 2026. So this is mere days after Prime Days. It's not prime day. Prime days 2026 have ended. We're seeing numbers start to settle, which means it's prime opportunity for us to dig in, analyze, prognosticate all the great things. And to help us do that, while Jordan and I could go on for hours about What Prime Day 2026 offered us, we brought a few guests onto the pod today to talk about what they saw. Uh, hands on keys, boots on the ground with Prime Day this year. So to do that, we have our trusty old retail media brain, Ross Walker, director of Retail media here at Acadia to talk us through the media.

Speaker A: Thank you. I am trusty and old. I'll take that.

Speaker C: Old and trusty. Old and trusty. It's better than old and crusty, I should say.

Speaker A: Are you sure that's not what she said? I'm not.

Speaker B: Your old brain is with us. So glad to have it back, Ross. Joining Ross, we have Michael Childers, retail account manager, back to join us and he'll be covering overall account strategy. Michael, you're an old pro at this. Now, I don't even know how many times you've joined us.

Speaker D: This is the fourth one. But I don't know why. I feel like every prime feels like the first prime. It's like a first date every time.

Speaker B: It's so special in that way. And longtime friend of the pod. First time caller, though, Meg Scavo is a senior account manager on our team and she is going to be digging into a little bit more of the account strategy perspective specific to some of our Disruptor Challenger brands that we manage. So, Meg, great to have you on the podcast.

Speaker E: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Speaker B: All right, we are going to start with the most important piece of the episode. Here it is, our annual. What did you buy? Bizarrely, I. When I share annually, I'm often sharing that my Prime Day purchase is some form of a vacuum cleaner. The past four years, four years previous, I did purchase Some form of a vacuum cleaner. I like clean floors. I didn't do that this year. It feels weird to get a knife sharpener, which was really exciting. But, Ross, uh, did you make any exciting purchases this year?

Speaker A: All of my purchases were for my children. I bought a slip and slide and a scooter and just like a bunch of toys and things. So I really went the opposite direction. It was all fun, but none for me.

Speaker B: My knife sharpener was not for my children.

Speaker C: A scooter and a slip and slide is such a dangerous combination. Like giving that to your kids in the same weekend.

Speaker A: They are meant to be used together. That's. I'm pretty sure I saw. That's how I was advertised.

Speaker C: That's pure habit.

Speaker B: Meg, how about you?

Speaker E: Yeah, so typically I buy clothes on prime day because we're going into summer and I want to kind of revamp my wardrobe. But this year I have a big birthday coming up in August, throwing a pool party. So I got a lot of pool floats and inflatable games. I got a, uh, inflatable poker table for the pool, which I'm excited about. And interestingly, I did use the new AI Alexa for shopping feature of looking at the previous price for the product the last 30 days to ensure I was getting a good deal. So I found that helpful in my search.

Speaker B: Oh, very nice pro tip there. How about you, Michael?

Speaker D: This year I invested in some, like, more health monitoring accessories. I'm jumping on that whoop wagon because they were running some pretty good deals, so I decided to do that. And then, of course, I have to support Amazon and buy some of their Blink cameras just because I need to refresh some stuff in my house, invest in some security. So some big adult purchases this year. But yeah, it's so funny. That's like the topic right now, right, is Alexa. It's what's being sent out through Fire TV and all the other things. And I definitely have noticed this year that, like, Amazon is definitely prioritizing any products using, like, best deals. They're using new widgets. It's like the shopping experience is completely different and they're definitely driving you to any product that's promoting. So it was really interesting to see passively what is Amazon putting in front of me for purchase. It was pretty cool to start seeing some new technologies and new visibility for customers.

Speaker B: So it's putting health monitoring devices in front of you and it's putting scooters and slip and slides in front of us.

Speaker C: The opposite of the danger monitoring device.

Speaker B: Yes. Jordan, how about you? Did you invest in anything?

Speaker C: This one felt different to me too. I feel like last year with our first four day prime event and it was closer to July 4th at least in my memory and so I did not get that much. And then this year the event felt so long that I feel like I had multiple consideration cycles that happened within the four days where like in the past, to your point Julie, it would be like oh, prime day's here. Let me buy a big ticket item. I'm going to get my yearly vacuum so I can have a vacuum in each room in my house. Like for me I bought stuff on day one and by the time I got to day three I was like well I'm just going to buy dumb stuff that I would have bought anyways that's now cheaper. So I bought like five bottles of sunscreen at 30% off because I was like I'm going to need to buy that anyway this year. Why don't I get it when it's cheap? And it made me think of like brands are put in a tough position here where it's like probably a lot of those commodity purchases that would have happened this year now just get condensed down to this period. If my sunscreen purchasing is any indication.

Speaker A: That's such a glass half full perspective. Jordan, how many brand switchers do you think there were during this time period, you know, thought did you buy a new sunscreen and we got like the

Speaker C: same hippie zinc sunscreen. Yeah, I was not an NTV in this case.

Speaker A: Never mind.

Speaker C: But it just leads to my second question here which is what did feel different in terms of purchasing behavior this year? And at this point this is not our first four day prime event nor is it our first multi day tentpole event. We obviously have four day Black Friday Cyber Monday for that as well that have kind of set the standard here. So a question that I would posit to the 3 meg I might have you start us out here is just like is this bimodal? Are we seeing day one, day four like we have in the past? Are we seeing a kind of smooth shopper demand volume across those days? Like take me through those four days and how they played out in you and your clients minds.

Speaker E: Yeah. So on the accelerator side we definitely saw front loaded demand on day one which is in any tenfold event. What was interesting though on our side was things kind of evenly distributed throughout the rest of the event. So pretty even demand across days two to four. We did see lifts day four for sure. Just not at the extent that we have in the past. And we did see day four a little softer than Black Friday Cyber Monday, the last four day event. Just because shoppers are trained to know to wait till Cyber Monday for the best online deals. And by the time prime day is at the last day, it's like Friday on a summer and everyone wants to go outside and enjoy the weather. So there's a lot of things at play there. But yeah, I thought it was interesting that it kind of held steady after day one. I did have in my portfolio specifically some brands that deepen their discount on day four. So we did see a little bit larger lift like if we did that type of promotion, but otherwise it was pretty steady after that. Front loaded day one.

Speaker C: Michael Ross, similar experience on your side?

Speaker D: Yeah, really kind of comparing like July versus June Prime Day, like we overall saw the same trend. Right. Day one was peak. Day four saw a little bit more of a lift and then day two and three kind of saw this upside down curve. But the one thing that I definitely have noticed this year is that even though day two and three were slightly lower than day one, those probably were, we saw the best growth year over year. And when I think of just like buyer behavior this year versus last year is I think customers were way more informed that it was a four day event. And I just think the urgency that we normally will see in some of these previous like models and temples are slowly losing out of shoppers behavior because like you said Jordan, like day one you buy everything but then you realize, oh, I can buy things later on or vice versa, I don't need to buy on day one. Let me wait till day two, day three, day four, let me window shop more, let me compare more. There's more time to evaluate your purchase versus just I got a rush because the deal is only going to happen today. I think that's one thing that I'm seeing as a trend is just urgency is lower and we're getting more of this window shopping kind of vibe from customers.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think on the media side one of the things that I would point out is that everyone I think understood exactly what the shape of the event that you described, Michael. So day one is the most important day and from a consumer standpoint I think like that we had really high conversion rate on day one and then a lot of clients started to notice like conversion rate is dropping as the event goes on. So those middle two days when you know, the Jordans of the world were thinking about other purchases to make that like weren't on their initial wish List. That's where we saw a lot of conversion rate erosion. And I would say that one thing that was different this year, I was expecting more of a bump on the fourth day. I was expecting more demand, I was expecting to see a bigger lift. And from what I can see, we didn't really see a huge lift on day four, broadly speaking. And conversion rate on the ad side was a lot lower on day four this year than it was on day one at the start of the event. So if anything, I think the consumer behavior is still shifting. I don't think it's by any means locked in.

Speaker B: So let's do it again. Let's have another four day Prime Day next summer to see if we can lock that in.

Speaker C: Started on Monday.

Speaker B: Well, let's look at it less from a day to day perspective and more from like an aggregate perspective, the total event. How are your brands looking at the success or not of this Prime Day compared to last year? Are there any trends that you've noted that are worth calling attention to? What did you see on your side, Meg?

Speaker E: Yeah, so I think an important thing to understand this year is that we're in June and not July. So the main thing I'm looking at, uh, our growth year over year rather than our incremental growth from the previous period because typically we're comping against the July 4th period. That's a busy travel week and sales are just naturally slower. So you have a bigger incremental lift period over period. While we saw top line increase over the several last temple events during June Prime Day, we did see a little bit of a softer incrementality overall just because brands were going stronger into the event than they normally are for the July Prime Day period.

Speaker B: That makes sense. That is a significant call out too. I mean, last year was the first year that Prime Day was pushed immediately following, um, July 4th. So there was major impact in terms of the lead in to the event and I think it ultimately perhaps had impact on the event as well. Michael Ross, did you guys note anything in aggregate in terms of your brand's performance and how brands are measuring the success or otherwise of this Prime Day?

Speaker D: Yeah, I think expectation wise, like we hit that and we follow the like again, the similar structure we did last year. I know for our like total book, like collectively we did see like a 23% increase in day one. So like day one was still the victor, was the best day of the week. But again, day two and three actually saw the most growth year over year, like we compared to day two and three of, uh, prime July in 2025, day two saw 3% increase and day three saw a 28% increase. So it's one of those things where we're seeing more activity in the middle. And then even from like a vendor side perspective, even though data is still being attributed for vendor, the three days we can see like they were more flat this year, they didn't see that kind of steadily decrease in day two and three. Day one, day two and day three kind of kept the similar velocity and there wasn't really a lot of decreases. So I think the expectation here was we did what we needed to do and we hit the same kind of thing. But there was definitely some differences in trends that kind of make us reevaluate what we might want to do end of this year. If Amazon keeps Prime Day in October for fall or even strategy for next year, it's been super interesting to see how things are kind of plateauing out versus last year.

Speaker A: I work with a lot of enterprise brands that have been doing Prime Day for a long time. Some of who like are newer to the promotion game, who thought they kind of get away with organic growth and not promote too much. And I would say that the delta between legacy brands or enterprise brands that don't promote during Prime Day and the rest of sellers has like really, really tightened up. So like almost all the enterprise brands that I work with are doing promos across almost their entire assortment now. And that was like anathema to them in the past. The bumps that they got from starting promotions like in the past couple of years, they're not there anymore. Like we're still seeing lift, but those brands are happy with like double digit, like 10 plus percent lift as opposed to like 20, 30 or 40, like crazy lift that you would have for the first time promoting. But I would say that has kind of disappeared now. I would say for like the larger enterprise brands, the stories are like kind of local within the catalog as opposed to global across the brand. There are often focused product lines that see really, really great performance on Prime Day and then the other product lines that don't get as much focus, maybe they don't have as fantastic a story so like brand as a whole up, uh, some huge winning storylines that I think the brand is behind and really happy about. But then there are some draggers. Right? Because your attention just can't be everywhere.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's the important shift here. It's like it used to be Prime Day was the sort of tide that raised all ships Here where, like, even if you weren't promoting aggressively, you would get some bump here. And now it's almost the inverse where it's like, I need to promote consistently across my whole catalog just to comp reasonably well against last year. And if I don't do that, like, I'm behind. So, yeah, it's a tougher spot with that large swath of promos. I think the thing that always comes to mind is like the actual setup and execution and implementation of these promos, ad budget, that sort of thing. All the stuff that has to happen in the lead up and then be monitored throughout the event. Notoriously, there's always an outage or a glitch or something. Causes fun monitoring during the actual event itself. For those of y' all in the trenches, uh, actually, Michael, maybe we toss it to you first to mix it up. What? Any, like, initial thoughts, reactions from how things went just in the implementation of this year?

Speaker D: Yeah, I don't know if I just got blessed by the prime gods this year, but I did not have as many issues as I did the previous year. And I do think the understanding that PEDs refresh every 24 hours. So like one shift in strategy that we did this year was we're getting some reference price errors, but instead of immediately correcting them like early on, like May, early June, we kind of wait a little bit closer to the event. And some of the products that were needing bigger discounts got reverted and 20% was actually fine. I did feel like the effects of last year prepped us more for this year and understanding like how we can kind of structure everything. Something that's non promo related that I did see that was kind of a little bit of an issue was products sent in late May, early June, indexing for units have really delayed. Amazon now is allowing you to show how many units can become prime eligible within that first shipment. During this period, it was all zero out of whatever amount of units we sold. So we were getting units indexed. But I was having a couple clients concerned that inventory is taking and processing a lot longer even with optimized shipments. So that is probably something that, uh, we were keeping more of an eye on. That I saw was sluggish. But yeah, just having everything we did from last year, we implemented a proactive backup strategy. We knew what items had to go into promo or coupons versus prime exclusive discounts. And we knew how we kind of had to structure everything post big spring sale. So I got kind of lucky. A lot of my clients were very smooth sailing for promotions.

Speaker C: This year they did the God smile on your portfolio as well.

Speaker E: They did for the most part. Similar to Michael, though, the biggest sore spot was reference pricing. We had some clients who up until the day before were waiting to see where they were going to need to price and crunching the P and L, making sure like we can still be profitable with the deals and the max prices that Amazon's giving us. So that was the biggest pain point for me. But overall I was really happy with the, uh, data attribution and how less lagged it seemed than other years. It makes it so much easier to strategize in real time when you have accurate spend data and you're not expecting a huge jump in tacos the next day when the data fully bakes. So I was happy about that. And then overall, the only other thing I would agree with Michael as well was the shipping taking a little bit longer than usual down to the wire for a few, where I gave them six to seven weeks ahead to send shipments. I think May 14 was our shipping cutoff and it was really down to the last minute to get those units in. That was a little stressful. But overall I would say the execution was a lot cleaner this year.

Speaker B: There were no dogs wagging their tail on the home screen, which was a good change, a very good change. Ross, you started to touch on this a bit when you were talking about kind of your more enterprise brands, but just looking more broadly across all brand types. I'm curious about the trends that you saw relative to brands leaning in on promotion. There's always the past couple of years we've dealt with a lot of constraints, whether it be tariffs, impacting margins or what have you. There's always the balance of trying to protect the margins but recognizing that customers are there for the deal. And if you're not going to have the deal, then some other competitor is going to swoop in and have that 30 to 30, 35% off and take your customer. What did you see in your brands and their participation in the promotional events leaning in on, um, like the prime exclusive deals? What did that look like? Ross, you're excited to talk here. What did you see?

Speaker D: I am.

Speaker A: Um, promos is not, you know, it's not the area that I spend the most focus on. But when it comes to media, we have like a broad set of expectations. I'd say almost all brands are aligned with our core recommendation, which is the private exclusive discount is the discount to run. Almost all of our enterprise brands were running. If they're running deals, they were running that I had no brands that were doing lightning deals or any of the like more rarefied super high level promos. Everyone is kind of just going for like the baseline prime exclusive discount. Some brands were doing coupons where they weren't able to comp to the levels required for prime exclusive discounts. But what I saw happen across like both enterprise brands and other brands is that same story that I was sharing before is like there are some heroes. We're doing big 30%, maybe sometimes 40% discounts and then the rest of the catalog is like a more measured 15 to 20% discount. So you're expecting to make some big bets and have people really flow in to a few core product lines, but then the rest of the catalog is just supported with a lower level.

Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense. It's not a one size fits all. That's not a strategy. If you do one size fits all 100%.

Speaker A: And what I did see as well is like this Prime Day. Like brands, they still prioritize this Prime Day. I didn't have any, I should say summer Prime Day. I didn't have any brand saying like no, we're going to hold off and do our big promo later in the year. It's like no, this is still the event.

Speaker B: What did you see on your end Meg, in terms of promotional activity?

Speaker E: Yeah. So with the fee increases this year and just being a little bit closer to the bottom line, a lot of brands had to decide where they wanted to sacrifice the margin. And my advice is always invest in your hero products. Made sure every hero product was on some sort of deal. Obviously best deal is choice number one if not a sale price or just some sort of discount. Because I think the bigger picture of Prime Day isn't just the four days, it's what do you gain coming out of Prime Day to have a stronger back half of the year. And to me that's bsr, that's organic rank new to brand customers, bigger brand, tailored promotion audiences to work with the rest of the year. I always pitch it as an investment to participate in Prime Day. Put your biggest products on deals, compete to kind of secure your spot in the category or you're going to lose a lot of that momentum coming out of the event.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Meg, I was signing it tonight. It's just like your position here of like this is just a trade off of how much margin are you willing to get for badging. Essentially like if you can get a badge, trade the margin for it. And if not like is that too reductive or is that kind of how you view this?

Speaker E: Yeah, it's basically deciding is this product important enough that we're okay if we have uh, a single digit margin or maybe even break even or lose money if it's going to give us long term benefits coming out of the event. I think the gap between products that do and don't participate is getting wider in terms of performance. As you spoke to earlier, if you don't run any deals, you might be down year over year because with all of the filtering and AI tools, people are going right to the deals and search and you're not going to get visibility. So I think it's more important now more than ever to participate in some capacity and I think most brands are starting to understand that as well.

Speaker C: Yeah. The other thing that I feel like we're seeing is just the Amazon is pushing like the actual merchandising of these. Like the team noted a couple of, where it would show you the amount of committed units and how much those are claimed and the sort of large boxes of like the prime day deals in blue at the top.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker C: All these new sort of merchandising elements where Amazon is further pushing like this thing's on discount, you get to it, which certain deals seem to trigger again. Yeah, I agree. Like it comes down to like what is the merchandising and how we can capitalize on that. Ross, going over to you, one of the things that we've touted for a while now is just like how different tent pole strategy, lead in, lead out during event strategy can look now that we have the data sets available to us within amc. And so I'm just curious like is it pretty box standard now of like what are AMC approaches to tempole? Are there new things that we find exciting around AMC derived audiences and insights and that sort of thing or what is the sort of modern AMC playbook look like for this prime day?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a really good question. I would say like if we go back to sort of the dawn of amc, probably the most important audience that people discovered was a really valuable one, was like cart abandoners. Right. And like that was a audience data set that we never had access to before and that's very much bog standard now. What was like more of a discovery for us last year, which has become more of a best practice now is like the kind of like retargeting funnel from your like upper funnel lead in off site Amazon DSP campaigns, creating audiences that retarget those viewers with DSP that retarget Those viewers or plus up your bid for those audiences with sponsored ads. Those have become like net sort of natural audiences for us when we think about Amazon. So that like now we have a really clear view to tell the story for a lot of our brands who are running more upper funnel streaming TV in the lead up to the event. Like, well, how did those consumers then perform once it came to the event itself, like in search? So I would say it's evolved a lot to the point where like we now have like a much more structured approach using these custom.

Speaker C: So yeah, and I guess that kind of goes with the larger unification around Shopper Journey and DSP to search that we're seeing. As much as that's becoming unified. The thing that I suppose is getting a little bit more complex but more interesting, right, Is the actual search experience within the app and within the browser. Specifically the amount that Alexa for shopping has been put forth by Amazon as like a default way to interact with the Shopper Journey. I would love to get a take of M. Something that stood out to me was it was on customer. I got an email that was like you could win up to $1,000 by just creating a deal alert like with Alexa, like they were going that far to incentivize just interacting with some of kind of new, more agentic features that'll just pay you for it. So I was curious like Meg, maybe we start with you this time like as ah, someone who's both a consumer and um, managing brands. Like what did this event feel like from the new sort of AI shopping perspective?

Speaker E: Yeah, AI was definitely front and center this event. It surprised me, not really surprised, but I did notice how embedded AI was throughout the entire shopping experience. I think it just kind of points out how important it is to have optimized content and copy on your PDP moving forward and how that's going to become a huge piece of your strategy for Temple events. Because that's not only customer facing and the information they see on the listing, it's feeding the AI bots and that determines how Alexa or uh, whatever, if you're using a third party AI tool to look for deals, is going to categorize your product. So I think that's becoming a bigger and bigger piece this year. And with Temple events moving forward, just making sure your copy is optimized and you're showing up the way that you want to show up and that you're feeding those questions that people are asking on the listing, which is you have visibility into and the little blue bubbles on your pdp. So that's really valuable information to just double down on ahead of, uh, especially a temple event where you're getting a lot of traffic.

Speaker C: Michael, is that square with the conversations you're having with your brands?

Speaker D: Yeah, almost identical. One thing that we double checked leading into the event this year was definitely double checking attributions, and not just the required, but also just your general. I know that Amazon's pushing a title change at the end of July, and I think that's in favor of prioritizing attribution updates. So it makes the AI easier to recommend and read your product. So that is something that when you make a listing, it was always filling up the recommendations and then everything else was kind of like if you wanted to supply it. If not, we use imagery and copy to kind of direct that info. So it's right front and center. But now we're seeing that Amazon's prioritizing stuff for AI. So that's one thing that I made sure we focused on was start to collect attributions that we need to update. So those are all ironed down the back end leading into the event.

Speaker A: M. I would, if I could contribute to the conversation around prompts.

Speaker C: You may not allow it time to

Speaker B: move on enough AI.

Speaker A: I had made a, uh, prognostication earlier this year that prompts would be a big part of the sponsored ads experience for this Prime Day. And I will say that that did not 100% come true in that we don't really have any more controls around sponsored prompts at all yet we can enable and disable them. That's about it. And there hasn't really been a good reason to disable any of them strongly because there just has been so little volume against them. But one thing I will say was true is that the amount of spend going towards sponsored prompts increased 600% during Prime Day compared to the previous period. We don't have a comp like for last year yet, but a 600% increase in spend going to prompts really, really outweighed, like the overall average in comp for spend. So, like our whole agency, we spent 24 more year over year, but the spend on prompts was up 600%. Really, there was a huge delta there. So there was a lot more interaction with prompts this year during the event compared to a regular day. That alone is enough to say that it was valuable. And there's some really interesting data points around this as well. Like our average conversion rate for sponsored ads, for example, was 17%. The average conversion rate for like a sponsored prompt engagement was close to 12%.

Speaker D: It wasn't better.

Speaker A: There's been a lot of talk out there, um, about how prompt engagement improves conversion rate. Amazon I think threw out a number, like 40% increase in conversion rate when people engage in a prompt. I would say that generally was not the case. People are really in browsing mode when they're engaging with prompts a lot of the time for sort of like declarative type. I was able to break this into semantic. I. Someone was able to break this into semantic buckets. The area where people were engaging the most, like where we had the best conversion rate was around like verification questions like, does this product have X? Is it Y? Can it do W there? It comped close to our average conversion rate. It was like 16% versus our 17%. There was a lot of people engaging with prompts in general and it had a much lower than average conversion rate. It was like 7% was the average for like outside of that, that top semantic bucket.

Speaker C: And a lot of those prompts though are like pretty early on in the shopper where it's like, why is brand good for X product? Correct.

Speaker A: Yep. When you're really, really down the funnel where you have like brand value type questions like why choose X? Why is W what makes this product or this brand better than another? The conversion rate there in engagement with those prompts was 28%. So there you did see that 40% improvement in conversion rate. And these once you get further down the funnel.

Speaker B: Sorry Russ, do you care to prognosticate now about the role of sponsored prompts in the prime big deal days or Black Friday Cyber Monday? You want to throw anything out there?

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker A: This data alone, this suggests that like our team will be able to now like go out through all of their accounts and pause some of these like low level, low conversion rate prompts that aren't generating really valuable traffic and that will influence their prompt participation to be more towards the like probably the lower funnel. That would be my guess, is what we'll see. So we'll probably see an improvement in overall performance of sponsored prompts and I would guess that we'll see that growth continue. Like I think Amazon will continue to put prompts more front and center and get people more and more engaged in it. Because clearly people picked up the usage of prompts during this prime day compared much higher than they would have during a normal average day, but the volume

Speaker C: on it is still like low. Single digit percentage would be my guess in terms of like clicks.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, for overall engagement, a hundred percent. Look, you always put a good context on it. Like yeah, the growth was high, but it's from such a low baseline that it's very marginal. But uh, yeah, it's still, still a big growth point nonetheless.

Speaker B: We're talking about adoption of something new. So growth is growth. Let's pay attention to the. Well now it's behind us. Everyone's gotten a little bit more sleep and is feeling more in the steady state. Just as the prep for Prime Day is super important to invest in, so is the lead out strategy. Michael, could you start us off and talk a little bit about how you're looking at Lead out so that your brands can get the most out of the boost that Prime Day offered?

Speaker D: Yeah, definitely. I know this has been a popular strategy discussed on previous calls. I know I personally have mentioned it multiple times. But brand tailored promotions are such a great standby retargeting promo you can do on seller central. It helps with advertisement, especially if you're doing any views or purchasing remarketing through SD ads. It just helps added some extra incentive. I mean right now I think we have about like 42% of our total client are focusing on brand Taylor promotions for lead Out. So it's very popular and they've introduced new targeting methods. You can now target las customers. You can target of course cart abandoners. But one of my favorites that I've been testing out is now you can cross sell and do complementary product retargeting. So now you can go after other products that could be benefiting from the increase in traffic and conversion from the event. You can now start putting your product towards those shoppers and offering them a slight incentive to purchase your product with theirs. That's one thing that uh, we are always really focusing on is just getting brand tailored promotions, set that wide net and just have those audiences available for some additional conversion with some extra incentive.

Speaker B: How about you Meg? I'm sure brand tailored promotions are a part of um, how you guys are looking at the lead out. Are you pulling the lever for brand tailored promotions a little bit differently or are there others that you're emphasizing in your lead out strategy?

Speaker E: Yeah, so I think it depends a lot on how the event went for the client. If a client did really well, hit or exceeded their goals, it's having the conversation of what worked and how can we build this into our everyday strategy. Whether it's like a certain promotion that worked really well if we drove off traffic to Amazon and that really added to our growth. How can we Build that into our everyday strategy. And then if a client maybe didn't hit their goals or didn't see the volume they expected, something that I would suggest is running a lead out deal during the less competitive part of the event when people aren't running as many deals obviously in the four core days and then obviously doubling down on the data that we're getting from the event through brand tailored promotions. I like to relaunch brand tailored promotions at the beginning of day two of uh, the event because then it will start running day four and you capture those brand card abandoners from day one and then you relaunch it after the end of the event so that you have the full customer base from prime day. So that's something that I like to utilize. And then discussions like should we be increasing ad investment for the short term so we can hold on to rank if you get really good rank momentum during the event. So it's really just dependent on how the brand performed I think. And every conversation is a little different but I think overall there's a lot of levers we can pull. Agreed that brand tailored promotions is one of the biggest one, one of the biggest ones. And I think another conversation that sometimes you have to have, unfortunately if you performed really well, is where is our inventory at? Uh, so do we need to, do we need to reconsider maybe our July goals reel and spend a bit? Which is a good problem to have if you outperformed expectations. But it does happen. And so that's another thing we have to think about in the lead out period as well.

Speaker B: Oh, that pesky reality of inventory management, it's always there. How about you Ross, from a media perspective, how are you looking at the lead out strategy?

Speaker A: Yeah, this is an area that is maybe contentious, but as prime days and tentpole events have gone on over the years, one of the things I've consistently seen is post event or a few days after the event, for the week after the event, for even a few weeks after the event. There's very little incremental lift above baseline that can be generated with a lot of the lead out media strategies. So in fact we've had a number of like really, really strong incremental tests for like brands large and small of like what is the impact to your brand if you are really going dark completely on media post prime day? Like how much velocity do you lose compared to average? And one of the things I've seen consistently is that your dollars are better spent during the event, way better spent during the event than they are after the event for the most part. I would say the like traditional, the idea that Amazon will push quite a lot. It's like you need to have a lead out retargeting strategy. You need to make sure that you are retargeting all those viewers that you got during the Prime Day event. It's like, no, those people are like done and dusted. Their wallets are empty. Their demand is. Their thirst is slaked.

Speaker D: They don't need additional.

Speaker A: They're not looking to make a purchase in the next week after the event for sure. I would say more and more we're trying to like really trim down media spend after the event to the absolute minimum. Sometimes just defense, sometimes nothing at all. Because it's better to spend those dollars during the event itself and start saving

Speaker B: up for the next 1m.

Speaker A: Save up for the next event. There's a few brands where like the category demand like comes right back after Prime Day and it's like, okay, keep the lights on. You know, like go back to operating as normal.

Speaker B: Well, Meg Michael Ross, thank you for coming on so soon after Prime Day to share your observations and what you saw across brands and share your ideas of how brands can maximize, maximize the lead out as well. We'll be sure to have you back when we have, uh, prime big deal days. Any thoughts when prime big deal days might happen? We looking at mid October again or any takers on them moving the date of that as well?

Speaker E: I think they might move it to September. I have a hundred.

Speaker D: I think so too.

Speaker C: I'm gonna say December 24th.

Speaker D: Really?

Speaker C: Just keep Cyber Monday going.

Speaker B: We need to break the group thing because I like that. What's your take?

Speaker C: Misery Days?

Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know. Uh, maybe I'll be the one to center here. I don't yet have a strong feeling that they're going to move fall. Fall Prime Day. I know they moved this one, so yeah, maybe it makes sense they move the next one.

Speaker B: But I am a big fan of logic and logic holds that they would move it to September and then an event a quarter. I love that very much. It's very clean. So we'll see. I'm sure they listen to the podcast and we'll follow suit appropriately. All right, thanks everybody.

Speaker D: Thank you. Thank you.