One brand’s number one item made up over 25% of its sales and was not profitable. Chelsie Arvizu (eCommerce & Retail Growth Consultant) only saw it once the brand shared its numbers, and the campaigns were reframed around it. On this episode of the Brilliant Commerce podcast, Chelsie breaks down full-funnel retail media across Amazon, Whole Foods, Google, Meta and Walmart, from someone who has worked both brand side and agency side.
Behind the Expert
Chelsie Arvizu spent twelve to fifteen years on the brand side, starting in marketing before finding her real love in ecommerce — a function she describes as “a subcompany within a company,” where the pace never lets up and you end up working with every part of the business. She led ecommerce growth at fast-moving consumer brands including Hint and Ripple. After being laid off alongside half of her company, she was offered the chance to build out the retail arm of Drive PG (DPG), an Amazon DSP–focused agency that had been one of her own agencies of record. There she brought a brand-side lens to the agency work, focusing on the gaps she used to feel as a client — especially budget that sat in the wrong buckets and campaigns funded without the creative to make them succeed. Based in Austin, Texas, she now works as an ecommerce and retail growth consultant.
The Quick Hits
- Arvizu has worked both sides of the brand–agency relationship. Going agency side was a way to fix the misses she saw as a client — above all, having media budget but not the creative to make campaigns work.
- Ecommerce isn’t a solved channel. Amazon reset expectations once; agentic shopping, live commerce, and whatever comes next will keep changing how people buy.
- Set one number across channels instead of separate targets for DTC, Amazon, and Walmart.com. Separate targets make your own channels bid against each other; a single goal lets you move budget to wherever it’s most profitable right now.
- The wall between Amazon and Whole Foods has come down over the last year. Brands can now use the digital shelf to drive trial and turns when their physical aisle is crowded.
- Reporting isn’t insight. ROAS alone can flatter a customer who buys once in a while; layering in Subscribe & Save, new-to-brand, and LTV from Amazon Marketing Cloud tells the fuller story.
- Full-funnel retail media is now measurable. A shopper can be reached with a TV ad, followed with DSP, and closed with social and retail search, and brands can track that path in a way they couldn’t before.
- Share the numbers with your agency. One brand’s top seller was over 25% of sales and unprofitable; once the agency saw the margins, it reframed every campaign and the brand became fully profitable within months.
- The best finance partnership Arvizu ever had gave her a margin to hit and room to scale within it. The result was close to 100% year-over-year growth for multiple years.
From brand side to agency side
Arvizu came up on the brand side, first in marketing and then in ecommerce, which hooked her because of its speed and because it touches every part of a company. She never expected to leave. Then she was laid off along with half of her company, and an agency she’d worked with as a client — Drive PG, an Amazon DSP–focused agency — asked her to build out its retail practice.
The move was scary, but it gave her a chance to fix what she’d seen go wrong in agency partnerships. The biggest one was structural: finance decides which buckets the money goes into, and creative is often the bucket left short.
Agency life, she found, isn’t so different from the startup culture she loved on the brand side. The main change is how many hats you wear — staying devoted to each brand while switching between them all day.
Ecommerce is never finished
To anyone who thinks ecommerce was solved fifteen years ago, Arvizu points to how much has already changed. People used to wait weeks for a first online order without even a confirmation email. Amazon reset those expectations, but she doesn’t expect it to be the last word. Brands are now restructuring their sites so AI agents can shop for consumers, and live shopping in the US is still nowhere near where it is in Asia.
One number, many channels
Drive PG started with its Amazon relationships, but over the last two years it has expanded into other marketplaces and into Google and Meta. Arvizu thinks the channels work best as one system. With so much technology layered on top of the ad platforms, problems pop up that are outside anyone’s control, and the ability to move money quickly — from Amazon to Google, Meta, or Walmart — keeps the whole program working.
That only works if the targets allow it. When DTC has its number and Walmart.com has its own, the channels end up bidding against each other. With one shared goal, budget can go to whatever is most profitable or scaling best right now, including specific items or categories.
Whole Foods and the digital shelf
Amazon bought Whole Foods years ago, but Arvizu says real integration has only happened in the last year. For a long time the two were “church and state”: Amazon had a sophisticated bidding structure that couldn’t be extended into Whole Foods. Now those walls are down, so brands can plan how they show up in store and see where customers actually discover a product.
Often that’s the digital shelf. If a brand can’t get traction because its aisle is crowded, digital can drive the trial and turns that the shelf can’t. How much that matters depends on the category. Some categories have loyal repeat buyers; in others a brand has to win on taste or have a strong promo and price story to bring customers back.
Reporting versus insight
The standard reports — ROAS, TACoS, new-to-brand — are where Arvizu starts, not where she stops. The insight comes from layering on more: Subscribe & Save as a sign of long-term repeat purchase, and lifetime value, which Amazon Marketing Cloud reports now make available after years of it being hard to see. Without those numbers, a strong ROAS might just reflect a customer who buys once in a while.
What to measure depends on the goal: growth from a new product is a different problem from growth in existing ones, and how much upper funnel a brand will accept determines how far it can move away from short-term ROAS. That upper funnel is now trackable. A brand can reach a shopper with a TV ad, follow up with DSP once they’re aware, and close with lower-funnel clicks on social, Amazon, and Walmart, learning along the way what that customer is interested in and what else they shop for.
Plan for the long term
For attribution, Arvizu separates short-term goals from long-term ones. The cost of an inconsistent brand is real: she describes looking at a TikTok-heavy brand and not recognizing it as the same one she’d just bought, so she had to learn the brand all over again. A consistent brand story, built toward goals six months out, is worth more than optimizing month to month — and month-to-month planning leaves you without an answer when leadership asks how many new customers you brought in this year and how many you kept.
The best finance partner she ever had gave her a margin to hit and, within it, room to scale with no fixed ceiling. They checked in monthly and pulled back only if the numbers slipped. It was the best relationship she’s had with a finance team and produced the biggest numbers of her career: close to 100% year-over-year growth for multiple years.
The best seller that was losing money
Bryan’s advice to brands is to share as much as possible with their agency partners. Arvizu has a recent example of why. One of her most successful brands this year had a number one item that made up more than 25% of sales and wasn’t profitable. The agency couldn’t know that until the brand shared what was on its books. Once it did, the team reframed every campaign around the most profitable item, which became the new number one, and the brand turned fully profitable within months.
Getting started on Amazon
For brands that are curious about Amazon, Arvizu’s first tip is to build the listing out properly instead of rushing it live with a few bullet points and images. That used to be enough, but advertising costs on Amazon have gone up a lot in the last five years. Amazon’s AI creative tool is a decent way to get something done quickly, but a clean, considered product page makes every ad dollar go further and makes the brand feel legitimate.
For founders who aren’t writers, she suggests recording yourself describing the brand, giving that to an AI tool, and playing a few tools against each other. A $50 monthly subscription is far cheaper than a copywriter and creative director. Her caution is that AI has no personality: copy that leans on it too much won’t take a stand. The passion has to come from a human who owns the vision.
Getting more from your agency
Arvizu’s parting advice has one half for each side. Brands should ask their agency what it would do if they were starting from scratch, because campaigns that are going “semi well” tend to keep running and better ideas never come up. Agencies should ask what they could do better, and listen. One client told her they wanted fewer meetings and, instead, a weekly note on what went wrong and how it would be fixed. Once the agency worked that way, the relationship got much better.
Sound Bites
- “I might have the funds to run campaigns, but I didn’t have the creatives to actually pull through something successful.”
- “There will be a million more iterations in our lifetime driven by AI, or driven by the things we might not want.”
- “The value now is vastly greater than what you could even plan out in the past, which is really fun to play with.”
- “Once the cogs are moving, if you change something, it is so hard to recreate that exact momentum that you had.”
- “We’re not successful without our clients being successful.”
- “It might be literally a 180 from the direction you’re going right now.”
The Chord take
It’s easy to hear this conversation as a retail media update — Whole Foods opening up, DSP getting more measurable, Amazon’s new AI tools. The bigger point is that every one of those levers depends on what you can see. A brand can’t move budget to its most profitable channel if each channel is graded on its own number. It can’t scale a hero product if it doesn’t know the product loses money. And an agency can’t optimize for margin if it only sees ROAS. Arvizu’s best results — a top seller turned profitable, years of near-doubling growth — came when brand, agency, and finance worked from the same numbers and the same goal. In a multi-channel world where no report is pixel-perfect, the advantage goes to teams that share one view of the business and use it to make decisions.
Put it to work
- 1Check product-level profitability against product-level ad spend. If your best seller isn’t your most profitable item, decide on purpose whether to keep buying volume with it — and tell your agency either way.
- 2Replace channel-by-channel revenue targets with one shared goal, so budget can move to the channel that’s most profitable this week without your own channels bidding against each other.
- 3Add retention signals to your retail media reporting. Pair ROAS with new-to-brand, Subscribe & Save, and LTV from Amazon Marketing Cloud so a high-ROAS, low-repeat customer doesn’t pass as a win.
- 4If you sell in grocery, test the digital shelf where your physical aisle is crowded, and use the newer Amazon–Whole Foods integration to see where shoppers actually discover your product.
- 5Ask finance for a margin guardrail instead of a fixed budget. Room to scale within an agreed margin protects momentum that is hard to rebuild once it stalls.
- 6Before spending more on Amazon ads, upgrade the product page. Use AI tools to draft and compare copy, but keep a human in charge of the brand’s voice and point of view.
- 7This week, ask your agency what they’d do differently if you were starting from scratch — and ask how they’d like you to report what isn’t working.
Full transcriptShow ↓
Bryan Mahoney
Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the Brilliant Commerce Podcast, where I get a chance to sit down with some of the brightest minds in commerce today behind what I like to call iconic or next-to-be-iconic brands. And my guest today is no exception to that rule. Joining me today is Chelsie Arvizu, who is the Senior Director of Retail Ops and Marketing at Drive PG, an Amazon DSP–focused agency working at the intersection of digital advertising and in-store retail growth. Chelsie, it's so great to have you here.
Chelsie Arvizu
It's so great to be here. I'm excited to continue our conversation and dig into the differences between brand and agency a little bit.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, we're going to unpack all of that. Let's get warmed up. My first question is normally, where am I finding you today? But I've cheated — I know where you are. You are in Spain, days after Spain won the World Cup. So where are you normally when you're not in Spain?
Chelsie Arvizu
Normally I'm in Austin, Texas. I relocated there about three years ago with the great migration out of California.
Bryan Mahoney
And how has it been in Spain? Is this a great European summer vacation for you? I don't think you could have picked a better country, given what happened in the World Cup.
Chelsie Arvizu
No, it's been really wonderful. Obviously, we didn't really have a choice of which team we were going to be cheering on while we're here, so it was really cool to see them go all the way. A fun fact we learned while we were here: they don't overly celebrate every win. They really held off until they won the World Cup to go over the top, which was really cool to see.
Bryan Mahoney
I like that. I think we can maybe draw an analogy to the right way to celebrate wins inside our daily jobs. It's important to celebrate, but don't celebrate prematurely. Wait until you know you've accomplished what you set out to do.
Chelsie Arvizu
Absolutely. I think they did it right, and they definitely celebrated. They had the parade on a Monday, I think, which is kind of wild that it was that quickly after.
Bryan Mahoney
Well, maybe they had a feeling they were going to win. Proper planning, I guess — you've got to be ready for everything. Chelsie, I had a bunch of fun doing my research getting ready for this podcast. As I said to you during the warm-up, I love having an opportunity to speak with folks who have made this transition, either from brand side to agency side or vice versa. Sometimes I talk to people who have done it on multiple occasions — they've worked brand side, gone to an agency, then left the agency to go back to a brand. So I don't think the grass is necessarily greener on one side than the other. I think it's amazing to build that perspective over the span of your career, either working very deep on one particular brand or having the opportunity at an agency to work with a number of incredible brands. And when I said I sit down with folks who have been at or are currently at iconic brands, you definitely check an awful lot of those boxes. So before you got to the agency side, you had an opportunity to work with some incredible brands. Maybe take a minute or two and talk to me about that career arc. What did you do that ultimately led you to where you are today?
Chelsie Arvizu
Yeah, so I started on the brand side and spent the last, gosh, twelve to fifteen years working through that. I started on the marketing side, but really focused in on my love of ecommerce. The speed at which it changes your day-to-day, and the interesting people you have to interact with — you work with everybody within the company. It's almost like a subcompany within a company. So it kept me on my toes and was super fascinating to me. I went through Hint, which was a super fast riser, and then I went over to Ripple, which was a super fast riser on the dairy-alternative side of the business.
Chelsie Arvizu
To be honest, I never thought I'd leave. I think a lot of people on the brand side find that love of growing something, and you're so deeply devoted to it. But I found myself laid off with 50% of the company, and DPG was actually one of our agencies of record at the company. They gave me the opportunity to build out the retail arm of DPG. It was so fascinating to me, because when you work with agencies, you do see the misses — what you would like to see from the brand side — and I really thought I could give something there. It was a little scary. Once you get in the flow of what you know and you're successful at it, jumping is hard. But overall it's been really wonderful to take what I saw as misses in some of my agency partnerships and try to fill in that gap. The big one is a lot of the gaps when it comes to budgeting — where the CFOs tend to put the buckets, and where there are sometimes misses, which is in the creative. That was a big one I always had: I might have the funds to run campaigns, but I didn't have the creatives to actually pull through something successful. So that's been a big passion focus within DPG.
Bryan Mahoney
That's amazing. I'm sure you'd seen the hashtag agency life for years leading up to this transition. Now that you're on the agency side, is hashtag agency life living up to what you expected? What surprised you the most?
Chelsie Arvizu
I think it's how many hats people have to wear on the agency side. You really have to be devoted to each of the brands and get to know them all separately, but then you're flipping between those hats constantly. But agency life, I feel, isn't vastly different from startup culture, if you love that. I feel like they're kind of one and the same — super fast-paced and exciting. Everything's changing.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, that's interesting. I obviously now work at a startup, and prior to this startup I ran an agency for twenty years. I hadn't actually thought about how similar that was. Even an agency twenty years in still had that kinetic energy you find in a startup. So, hashtag startup life, agency life — that's really honest, and I like your answer. To me, the hallmark of a great agency is one that really cares about the brand and is really curious. You're working in a way where you're quite embedded in that brand, versus an agency that shows up with a playbook, where your brand doesn't matter as much as their ability to deploy the playbook. One of the things you said earlier, and I want to bring us back there, is the speed at which ecommerce moves. For outsiders — people who haven't really worked in commerce or ecommerce before — it can feel like, well, isn't ecommerce solved? Didn't we solve ecommerce fifteen years ago? Isn't it the slow-moving thing? But your point of view is that ecommerce is moving quickly and always evolving. How would you course-correct that misnomer — that ecommerce is something we solved a long time ago, when perhaps we're still in the early innings of what it is as a channel?
Chelsie Arvizu
Yeah, to me ecommerce will always evolve. There's always that next way we're trying to shop, or to reach customers, or make it more seamless. If everybody thinks back to the first time they purchased a product online, you might not have received an email that said whether the order went through, and you might have waited two or three weeks for that first product to come to your door. Really, it was Amazon that vastly changed the landscape of what we expect from the ecommerce space, but they're not going to be the be-all and end-all. We have people utilizing AI, so now people are having to restructure their websites so AI agents can shop for consumers. Live streaming — we keep trying to push it, but it's nowhere near where Asia has it. So we still have that whole frontier to make it through. The way it evolves will continue to change, and I think there will be a million more iterations in our lifetime driven by AI, or driven by the things we might not want. Maybe we get annoyed with our phones for a while and it goes back to QVC. Who knows? But it's going to evolve over time based on what makes this easiest, what customers want, and what their shopping experience is.
Bryan Mahoney
Well, if you have a crystal ball there — if we get annoyed with our phones — I'll put my hand up right now and tell you that I'm very annoyed with mine. I have a twelve-year-old daughter who is lobbying every single day for a phone, and I'm like, I don't think you understand the favor we're doing for you by saying no. Hold out as long as you can.
Chelsie Arvizu
Have you not caved in for those landlines that are super popular now?
Bryan Mahoney
I'm so nostalgic about the phone calls we used to have as kids on the landline, and then your family would pick up and you're like, I'm on the phone, I'm on the phone!
Chelsie Arvizu
And you knew everybody's parents.
Bryan Mahoney
Yes, exactly. So, I'm with you — ecommerce continues to change. And I would imagine now, sitting on the agency side and going back to this idea of multiple hats, you have the ability to experiment with some of these emerging channels as things change. They might not always be the right fit for every brand, but you can test and see, and then make recommendations to the brands you're working with: we're actually seeing a lot of traction in this motion. Maybe it's live shopping, maybe it's deepening a partnership with Amazon or expanding into Whole Foods. My understanding of Drive PG is that you're very well known for your relationship with Amazon and that expertise. So what's next for you there, and for some of the brands you're working with?
Chelsie Arvizu
Yeah, we were originally founded on the Amazon relationship, and in the last two years we've really evolved to touch different marketplaces, but more importantly to touch the landscape of Google and Meta, because everything works well together. There's also the amount of technology we're layering on now — things happen that are outside our purview, where we don't know why it's happening or what a quick solve might be. So having the capability to quickly move — say something's going on in Amazon — funds over to your Google campaigns, your Meta campaigns, maybe your Walmart campaigns, allows everything to work together. That's something I've been a big advocate of since getting into ecommerce: not having specific channels where DTC has to hit this number and Walmart.com has to hit that number, and then you're just bidding against each other in the platforms. When you have one number everybody's trying to achieve across that landscape, you can move funds to where it's most profitable. You can move it to where you're seeing the ability to scale, or to where you're seeing success in specific items or categories, and you get a lot more flexibility in driving success for those clients.
Bryan Mahoney
One of the things I'm less familiar with — you're talking about the ability to move funds between digital channels, where more often than not the purchase is made online. As I think about Amazon, and specifically Amazon's relationship with Whole Foods, where there's in-store placement, there's a balancing act between a digital ad and the in-store transactions it drives. How important is that to the business? How many brands come to you and your team and say, help us figure this out, and what traction are you seeing there? Because if my numbers are right, Whole Foods is opening a bunch of new retail locations, so suddenly there's a lot more shelf space up for grabs. How do we make sure we're on the right shelves at the right time, but, crucially, that we're reaching the right customers and driving them to those stores?
Chelsie Arvizu
Yeah, great question, especially because even though Amazon bought Whole Foods quite a while ago, it's really been in the last year that there's been a much larger, more seamless integration. It was kind of church and state for a very long time. You had this incredible bidding structure on the Amazon side, and you couldn't fully extend it to the Whole Foods side. In the last year those walls have come down, and now you can build really well-thought-through structures for how it's framed in store. On a macro, upper-funnel level, where you can't quite get the consumer data all the way down to the customer who buys it at the checkout counter, whether online or in store, it gives brands good capabilities to see where the customer finds the product. A lot of the time it's on the digital shelf. Maybe you're having a hard time getting traction because your aisle is crowded in store. Great — now you can use the digital shelf to help get those turns and drive that trial. And it depends on the category. Some categories have a very consistent user who stays with the brand, and in others you really need to be a standout performer on taste preference, or you need a really strong promo and price point story to keep that customer coming back.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah. The drive to get someone to try something, and the immediacy of what's available if they could just walk into a Whole Foods because they saw that ad, is interesting. I want to learn more about this. As those walls come down, it seems like a pretty interesting opportunity for anyone in CPG. And I imagine sometimes you're asking your brands to take a big bet. That brings me to the next thing I wanted to talk to you about: reporting versus insights. You said something earlier that I thought was really interesting — we don't say it out loud very often, but a lot of times brands are flying reasonably blind on some of these decisions. How do you and your team bridge the gap between reporting and insights in a way that drives accountability? We're going to hold hands and make a big bet here — how are we going to report on that progress, and how are we going to keep each other accountable for the successes, or the tweaks we need to make to some of those bets?
Chelsie Arvizu
Yeah. There's the general reporting I think we're all used to from the last twenty years: the ROAS, the TACoS, maybe new-to-brand. Then you get into the layering, which is where you start pulling in insights and telling the story. For Amazon, there's the Subscribe & Save number — a long-term signal if your product is something people can click into and get repeatedly. LTV is finally something we can get from our AMC reports, which was behind a wall for a long time. Without that, you're only telling part of the story. You might have the strongest ROAS, but maybe that's a customer who only buys every so often, and that's what's keeping the ROAS strong. So when you pull all of these together, there are a few things to know from your customer that get away from the traditional view. Where do you want to see growth? Is it a new product? Because that's a totally different way of thinking than existing products. The other part is the appetite for upper funnel, which pulls away from the tried-and-true ROAS. Everybody loves to see a short-term ROAS, but as you go upper funnel, you cast your net wide. What are the opportunities there, especially with Amazon media and some of these digital media platforms? You used to just hope for the best, or maybe look at your Google rankings and searches to see what your TV ads were doing, or, if it was driving to a specific store, how those retail sales improved. Now you can truly track people through the funnel. You can hit them with a TV ad. Great — now that they've seen it and they're aware, you can deploy your DSP ads, which give a bit more insight. Then you layer in the final few CPCs on your socials, your Amazon retail, your Walmart retail, so you're painting the full picture of that customer — what they're interested in, what categories they might be shopping in — in a way you never could before. The value now is vastly greater than what you could even plan out in the past, which is really fun to play with.
Bryan Mahoney
And with all of these channels, I'd imagine it can be exhausting to log into each one and pull their reports, because each is going to paint the rosiest picture possible for that channel. But if I'm understanding you correctly, these channels need to be complementary. Someone might see a TV ad here, see the product on a shelf somewhere, and ultimately buy it somewhere else. So is it fair to say that what matters is a holistic view of how the channels are performing, with the right amount of editorial around it? Because it can't be pixel-perfect — truly, it can't be, especially when we're operating in a multi-channel world. Given your experience on the brand side and now the agency side, what's your point of view on the right investment to make in getting that source of truth for channel attribution?
Chelsie Arvizu
Yeah, I think there are two parts: a short-term and a long-term goal, and that pulls apart the different attribution models. Think about some brands, especially TikTok brands, that have so many influencers or ads going. There are a million times when I'm like, I think I just bought this brand, but this looks so different from what I bought. Then I go look, and okay, it is the same brand. Think about how many times that happens to people and the cost of it, because they're having to relearn something. So figure out your overall goal and how you get there, and build out those building blocks, making sure as you go that it feels like a consistent brand and a consistent brand story, building up to whatever it is, even six months down the line. That's far more valuable than shooting month to month with a goal only for that month. That's where you can lose sight of what you're building toward over the next few months, and you won't see the long-term gains. When the leadership team comes to you and says, okay, how many new customers have you brought in this year? How many did we retain from last year? — you might not have the whole story to tell, because you've been pulling apart each month. And on the brand side, I think we've all done this at some point: you get excited about a creative, or a great influencer says yes to your brand, and it goes off the path you'd planned, and you have to figure out how to pull it back in.
Bryan Mahoney
Planning is guessing. Every project manager I've ever worked with hates me when I say that. But planning is guessing. And if you have a good reporting infrastructure in place and a good channel strategy, being nimble and able to react is a secret weapon for sure.
Chelsie Arvizu
Yeah. One of the best CFOs — the best finance people — I ever had gave me a margin I had to hit, and as long as we were within it, we had, per se, unlimited scalability. Not having to do the balancing act — I'm going to pull from this because that's running out — really allowed the momentum and the gains to keep going and going. I know it's hard to plan for, and I don't know how he managed it on his side other than on a monthly basis. We'd go, hey, this is how much I think I'm going to hit, and obviously if we're not there, I'll scale back. But that allowed for the best working relationship I ever had with a finance team, and it was the biggest numbers I've ever hit in my career — almost 100% year over year for multiple years. If any businesses listening have that capability, I think it was one of the most successful models, because you're not always reining things in when they're going well. Once the cogs are moving, if you change something, it is so hard to recreate that exact momentum.
Bryan Mahoney
I think that's a really interesting framework. What I'm hearing is that you're orchestrating across these channels and you need visibility into how they're working. Some of it is written in pencil, and some parts are written in pen: we can orchestrate within these boundaries as long as we're hitting these margin targets. You and the marketing team have a certain job to do, and the finance team is there to keep you accountable. And it's really interesting for brands to be able to share that with their agency partners. Sometimes we feel like we don't want to share too much, like part of this needs to be a secret sauce. But 'one team, one dream' is the advice I normally give. If you want to get the most out of the partners you're working with, share as much as possible, get on the same page, align those incentives. If you can do that and you find a partner who's curious about your brand, you can do some really tremendous things together.
Chelsie Arvizu
Absolutely. The more barriers you take down between the two, the more you find you can achieve. This year, one of our most successful brands — their number one item was not profitable, and it made up over 25% of their sales. We're not even halfway through the year, but we focused on changing that, and they are now completely profitable. We took their most profitable item and made it their number one item. Without that knowledge, obviously, we couldn't know that was happening on their books. As soon as we had it, we were able to reframe all of our campaigns and how we were thinking about their business — because obviously, we're not successful without our clients being successful.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah. And sometimes you can choose to lose money on a certain product if it's getting customers in the door. But making those decisions with that visibility and accountability is ultimately key. I want to shift gears a little. Selfishly — and I don't mean to put you all in the box of just being Amazon experts, but you are Amazon experts — I talk to an awful lot of brands, and I think a lot of people listening are Amazon-curious, whether that's having their products on Amazon or shifting more of their ad spend to Amazon, because it has an incredible built-in audience and has been releasing new tools. You've already talked about the walls coming down between Amazon and Whole Foods. They also recently rolled out an AI creative assistant. I'm curious whether you and the team have hands-on experience with that, or what you'd tell someone listening who's Amazon-curious but hasn't dipped their toes all the way in. How would you get started? Is there a particular tool you think is especially promising that they should focus on?
Chelsie Arvizu
Yeah, I think the first thing is building it out right. Sometimes people just want to get it live, put up a few quick bullet points, and throw some images up. You used to be able to get away with that a lot more, but the cost of advertising on Amazon has gone up significantly, even since five years ago. So the beginning is really just taking those extra moments — or even, as you said, going into the AI creative tool, which is actually pretty good for someone who wants to get something done quickly. You can put it in and get something you can definitely make worthy of your PDP. But taking those extra few moments to do something that feels very clean and very present, not just a manufacturer putting up a product, is probably the number one thing I'd tell anybody starting their business today. It makes your dollar go farther. It makes people more invested in your overall brand. It gives you legitimacy, and then people want to get to know you a little more. That would definitely be my number one tip. And there are so many tools now. Maybe you're not the best copywriter — even if you're not a good writer, just sit down and record yourself talking. What do you want your brand to look like? What do you imagine for it? Throw that into any AI tool and put a few of them up against each other. If you don't like something ChatGPT says, great — go, hey Claude, I didn't like this part of the ChatGPT version, how would you reframe it or make it better? You have all these tools in your hands. Yes, some of them cost a little, but $50 a month on some of these platforms is vastly cheaper than hiring your own copywriter and creative director. So for people looking to build a brand, there's so much you can do without having the actual expertise anymore.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah. Or being stuck — having writer's block and not being able to overcome it.
Chelsie Arvizu
If you have a vision for it, you have the tools to really put it to use and get something launched. But yes, my number one would be leaning into branding and creative off the bat. That's what will always differentiate your product.
Bryan Mahoney
I love that. I'd describe myself as an AI optimist, as long as we're using AI the way you just described — you as the human need to own the vision. Leverage the tools, use them as a thought partner, but ultimately be the steward of your brand voice and brand creative, get the right thing out there, and iterate quickly. If you're wearing multiple hats, either within a brand or at an agency on behalf of your customer, being able to use these tools to wear those hats better is not just the opportunity we have right now with this transformation — it's a responsibility, to make sure we're still putting really good work out there and not delegating all of it to AI. If we do that, we run the very real risk of everything sounding and looking the same. I've talked about this a lot — that depresses me. I don't want to buy a product from a brand where I'm like, really? Try just a little bit harder.
Chelsie Arvizu
It does. You can tell when somebody leans too hard into AI, because AI doesn't have a personality. It doesn't want to put a stake in the ground for whatever it stands for, so all the copy is like, this is good, we think you'll like it. Traditionally, if you fully believe in it — any entrepreneur you've ever met says, my product is the best product out there, I guarantee it. There's a passion that comes from a human touch that AI will never be able to recreate. So yes, it definitely needs to come from the heart, from a human directing it, with AI there for assistance.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, we're fully aligned there. Okay, as we wrap up: you've been on both sides, and the passion you have for brands is loud and clear. What's the one thing you could say to a brand today so they can call up their agency this afternoon and get even more out of the relationship? Now that you've seen both sides, what's the one thing holding brands back from having an incredible partnership with their agency of record?
Chelsie Arvizu
I'm going to do one from the brand side and one from the agency side. From the brand side, we're all a little egotistical in some way, and sometimes you don't want to override something that's already going semi well. So really ask: hey, if we were starting from scratch, if we didn't have campaigns already running or these plans, is there something you'd recommend doing differently, or a different focus you'd take? Because sometimes we keep going down the track because it's already there. There might be somebody in the room with an interesting idea, something really different from the way it's going, and it doesn't enter the chat because it's not given the room or the space to say, hey, maybe we're doing something wrong — how can we rethink this?
Bryan Mahoney
Love that.
Chelsie Arvizu
And from the agency side, I think more agencies can first ask if there's something they could be doing better — sometimes it's the line of communication. I've had a client say, I'd really like to not meet more; instead, I'd like you to tell me what went wrong this week and how we're going to do it better. Sometimes we don't want to hear what's not going great, and we wait until the end of the year or the end of the quarter. Once we made those changes, the relationship got so much better, because we were focusing on the way they like to work. I know both of those lean toward the negative side, but I do think sometimes we keep things going because they're going fine or they're already there. Really dig into what we could be doing better and whether there's a different way to do this. It might be literally a 180 from the direction you're going right now.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah. It's the confidence to take that hard look in the mirror and have those slightly uncomfortable conversations. In my experience, no news isn't always good news. That's a really interesting insight: don't wait for the end of the quarter, don't wait for the end of the retainer — have those conversations all the time. And going back to the idea of AI as an assistant, feed the results in. Results were really great this week, but what's one thing we can change? Always show up, always be curious, always find opportunities to demonstrate the work you're doing and tighten the partnership. That's what begets really long partnerships. And I love the agency–brand relationship. It's been very cyclical — I've been at brands that decided they needed to become their own agencies, and agencies go through these existential crises — but agencies are going to be around. Their ability to innovate and experiment across a number of channels and mediums will always add value on the brand side. And of course, agencies don't exist without brands, so to me it's really been this beautiful symbiotic relationship. Maybe I'll wrap us up where I started: it's always so wonderful to talk to someone who has done both and has the passion to keep doing both. Thank you so much for taking time out of your trip in Spain to join me today and share these insights. I'd love to have you back in a couple of months to talk about how the landscape continues to change, and how ecommerce continues to not just move quickly but probably accelerate.
Chelsie Arvizu
Definitely. I have a feeling we'll have a lot of AI conversations to keep building on by then.
Bryan Mahoney
Yes — maybe we'll be saying the same thing: if you're annoyed by your phone, if you're upset with your AI agent. Who knows? Right now I'm not upset. Right now I'm very enthusiastic about the work we're doing together.
Chelsie Arvizu
Definitely. Awesome. Well, thank you for having me, Bryan.
Bryan Mahoney
This was great. Thanks so much.