The Licensed Toy Launch That Held CPCs at $0.22 Through the Movie Window
Overview
This case study covers a globally recognized licensed toy brand with a tentpole movie release tied to its flagship character IP scheduled for Q2 2026. While the brand carried decades of cultural recognition and shoppers already knew the franchise on sight, the Amazon account had been dark for roughly five to six months ahead of the movie window: no active campaigns, no recent search-term data, no momentum to inherit.
Our team identified that the issue wasn't demand creation; it was demand capture. With the movie acting as a built-in pull on the catalog, paying premium CPCs to "build awareness" would have meant teaching the algorithm something it could already infer from brand recognition alone. To unlock scalable growth, we built an awareness-led, upper-funnel-only structure aligned to the known release window across five marketplaces — US, UK, Germany, France, and Spain — and measured against total revenue rather than ad-attributed sales alone.
Our team built the campaign around harvest-first auto campaigns at deliberately low bids, refusing to bid up on the obvious head terms even as competitive pressure climbed.
The result: auto-campaign CPCs as low as $0.10 during harvest, a campaign-average CPC of $0.22 through peak, and a US flagship market that delivered a 7.29x ROAS at 13.72% ACoS on $39,554 of PPC spend.
Total revenue tracked at $602,684 (more than 2x ad-attributed sales) confirming that the awareness-led approach compounded into organic demand, rather than cannibalizing it.
The Challenge
Despite carrying decades of brand recognition and a built-in demand pull from the upcoming movie release, the catalog faced structural and timing constraints that made aggressive bidding the wrong move:
- Dormant account with no momentum, with five to six months of zero ad activity, no recent search-term data, and no historical learnings to scale on
- Fixed-date tentpole movie release in Q2 2026, compressing the entire awareness-build-and-capture window into roughly six weeks before the launch peak
- Five-marketplace coverage required across US, UK, Germany, France, and Spain, each with different demand maturity and reporting infrastructure
- Tightly capped budget under $40,000 in PPC spend across the catalog through the movie window, ruling out aggressive top-of-search bidding entirely
- Crowded licensed-toy competitive set, with multiple sellers bidding hard on character keywords — the obvious move most agencies would have made
- No client-set ROAS or ACoS targets, only spend control and a Q2 revenue number, meaning the team owned the strategic call on how to deploy
Together, these dynamics meant that the conventional “outspend the field” playbook would have burned the budget without buying meaningful incremental visibility. The brand already owned the demand. The job was to capture it cleanly.
The Approach
AWARENESS-LED, UPPER-FUNNEL POSITIONING
We rejected the category-default move of bidding aggressively on character head terms. The IP carried decades of cultural recognition; trying to "build awareness" would have meant paying premium CPCs to teach the algorithm something brand recognition could deliver organically. Instead, we structured the campaign upper-funnel only, letting the impending movie release pull demand through a cleanly positioned catalog rather than forcing it through a bidding war.
HARVEST-FIRST CAMPAIGN ARCHITECTURE
Auto campaigns launched at deliberately low bids with one job: surface the search terms shoppers were already using ahead of the movie window. From the harvest, terms with two or more orders graduated into a tightly scoped phrase-match layer. Nothing else was promoted up. This kept the harvest layer clean and made the inevitable scale-phase decisions evidence-based rather than speculative.
SIGNAL-DRIVEN ASIN PRIORITIZATION
As the launch window approached, spend shifted onto the ASINs and search terms that earned it through harvest-phase performance. The team did not pre-decide the winners. The data picked them, and what surfaced was counterintuitive: the breakout product was not the franchise's headline hero. It was the signature villain ASIN, which led the catalog on every meaningful axis with an 8.75x ROAS at 11.43% ACoS.
TOTAL-REVENUE MEASUREMENT FRAMEWORK
We measured against total revenue rather than ad-attributed sales alone. PPC attribution understates the business impact of an awareness-led campaign for a brand that already pulls organic demand. By tracking total revenue, we captured the compound effect of paid feeding organic, and surfaced a more-than-2x gap between the two in the US flagship market that justified the upper-funnel-only approach.
Our Results
Held average CPCs at $0.22 through the most competitive window of the year, with auto-campaign floors as low as $0.10 during the harvest phase
Delivered 7.29x ROAS at 13.72% ACoS in the US flagship market on $39,554 of PPC spend, generating $288,223 in ad-attributed sales and $602,684 in total revenue
Surfaced an unexpected catalog breakout (the franchise's signature villain ASIN ) that delivered 8.75x ROAS at 11.43% ACoS, outperforming the franchise's flagship hero on sales, units, and order volume
Sustained efficiency across international markets, with the UK delivering a 9.41x ROAS and Germany delivering 6.9x against a tightly capped multi-market budget
Surpassed the client's Q2 revenue target ahead of period close, with total revenue compounding at more than 2x the ad-attributed sales figure across the flagship market