Case Study
Advantage United Commerce helps Sulwhasoo reach new US audiences with STV and display
Described as “holistic skin care,” Sulwhasoo is a South Korean beauty brand that has been available in the Amazon US store since 2022. While the brand began that year with strong recognition in South Korea, expansion to wider audiences in the US remained a challenge.
Sulwhasoo began working with Advantage United Commerce (AUC), an agency focused on retail commerce for consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands that offers both advertising and measurement services for Amazon Ads. Sulwhasoo started working with AUC in March 2022 and tasked them with helping expand reach with US-based audiences. Sulwhasoo wanted to grow Streaming TV and display ads impressions, month-over-month purchase rate, and purchases coming from new-to-brand (NTB) customers. Additionally, they wanted to try and increase overall US sales.
New media, new audiences
AUC added Streaming TV ads to Sulwhasoo’s media mix, aiming for a wide US audience reach. For video creative, AUC leveraged a preexisting video focused on Sulwhasoo’s best-selling skin-care product.
Initial Streaming TV ads for Sulwhasoo were shared with in-market and lifestyle Amazon Audiences segments through the Amazon DSP, related to luxury/premium beauty brands, makeup, and skin-care products. Utilizing branded elements, AUC also added Sulwhasoo’s branded video assets to the Streaming TV ads, facilitating an easier path to purchase for shoppers.
Simultaneously with Streaming TV, AUC also launched display ads with Amazon DSP that reached across the customer journey, including awareness, consideration, and engagement-focused campaigns as well as conversion and loyalty tactics.
Insights, measurement, and integrated strategy
AUC used Amazon DSP insights and measurement tools to help optimize their Streaming TV and display ads consistently. Using the Audience Insights report, for example, AUC refined the reach of their campaign by looking at existing Sulwhasoo customer audiences with the Audience Insights tool. These learnings were then layered back into a strategy to try and reach a more relevant audience with Streaming TV.
For awareness and consideration-based display ads, the Amazon DSP overlap report helped reach US customers with a high affinity for the Sulwhasoo brand, with a focus on driving net-new purchases.
AUC also used Audience Insights to help better understand the ideal lookback windows (the number of days since an audience took a certain shopping action, such as visiting a detail page, has taken place) for views remarketing campaigns, by demonstrating the shopping journeys of audiences who have previously purchased from the brand. Additionally, AUC used purchases remarketing to reach existing customers beyond the usual repurchase window, with a reengagement goal.
Expanding audiences and increasing sales
After debuting new Streaming TV and Amazon DSP display ads strategies for Sulwhasoo in April 2022, AUC observed exponential results in their KPIs, far exceeding AUC’s benchmarks. With roughly eight weeks in-flight (ending May 2022), Streaming TV impressions exceeded Sulwhasoo’s goal by 30%.1
Ad-attributed purchase rate among US audiences showed improvement, with a 57% increase month-over-month in May 2022, scaling to a 100% increase between June and July 2022.2 This latter figure likely demonstrates the halo effect of the brand’s Streaming TV ads, as the flight of Streaming TV ads had finished running by the end of May.
NTB purchases among US audiences also scaled exponentially, with a 21% month-over-month increase in May 2022, 111% in June, then hitting 258% in July.3
Lastly, the impact of these new strategies seemed to also have contributed to Sulwhasoo’s overall sales in the Amazon US store, which Sulwhasoo saw increase 174% between Q1 2022 and Q2 2022.
Growth in new locales
Reviewing the results from the Sulwhasoo Streaming TV and Amazon DSP display ads campaigns, AUC credits both the integrated ad strategy and a close relationship with their client.
“Growth potential can increase with an integrated ad strategy. Advertisers should engage in all available opportunities across the shopping journey, meeting shoppers across their favorite touchpoints to help scale and grow their business. With Amazon Ads, we helped Sulwhasoo reach relevant awareness and consideration-based audiences in and outside the Amazon store, and help guide these audiences toward purchase.”
— Camille Agoncillo, director of media, Advantage Unified Commerce
Angelica Bautista, e-commerce US director for Sulwhasoo, concurs. “We understood that to help us further grow in the Amazon US store, we could benefit from having strategic partners that would help us navigate media,” she explains, adding that AUC’s consistent collection of and reaction to insights contributed to the above-benchmark results.
1-3 Source: Advantage Unified Commerce, United States, 2022.