How CPG brands use IP collabs to win new customers on Amazon. Toy Story 5 opened to $312M globally and CPG brands with IP collabs are converting new customers fast. Here is what your Amazon partner should be doing. Eleviam Team Amazon & TikTok Shop Specialists IP licensing is now a serious customer acquisition channel for CPG brands. Toy Story 5 opened to $312 million globally in its first three-day weekend, and CPG brands that planned ahead are sitting on some of the most conversion-ready limited edition product lines of the summer. Dr. Squatch, SmartyPants, Simple Modern and Away all moved early, tying licensed SKUs to one of the highest-grossing Pixar releases in history. The brands doing this well are not just slapping a character on a label. They are engineering a multi-touchpoint acquisition funnel that runs straight through Amazon and TikTok Shop. If your brand is doing $75K or more per month on Amazon and you are watching this trend from the sidelines, you are leaving a measurable amount of new customer revenue on the table. Here is what separates the brands capturing that revenue from the ones who will restock plain packaging in September wondering why Q3 underperformed. What the Barbie and Wicked playbooks actually proved. The Barbie movie in summer 2023 generated over 100 brand collabs across apparel, beauty and personal care. Wicked and its sequel Wicked: For Good produced more than 400 brand partnerships and over $330 million in media and promotional value, with roughly 28 billion impressions in the first few months. Those numbers are not marketing fluff. They represent real shelf velocity, real search volume spikes and real new customer data flowing into brand accounts. P&G understood this. Gain laundry detergent and Dawn PowerWash both carried licensed Wicked packaging and participated in a 360-degree campaign that extended far beyond the product itself. These were not novelty plays. They were structured acquisition programs with measurable return on ad spend tied to incremental category buyers. The brands that won during those windows shared one trait: they treated the IP partnership as a full-funnel commercial event, not a branding exercise. What a strong operator should be doing with your IP drop. When Dr. Squatch launched its Toy Story 5 collection in May, including three soaps and two deodorants like the Woody-inspired Howdy Hero scent blending snake root extract with desert sage, warm vanilla and leather, the goal was explicit new customer acquisition. Their director of brand marketing described IP partnerships as a Trojan horse with new audiences. That framing is exactly right, and it tells you something important about how to evaluate whether your Amazon partner knows what to do with a moment like this. A strong operator should be executing all of the following around an IP drop: * New ASINs built with franchise-specific keyword architecture targeting both the IP audience and your existing category buyers * A+ Content and Brand Story modules updated to reflect the collab creative within 48 hours of launch * Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns segmented by audience intent, buyers searching for the IP, buyers searching for the product category and existing brand loyalists * A DSP or video campaign targeting the demographic cohort most likely to convert, in this case millennial parents who grew up with Toy Story and are now buying personal care and household products * TikTok Shop integration for the limited edition SKUs, with creator seeding timed to opening weekend and the weeks following If your current agency is not building a go-to-market plan that covers all of these vectors before a licensed product ships, you are funding a missed opportunity. The multi-generational angle is a specific targeting advantage. SmartyPants launching its first-ever licensed tie-in with Toy Story 5 branded packaging for Kids Multi and Omegas is a signal worth paying attention to. The brand did not treat this as a single SKU swap. It launched a full campaign called Fuel Their Imagination spanning social media, retail shelves, online video, podcasts and streaming video. That is a brand thinking about the licensed moment as a traffic driver across every channel where its buyer exists. Simple Modern tied its Toy Story themed lunchboxes and water bottles directly to back-to-school season, compressing two major commercial events into one purchase decision. That kind of calendar intelligence is what your Amazon and TikTok Shop partner should be bringing to every major cultural moment, not just the ones you flag yourself. The multi-generational nature of Toy Story specifically creates a rare targeting condition. You can reach millennial parents through nostalgia-driven creative while simultaneously converting their children as the primary user. That dual audience structure means your ROAS calculation on advertising spend has to account for longer lifetime value, not just first purchase return. What separates Good partners from bad ones during a trend window. Trend windows on Amazon and TikTok Shop are narrow. Search volume for a movie-driven collab peaks in the first two to four weeks post-release and decays faster than most brands expect. The brands that capture the most incremental revenue are the ones whose operator had the catalog, creative and campaign structure live before the cultural moment peaked. Three things reveal whether your partner is built for this kind of execution. First, do they have a process for identifying cultural moments 60 to 90 days in advance and building commercial plans around them. Second, do they control enough of your Amazon account infrastructure to move quickly without waiting for approvals on every asset. Third, do they have TikTok Shop creator relationships that can be activated in days rather than weeks. Eleviam manages Amazon and TikTok Shop as a connected system, not two separate channels. When a brand brings a licensed SKU or a limited edition drop, the commercial plan runs across both platforms with aligned inventory positioning and coordinated ad spend. That alignment is what turns a cultural moment into a Q3 revenue event rather than a footnote in a post-mortem. Running $75k+/month on Amazon or TikTok Shop? Book a free 30-minute audit call and Eleviam, Inc.'ll show you exactly where the margin is leaking.

Skai's 2026 US ShopAble Media Awards recognize the brands and agencies leading media into the agentic age. SAN FRANCISCO, CA - May 13, 2026 - Skai, the leading omnichannel platform for commerce media, just announced the winners of its 2026 US ShopAble Media Awards. The awards honor consumer goods brands and agencies for outstanding results achieved through Skai's platform. As marketing enters the age of agentic AI, brands and agencies face a new set of demands: acting on data faster, coordinating across more channels, and building the operational infrastructure to let AI work alongside human teams. This year's ShopAble Media Awards winners distinguished themselves through rigorous, results-driven use of Skai, from deploying AI-powered diagnostics across entire agency portfolios to turning CTV exposure into a direct path to conversion. The outcomes speak for themselves. This year's winners: * Code3 won the Celeste AI Pioneer (Agency) award for using Skai's purpose-built GenAI agent across forecasting, new-to-brand analysis, reporting, and optimization to unlock hidden revenue opportunities on Amazon Ads. * DoorDash was recognized with the Celeste AI Pioneer (Brand) award for lifting conversions 18%, reducing CPA by 22.9%, and surfacing inefficient budget allocation using Celeste AI for predictive diagnostics. * WPP Media earned the Omnichannel Retail Media Excellence award for achieving up to 292% media efficiency for Church & Dwight, with signals from Skai's Incremental API integration flowing automatically into media buying decisions across multiple brands and retailers. * Opella was honored with the Commerce Data Excellence award for driving a 23% revenue lift by leveraging Skai's Profitero+ integration to power data-driven, real-time bid optimization. * Grain Group won the award for Full-Funnel Amazon Excellence (Agency) for pioneering the first sequential full-funnel architecture built on Skai's CTV Center, delivering an 85% revenue lift and 53+ million impressions for Cambio Roasters. * Dr. Squatch was awarded Full-Funnel Amazon Excellence (Brand) for rewiring its Amazon growth strategy with Skai, combining automation, competitive intelligence, and DSP to unlock smarter full-funnel growth. * The Estée Lauder Companies received the Search Shopping Excellence award for using Skai's PMax Asset Optimizer to uncover underperforming copy lines, refresh creative faster, and turn hidden inefficiencies into stronger returns. * Elliet Ross, Marketplaces Sr. Specialist at Tinuiti, was named Skai Champion of the Year (Agency) for her commitment to continuous testing, optimizing, and helping others win while remaining curious, competitive, and always one step ahead. * Carolyn Nagele, ECommerce & Shopper Marketing Manager at Hormel Foods, was named Skai Champion of the Year (Brand) for helping shape the roadmap, embracing new capabilities early, unlocking smarter growth with Celeste AI, and driving adoption of Competitive Insights higher by 3,000%. "This year's honorees show what it looks like when leading brands and agencies move from talking about AI to actually leveraging it," said Stephanie Herndon-Rasse, Chief Customer Officer at Skai. "They brought creativity, diligence, and real strategic thinking to their work, and the results reflect that. Congratulations to the winners of the 2026 US ShopAble Media Awards for setting a new standard of excellence in commerce media." About Skai Skai is the leading omnichannel platform for commerce media, enabling brands and agencies to connect data, insights, and execution across the world's largest publishers and retailers. Built for the agentic era, Skai's platform unifies planning, activation, measurement, and retail operations in a single integrated system. With its open architecture and AI capabilities, including commerce media agent Celeste AI and support for custom AI agents via its Model Context Protocol (MCP), Skai enables organizations to drive smarter decisions, greater efficiency, and improved performance across every channel. Trusted by over 8,000 brands and agencies, such as PepsiCo, Sanofi, Estée Lauder, Publicis, Tinuiti, and WPP, Skai integrates with more than 300 publishers and retail media networks, including Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Criteo, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and TikTok, and is headquartered in San Francisco with nine international offices. Learn more at skai.io for more information.