DTC831: Simple Amazon Ad Strategy for Sellers

Good morning, 

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Here’s what you’ll find in today’s DTC:
 

💰 Amazon Ad Tactics 
Balancing revenue and profit in your ad strategy. 

❗ All About Millennial Nostalgia 
Ways to integrate nostalgia into campaigns. 

📦 Daily Tariff Update
Canada plans retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. 

🧘 And searches for ______ menu are climbing.
Boost your mood with this trending hack.

You’re reading this newsletter along with new subscribers from: Sci Roof, Hello Someday Coaching, and Mulkerns. 👋

🤔 Is Your Agency Giving You ROI—or Just Reports?

We hear it all the time. Most agencies feel distant. Transactional. You get a few updates, a slide deck, and… that’s it.

That’s not how Pilothouse works. 👇

“The Pilothouse team feels like they are a part of our team, and we haven't been able to say that about other partners before. From a revenue perspective and from a profit margin perspective, we've doubled year over year since we've been with Pilothouse.”
— Jovi Boparai, CEO, CorneaCare

If you want a team that:

• Truly cares about your business
• Shows up like an in-house partner
• Is focused on performance

We should talk. 🤝

We’ve got a few open slots and we’re looking for brands we can go deep with.

👀 Curious?

👉 Chat with us. No pressure. Just real talk.

💡 Are Your Amazon Ads Driving Incremental Revenue or Incremental Profit?

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When evaluating Amazon Ads, brands need to distinguish between two key goals: incremental revenue and incremental profit.

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Pilothouse's Amazon team explains that the right metric to focus on depends on the purpose of each keyword and the value it drives for the brand.

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✅ Ranking Keywords 

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Focus: Incremental Revenue

For keywords where we aren’t organically ranked yet, the goal isn’t immediate profit—it’s incremental revenue and ranking gains. 

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The reward? 

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A top organic spot that drives profitable, sustained sales over time.

But this can’t be a blind investment. 

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To ensure efficiency, we must:

• Track organic rank consistently
• Monitor the Search Query Performance Dashboard to confirm our ad spend is actually moving the needle

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✅ Defending Top Organic Rankings 

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Focus: Incremental Profit

Once we secure a top organic spot, the priority shifts to maintaining that position while maximizing profitability. 

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The key here is spending the minimum amount necessary to defend your ranking.

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We’ve even seen cases where cutting spend entirely on a top-performing keyword led to earning the Best Seller badge—proof that constant optimization is key.

Continuing Amazon success requires ongoing monitoring of:

• Competitor movements
• Organic rank fluctuations
• Search Query Performance data
  
  

When done right, this approach leads to sustainable, profitable sales without unnecessary ad spend.

How are you balancing revenue and profit in your Amazon Ads strategy?

Whether it’s a minor tweak or a major shift, we’ll keep you posted on the latest tariff changes—so you’re always in the know. 

June 5, 2025 update:

• Canada Prepares Retaliatory Tariffs
  
  
  
  • Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney shares that the country is preparing retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. if trade talks fail.
    
    
  • He says: "We are in intensive negotiations with the Americans and in parallel preparing reprisals if those negotiations do not succeed."
    
    
  • Earlier this week, Trump's 50% tariff on aluminium and steel came into effect. 

⚡ How Shoott Scaled Google & Meta Without Sacrificing Performance

Shoott—a fast-growing photography platform—found Pilothouse through this very newsletter.

After early Meta success, they wanted to scale on Google without losing efficiency. 

Six months later, they’d done exactly that:

• 📈 +33% Google conversions
• 💸 -22% Google CPA
• 🔥 +40% Meta conversions (on just +26% spend)
• 😮‍💨 -10% Meta CPA

All while maintaining strong profitability across channels.

So what made the difference?

The Pilothouse team didn’t just run ads—they went deep: dialing in seasonal strategies, refining location targeting, expanding and optimizing keywords, and uncovering incremental branded search opportunities. And they did it all while collaborating closely with the Meta team to keep performance tight.

📣 Shoott came to Pilothouse because of this newsletter—and they walked away with a scalable growth engine.

👉 Want to be next?

🎧 It Pains My Gen Z Heart To Say This But…Millennials Might Be Super Cool? 

Avery jumping in here! 👋

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Nobody loves to poke fun at millennials more than me. 

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Growing up Gen Z, I was always mortified by my millennial cousins and their desire to film a boomerang at dinner.

How desperate they were to own the title of 90s kid even when they were still in their teens. 

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The entire generation seemed to have early-onset nostalgia that always annoyed me until I started to really explore marketing to them and forced myself to look into why they’ve been obsessed with the past for so much of their lives. 

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When we think about millennial nostalgia, it’s easy to jump to the more caricatured examples—like Disney Adults or lifelong Harry Potter fans. These groups often get framed in a way that feels juvenile, feeding into familiar (and tired) stereotypes about millennials: that they’re stuck in childhood, coddled by participation ribbons, and resistant to growing up.

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However, the most recent studies suggest that nostalgia is actually a future-oriented cognitive function, which makes it an incredibly interesting tool as a marketer and also (I believe) vindicates millennials. 

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Millennials were the first generation to really play on the internet, and they used it largely to express themselves and build genuine community.

They weren’t governed by their technology, but rather used it purely as a tool for self-expression. 

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As we’ve seen modern internet usage kill individuality, it’s easy to see why millennials yearn for the days before everything was so… sanitary. 

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Millennials had brightly coloured iPods and phones that barely did anything.

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They talked to each other, invented cultures and sub-cultures, and felt real power in their individualism, which links directly into how they experience nostalgia today. 

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If you want to understand better how nostalgia influences our lives, dive into the golden era of MySpace, or hear some life advice from my acupuncturist, tune into this week’s episode of Ad-venturous. 

Searches for dopamine menu are rising. 

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What is this? A dopamine menu is a list of curated activities that bring you joy (e.g. gardening, doing karaoke, getting a sweet treat). A dopamine menu provides a much-needed ‘dopamine hit’ and boosts your mood. 

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Why is this happening? Initially popularized for those with ADHD, dopamine menus are being adopted by the self-care movement. 

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This is a great way to give your brain a bit of a break if you’re struggling with your real to-do list and feeling anxious about difficult tasks. 

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What’s on your dopamine menu? Reply back to the newsletter and let us know! 

📥 Got a B2B Biz? 

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Join dozens of B2B companies finding demand-gen success through our niche community of 150k brand leaders and founders this year. Talk to our team to learn more.

Have you heard our latest podcasts?

• 🧑‍💻 TWBERP 36: Retention Programs for Different Cohort Profiles
• 💦 How CharCharms Scaled Hydration Accessories to Nationwide
• ⚡ AKNF 512: Q4 Playbook: Meta, Mother’s Day and Creative Strat
• ✏️ Ad-venturous 4: For Those Who Can't Write Copy Good
• 🤔 TWBERP 35: Which Ad Beliefs Still Hold Up? 
• 🍫 IQBAR’s CPG Playbook: Product Market Fit to Omnichannel Scale

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Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Frances Du. Edited by Eric Dyck.