How Colgate UK Turned Amazon Media into a Predictable Growth Engine

About

VML Marketplaces is the specialist ecommerce and retail media unit within VML, helping brands grow on platforms like Amazon by combining data science, media strategy, technology, and marketplace expertise.

The Client and the Challenge

Colgate-Palmolive UK is a leader in oral care, competing in one of the most crowded and price-sensitive categories on Amazon: toothpaste. The brand was investing heavily in Amazon media, but broad targeting and rising costs were limiting its ability to grow efficiently.

Key challenges included:

• Audience targeting that reached many low-value or low-intent shoppers.
• Inefficient media spend in a hyper-competitive category where promotions and price competition are constant.
• Unpredictable performance, making it hard to forecast growth or scale what worked.

Colgate and VML Marketplaces recognised that continuing to “reach everyone” was not sustainable. The critical question shifted from “How do we reach more people?” to “Who actually drives growth for Colgate on Amazon?”

The Big Insight

By analysing Amazon Marketing Cloud data alongside Colgate data, VML Marketplaces uncovered a pivotal finding:

Just 2% of shoppers were responsible for 82.5% of Colgate Amazon sales.

This small, high-value cohort was the engine of the Colgate Amazon business, yet media strategies were not built around them. The core problem became clear:

Growth was not a scale problem. Growth was a precision problem.

The Approach

To act on this insight, VML Marketplaces and Colgate UK designed a 5-pillar machine-learning model that scored every relevant Amazon shopper on a 0 to 100 “likelihood-to-buy” scale.

Using Amazon Marketing Cloud and Colgate inputs, the strategy centred on three big shifts:

• Identifying the highest-value 2% of shoppers and understanding their behaviours.
• Building audience tiers based on likelihood-to-buy scores.
• Prioritising bids and budget toward the shoppers most likely to convert and deliver long-term value.

Dynamic, Always-On Optimisation

The model was not static. It continuously refreshed audience scores as new signals came in, allowing the VML team to shift spend toward the best-performing cohorts while systematically reducing investment in low-likelihood audiences to minimise waste.

From the outset, the framework was built to be replicable, designed to scale across EU5 markets with local tuning for shopper behaviour and competition, and to serve as a default operating model for Colgate Amazon media, not a one-off test.

In practical terms, Colgate stopped treating Amazon like a broad awareness channel and started treating it like a precision engine, using data and machine learning to back the shoppers who matter most.

The Results

Over the 14 July to 5 August 2025 campaign period, this approach turned Amazon into a far more efficient and predictable channel for Colgate UK.

Efficiency gains:

• ROAS up 65% (+45% vs target)
• CPC down 43% (+18% vs target)
• Conversion rate up 20%, with a +8 point advantage vs the category median

Growth and long-term value:

• 24% of sales were New-to-Brand (+14% vs target), proving that precision could both retain loyal shoppers and attract valuable new ones.
• Subscribe and Save sign-ups from new users grew by 207%, locking in recurring revenue and making performance more predictable over time.

All of this was achieved while reducing media spend by 58%, spending significantly less, yet delivering significantly more.

Following the UK success, the framework was scaled across EU5 markets, where it delivered consistent gains. It is now the default operating model for Colgate Amazon media, a durable playbook, not a one-off case.

What This Nomination Means to Us

This nomination validates our belief that better outcomes start with better questions. Asking who drives growth led to an insight that fundamentally changed how Colgate invests on Amazon, not just in the UK, but across Europe. What started as a single-market test is now a scalable operating model, and that is what we are most proud of.

This recognition celebrates a simple but powerful shift: instead of trying to speak to everyone, VML Marketplaces and Colgate focused on the 2% who drive the most value and built a system around them.

That system did not just deliver a strong campaign. It changed how Colgate plans, buys, and measures Amazon media, permanently.