Front Row helps Cosnova reach 53% new-to-brand share with localized full-funnel strategy

Goals

Cosnova's decorative cosmetics brands, essence and Catrice, had established strong brand equity across EMEA—but the U.K. represented a different kind of challenge. While the brands had recognition in other countries, they were significantly under-distributed in U.K. offline retail, making Amazon a critical infrastructure for reaching U.K. consumers at scale. When the brands launched on the Amazon U.K. store in Q4 2025, the category dynamics were unforgiving: premium-led pricing, high cost-per-clicks (£0.80+), and initial return on ad spend (ROAS) below 1.0x.

Early tests confirmed that sponsored ads alone would burn budget without an awareness foundation. Focusing exclusively on search meant bidding against established premium brands for expensive keywords with no brand preference to tilt the odds. Success required building awareness and driving sales simultaneously—making Amazon Ads full-funnel capabilities, and the audience intelligence to connect them, central to the launch strategy.

Cosnova partnered with Front Row, an Amazon Ads Advanced Partner agency specializing in Connected Commerce strategies, to develop a localized approach that could build brand recognition and drive efficient growth from day one. The objectives were ambitious: achieve 2.0x total ROAS, reach profitability within 12 weeks, and attain 40% new-to-brand (NTB) customer share—meaning first-time purchasers of the brands on Amazon.

Approach

Front Row's first conclusion was that a lack of awareness, not product or pricing, was driving inefficiency. The team secured incremental Amazon DSP budget for upper-funnel investment first—treating awareness and performance as one system—where upper-funnel signals feed directly into lower-funnel results. This is the principle Front Row calls Connected Commerce: linking brand investment to measurable sales outcomes using Amazon's insights and infrastructure.

A key strategic decision was to connect Amazon campaign activation to broader brand activity already happening across other channels—rather than treating Amazon in isolation. Where a brand was launching a new product, the team aligned Amazon video ads to that launch moment, extending the campaign's reach and reinforcing messaging that consumers were encountering elsewhere. Where brands had active community presences—including essence's Roblox map reaching gaming audiences on Twitch—the team reached those same audiences on Amazon—so what people saw in other channels matched what they found on it. Cultural moments like the Maxton Hall Season 2 launch worked the same way: rather than building new audience contexts from scratch, the team connected Amazon activation to conversations and content the audience was already engaged with. The principle across all of it was the same—don't ask only who your audience is; ask what they're already paying attention to and meet them there.

Campaign management was continuous rather than set-and-forget. The team monitored advertising cost of sales (ACOS) weekly by campaign type—cutting underperforming placements, scaling what worked, and shifting budget as the funnel evolved. Performance+ AI helped both brands scale efficiently—growing results without growing spend at the same rate.

The final layer was measurement. Weekly tracking of total ROAS, media ROAS, and new-to-brand share confirmed that upper-funnel spend was driving lower-funnel results—not just running alongside them. And with Amazon Marketing Cloud providing the audience intelligence across the full campaign, the insights generated didn’t reset when the campaign ended. Every high-value converter, every effective exposure sequence, every audience segment that responded became the foundation for the next campaign—turning a launch into a compounding growth asset.

Results

The connected strategy delivered results that exceeded every objective—and validated a way of working that goes beyond a single launch.

The most immediate proof was speed. Profitability was achieved in just 8 weeks, 4 weeks ahead of the 12-week objective.¹ That timeline matters not just as a commercial result but as a strategic one: it confirms that upper-funnel investment accelerates the path to break-even rather than delaying it. Brands that withhold awareness investment to protect short-term ROAS may not be focused on solving the right problem.

From there, the scale of outperformance was consistent across every metric. Total sales reached 340% of the original goal.² ROAS improved from 0.6x at launch to a peak of 28.6x, averaging 4.4x across the full campaign—more than double the 2.0x target.³ New-to-brand customer share reached 53%, surpassing the 40% goal, confirming that the campaign succeeded in increasing U.K. shoppers purchasing the brands for the first time on Amazon—not simply retargeting existing buyers from other regions.⁴ Media contribution reached 35% of total sales, demonstrating that advertising wasn't supporting growth at the margins—it was driving it.⁵

Upper-funnel activation proved its commercial case directly: Prime Video campaigns delivered a purchase rate of 1.2% against a 0.3% category benchmark, four times the category average—confirming that awareness investment, when connected to the right signals and the right audiences, translates into measurable sales outcomes rather than vanity metrics.⁶

The clearest proof of the strategy's impact came from comparing U.K. performance against equivalent products listed on non-activated EU storefronts. The performance gap between the two wasn't marginal—and it couldn't be explained by product, pricing, or seasonality. It was explained by the connection between upper and lower funnel. Brands that run branding and performance as separate workstreams will see results from each. Brands that run them as one connected system will see results that neither could produce alone. Amazon's infrastructure—where streaming signals feed DSP retargeting, which warms audiences for sponsored ads conversion—is what makes that connection possible at scale.

What this campaign leaves behind is as important as what it delivered. The audience intelligence generated through Amazon Marketing Cloud—which converter profiles performed, which exposure sequences drove the highest ROAS, which audience segments are ready to reactivate—becomes the strategic foundation for the next campaign, in the U.K. and beyond. A launch built the right way doesn't just deliver results. It builds the infrastructure to compound them.

Sources

^1-6 Cosnova, U.K., 2025–2026.