Laura Meyer
“Competition has become much harder, partly because companies like Estée Lauder are placing a greater emphasis on Amazon.”
Laura Meyer is the founder and CEO of Envision Horizons, a global marketplace and retail media agency serving enterprise brands across Amazon, Walmart, Target, and international markets. After witnessing brands struggle with Amazon's complex ecosystem during her time at Amazon Media Group, Laura launched what began as an Amazon-focused startup from her NYC apartment and has grown it into a strategic partner for some of the world's most iconic brands.
Laura has become a thought-leader in the eCommerce space, sharing data-driven research featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Beauty Independent, and other major publications. Laura shares her latest industry findings and insights with an audience of 20,000+ weekly newsletter readers.
Laura also serves as an advisor and angel investor to mission-driven companies. She balances running a growing agency with raising two young daughters on her farm in Massachusetts.
What's the biggest change beauty/lifestyle brands have had to deal with over the last year as they're selling on Amazon?
Three things come to mind. First, the level of competition has become much harder, partly because companies like L'Oréal or Estée Lauder are placing a greater emphasis on Amazon.
They have been bold in their Amazon investments because, in many ways, that's their growth channel right now. As that happens, the cost of customer acquisition rises.
Smaller beauty brands were able to succeed because the big brands weren't there. For years, we would conquest for skincare brands using Clinique keywords because they converted well. Now that Clinique's on the platform, you can't really use that strategy.
The second thing is the level of media investment and strategy. On Amazon, everyone is spending on paid search and easy point of access. Anyone can buy it. It's at the bottom of the funnel, so there's direct attribution.
We're actually seeing more brands getting educated and investing in the mid and upper funnel. That's a different skill set incorporating Amazon DSP or layering Amazon Marketing Cloud capabilities and insights.
But the thing with DSP is you can't just go out and buy it. You either have to partner with an ad tech platform or work with an agency like Envision Horizons, which has its own DSP agency seat. Or you can buy it directly through Amazon.
The third piece is the importance of creative. For a long time, brands made the mistake of just uploading whatever e-commerce images they had in their Dropbox to Amazon. Now with AI, you can do a lot more personalization and customization.
What's an advertising or tech buzzword you can't stand?
Growth hacks. It's gimmicky and I can't stand it. A hack typically walks a gray area legally and ethically, and it usually isn't scalable.
We'll have brands who come to us and ask, "How do we growth hack getting more reviews?" You can't. We're not breaking rules here. I'm not going down that slippery slope. And I get it, as an entrepreneur, you do have to be scrappy in the early days.
But I'm happy to see a change in business culture away from the growth hack period that took place between around 2015 to 2021. There's just too much to risk. And now, a lot of customers can read through slimy tactics or gamifying some aspects of growth. If "Growth Hack Ninja" is in a person's LinkedIn title, I go the other way.
“A lot of businesses are going to make 90-degree turns to have AI agents replace people in an attempt to find more scale. But the reality is, you still can't really use AI to build a strategy pitch deck.”
The Amazon ecosystem changes so quickly. How do you keep up with the evolution?
There are so many elements of Amazon in play, from keeping up with requirements for FBA fulfillment to what's going on with advertising, down to the character limits for product detail pages. The span of terms and services is ever-changing, so we have a few ways of approaching it.
On a weekly basis, we're reporting on what's new. We send out a weekly newsletter and I give a huge kudos to Tristan, who runs our content, because she scours the internet for updates. If there's a policy change from Amazon, she gets notified directly.
But then we go a step further. Every other week, our client services team has something called War Room, where all the client service departments come together, and they share what's working, what's not, and what they're stuck on.
It's an all-hands collaborative sync, and we do a pop quiz on our marketing content. It's lighthearted, but it helps everyone from our account management to our media directors process what those changes are.
How will AI affect ad strategy over the next 2-3 years?
Within the Amazon ecosystem, one fear is that all this work you did for SEO, or even Amazon advertising for discoverability, will no longer be part of the customer journey.
People are asking AI, "What's the best foundation for these skin types of this skin tone? Give me a list of 10 brands or 10 products." AI is listing that out, then either linking to the D2C or to Amazon. So I'll be really curious to see how that evolves. Will AI start making money on an affiliate link to Amazon? Are there now going to be sponsored posts within the AI results?
The tedious and tactical work that's required in any marketing or e-commerce role is going to get automated. But the soul of marketing, the creativity, the original concepts, that is where humans must play a role. If all creative ideas come from AI, then we're all going to be producing and spitting out the same messaging.
You still need a strategy leader. A lot of businesses are going to make 90-degree turns to have AI agents replace people in an attempt to find more scale. But the reality is, you still can't really use AI to build a strategy pitch deck.
AI enables people to do the work that they get most excited about, versus running queries or building tables within Excel to find answers. We'll be able to get the answers quickly with AI, and then do something creative with it.
Has your language about Envision Horizons itself shifted recently? Do partners respond to a particular style of communication as you explain your services?
We update our sales pitch deck every six to nine months to stay current with changes. We're really grateful to our prospects, even those whose business we don't win, because the majority of the time they provide us with feedback as to why. Those post-mortem conversations, where you put your feelings and ego aside, are invaluable.
Our pitches and marketing language used to be very tactical. This is how you do this, this is how you set it up, here is the outcome. The board of a conglomerate doesn't care about that. They care about P&L and our value proposition, not conversion rates and managing the PPC.
We're discussing the financial side of the business more, rather than the tactical marketing practices. We present a story arc about what we're trying to do strategically, rather than a list of percentages.
Give us a solid book recommendation.
A book I always like to revisit is by Stephen Swartzman, the CEO of Blackstone Group. He wrote a book called What It Takes, and there's a quote that always stuck with me:
"If you're going to commit yourself to something, it's as easy to do something big as it is to do something small. You will suffer the same toll financially and psychologically as you bludgeon it into existence. So if you're going to dedicate your life to a business ... you should choose one with the potential to be huge."
It's easy to have limiting beliefs. I can only build a business of this size. I don't have a fancy Harvard MBA. Self-doubt creeps in.
However, the reality is that whether you run a billion-dollar business, a million-dollar business, or a hundred-thousand-dollar business, you still have to deal with HR, finance, sales, and marketing. The problems at scale are a little bit bigger, but you're still dealing with them, so you might as well go big.