Unicorn Orange helps Rude Health grow share up to 24% on a flat budget with AMC

Goals

Rude Health, a UK-based food and beverage brand, set out to accelerate growth across their plant-based drinks portfolio, including almond, coconut and oat. Operating in a crowded category alongside multinational Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) brands with significantly larger advertising budgets, the brand wanted to build on their established position and unlock further share.

With almond drink already holding a strong position in the category, Rude Health identified an opportunity to increase visibility and attract new customers. Coconut milk was performing particularly well, growing its share by 33%, while oat drink continued to hold its position in one of the most crowded areas of the plant-based drinks market.

Following their acquisition by Oddlygood, Rude Health entered a new phase of growth, with increased focus on reaching new audiences and maximising the impact of their existing media investment. The brand partnered with Unicorn Orange, an Amazon Ads specialist, to strengthen their presence on Amazon, accelerate customer acquisition and improve campaign efficiency. The campaign objectives were to grow almond drink share to 9% or more, increase coconut drink share by 5% and strengthen oat drink's position within the category.

Approach

Unicorn Orange shifted Rude Health's strategy from broad reach to strategic, insight-led marketing, integrating sponsored ads, Amazon DSP and AI into a unified full-funnel system powered by Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC).

The team began with a diagnostic phase which revealed a 22.7% decline in brand search volume alongside a conversion rate (55%) that exceeded the category median (50%). This indicated strong lower-funnel performance but weakening upper-funnel visibility. Amazon Ads planner identified a 3.5 to 4 million shopper awareness opportunity within the plant-based milk category.

Unicorn Orange launched full-funnel Amazon DSP campaigns across awareness, consideration and conversion, complementing existing sponsored ads. Amazon DSP AI creative optimisation enhanced existing assets, which was critical given the creative production freeze. AMC connected insights across all ad types, while the AI-powered analytics layer generated bespoke AMC queries for on-demand reporting without dedicated engineering resources.

AMC-driven optimisation refined the approach. Frequency-based analysis identified 11 to 15 impressions as the peak efficiency zone, informing remarketing strategy. Income-based audience analysis revealed conversion variance, enabling Amazon DSP bid adjustments that reallocated spend towards higher-value audiences without increasing budget. Unicorn Orange validated Amazon DSP incrementality through Monte Carlo simulations powered by their Python programme, confirming that observed growth was driven by the full-funnel strategy rather than organic trends.

Results

All three product lines exceeded their targets on a flat budget with no creative refresh or new product development.
Almond milk grew from 8.7% to 10.8% share, a 24% increase.¹ Revenue grew 51% year on year, with 34% of new-to-brand and 59% of repeat customers having Amazon DSP exposure prior to converting.²

Coconut milk grew from 34.4% to 38.8% share, a 12.8% increase that more than doubled the 5% target.³ The team observed a 23.8% return on ad spend (ROAS) improvement, alongside a 25.4% revenue increase and 50.5% growth in branded searches.⁴

Oat milk grew from 3.0% to 3.6% share, a 20% increase against a goal of simply maintaining share.⁵ Incrementality testing placed this result beyond the 99.9th percentile of simulated outcomes, confirming proven, measurable growth.⁶

Across all sub-categories, Rude Health's share of voice grew between 65% and 145%, while similar brands experienced declines ranging from -19% to -67%.⁷

These results demonstrate how an insights-led, full-funnel approach, powered by AMC-driven frequency optimisation, audience-based bid adjustments and proven incrementality measurement, can help a brand grow share without increasing budget or refreshing creative. Unicorn Orange's methodology shows that strategic orchestration of Amazon Ads solutions can unlock growth even when outspent by larger advertisers.

Sources

^1-7 Rude Health, UK, 2025-2026.