Toucan Talks: Using Deal Periods to Accelerate Growth
The first Toucan Talks: why Amazon's tentpole events are worth planning a quarter around, and what a full-funnel Prime Day actually looks like from prep through to lead-out.
The importance of tentpole events and deal preparation
Megan's opening talk framed Prime Day and Black Friday as retail phenomena rather than promotions, Amazon accounted for more than 17 percent of all global Black Friday sales in 2023, and a third of shoppers discover a new product or brand over Prime Day. The argument was the deals flywheel: a deal generates interest, interest lifts sales velocity, velocity improves search rank, better rank brings new customers, and new customers leave the reviews that make the next event easier. The talk ran through the three deal types available to vendors and sellers and the alternatives when deals are not available, Prime Exclusive Discounts, coupons and slash-through pricing, then the top tips: start prepping early, plan stock against the deal, promote your top products, get the detail pages retail ready first, run a full-funnel advertising strategy alongside, and let the data guide optimisation. Amazon's own study is clear that deals and ads used together drive a far stronger new-to-brand lift than either used alone.
Implementing a full-funnel Prime Day strategy
Mahlah took a supplement brand's Prime Day apart phase by phase. The brand sat at a higher average selling price than its competitors, which made a deal event the right moment to convert new-to-brand customers. Everything started from retail readiness, reviews, SEO, stock, titles, listing imagery and A+ content, before a pound of media was spent. Budget then moved deliberately across four phases: build reach in the two week lead-in with video and display, ramp up and remarket engaged audiences, switch priority to conversion campaigns over the event itself, then phase out into loyalty. The results ran ahead of target on every goal, paid sales grew 44 percent against the previous Prime Day, ROAS beat Amazon benchmarks, and the AMC analysis afterwards showed conversion rate reached 9.1 percent when a shopper had seen both Sponsored and DSP ads, against 3.7 percent for Sponsored Ads alone.
Content recommendations leading up to tentpole events
Ben's session was the retail readiness checklist in detail: a main image built for click-through rate, a full set of nine listing images because listings with a complete set rank better than those without, video on the listing, Premium A+ content, a Brand Story, and a link through to the Brand Store. The second half was about cross-channel consistency in the run-up to an event, building custom seasonal creative that can run in Sponsored Brands and DSP, building matching landing pages on the Brand Store with the relevant SKUs, and mirroring the creative strategy across paid so a shopper gets one seamless journey. It also covered using Manage Your Experiments to test creative choices rather than argue about them.
Amazon deal events with AMC
Jasper closed the talks with Amazon's own clean room view of deal events, in particular how advertising investment during an event week lifts more than the promoted ASINs alone, spilling over into the rest of the range, and what the path-to-conversion data says about which combinations of ad types are actually doing the work over a peak trading period.
In the room
