How Marshall Helped ZUP to Drive Revenue and Outmaneuver Competitors Using AI-Powered Insights
Short, seasonal windows like summer can make or break a brand’s momentum. On Amazon, knowing where your competitors are missing the mark—underserved audiences, weak messaging, overlooked placements—opens the door for sharper, more efficient targeting.
These types of insights help brands shift strategy faster and win more often. Increasingly, teams are turning to generative AI to pull performance signals from complex data and uncover growth opportunities in real time.
Challenge: Tight windows demand faster decisions
ZUP, known for its innovative water sports boards, depends on a short selling season from June through August. Spotting trends early is critical. As spring 2025 kicked off, their media agency, Marshall, was already planning for peak season. But building a full picture of past performance and competitive dynamics through manual, fragmented data pulls was slow and left gaps.
In Amazon’s high-speed marketplace, sticking to manual review meant important insights could be missed, costing ZUP visibility and return when it mattered most. Marshall needed a faster and clearer way to uncover untapped opportunities. So they turned to Skai’s Celeste AI, a generative AI tool built for the pace and complexity of commerce media.
Solution: From buried data to bold moves
With Celeste AI fully integrated into the Skai platform, Marshall had fast access to historical performance insights across ZUP’s campaigns. The team prompted Celeste to review last season’s data, looking closely at how broad match keywords performed. A generic term like “waterboard” could trigger all sorts of searches—finding the strongest ones manually would take hours.
Prompt: When looking at all search terms compared to the same period last year, what terms are missed opportunities where spend is down compared to last year on high-performing terms?
Celeste found a clear gap: among broad match keywords like “waterboard,” the term “kids waterboard” was quietly outperforming “adult waterboard” across conversion, engagement, and ROAS. The signal was there, but too deep in the data to easily catch without AI.
Marshall moved fast. They updated positioning in April, shifting part of the strategy to speak more directly to families and parents. Using Skai’s Competitive Insights, they refined keywords and conquesting strategies to target the youth segment that their competitors hadn’t prioritized.
Acting early gave them a runway. Marshall refreshed Sponsored Product, Sponsored Brand, and Sponsored Brand Video campaigns—and Amazon’s GenAI creative tools sped up asset development with visuals that leaned into the family angle, showcasing ZUP boards packed in with kids’ summer gear.
Results
Celeste AI didn’t just streamline reporting—it helped Marshall act more quickly and with greater precision. They surfaced an overlooked audience, retooled the strategy, and delivered impact during ZUP’s most critical selling period, all from a single prompt.
- 44% decrease in CPCs
- 34% increase in ROI
Marshall is continuing to explore new growth plays for ZUP, including additional investment in Amazon DSP.
About Marshall
Marshall combines 50 years of retail expertise with our proprietary digital tools and your company’s capabilities to create a unique winning solution. With a proven track record building hundreds of brands and maximizing companies’ sales, this award-winning agency leverages their knowledge, relationships and the trust they’ve built with customers and clients to dynamically plan and build comprehensive strategies and solutions to address market needs.
About ZUP
Made in the USA and aimed at combining safety with unlimited fun on the water, ZUP products include an all-in-one board that incorporates multiple water toys into one eye-catching piece of equipment designed for any skill level.
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