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— Case Study

Audience Development at Amazon

When Amazon Entertainment's primary growth funnels started drying up, the mandate was clear: build new ones. A new department and operating model, piloted first at Amazon Music, turned content, paid media, and product experience into a unified growth engine — driving +306% acquisition growth and reducing customer acquisition costs by 75% — before being scaled across the entire portfolio of businesses (Prime Video, Audible, and more).

Company Amazon
Industry Entertainment / Streaming
Scope Global
Focus Growth & Acquisition
Kendrick Lamar Pop Out Concert breaks Prime Video and Twitch streaming records
+306%
YoY Acquisition Growth
75%
Reduction in CAC
45%
Improvement in Retention
+2.8pt
Increase in Consideration
— The Situation

The Growth Funnels Were Drying Up

Amazon's historically powerful growth channels for its entertainment services — bundled distribution through Prime and Alexa — were in steep decline. The services needed entirely new acquisition funnels, and they needed them fast.

  • 1
    Primary funnels were in steep decline. The bundled distribution channels that once powered growth were shrinking rapidly — and the trend was accelerating.
  • 2
    No dedicated audience development function existed. There was no department, strategy, or operating model purpose-built for acquiring new segments of customers through rigorous growth marketing experimentation and measurement.
  • 3
    Paid marketing infrastructure was underdeveloped. The tech stack had significant gaps, campaigns ran from siloed accounts without audience suppression, and measurement was inconsistent across teams.
  • 4
    Onboarding and product experience were broken. Content-led customer experiences were essentially non-existent, sign-up flows had significant drop-off, and there was no personalization infrastructure in place.
— The Mandate
Build a new department — Audience Development — and the strategy to create entirely new growth funnels across Amazon's entertainment division.
— The Approach

Four Pillars. One Growth Engine.

The work started with customer insights: people didn't want a promotion — they wanted content. That qualitative insight reshaped the entire strategy. From there, it was about building the infrastructure across content, paid media, product experience, and retention to turn that insight into scalable, measurable growth.

01
Content-First Strategy
Shifted from promotion-led acquisition to content-led funnels built around audience insights. Developed scalable content formats and a tiering framework that prioritized campaigns based on audience alignment and investment. Moved from a handful of tentpole campaigns per quarter to an always-on cadence across niche and flagship content — dramatically increasing volume without going dark between releases.
Content & Creator Marketing →
02
Paid Media & Measurement
Rebuilt the paid marketing stack from the ground up. Centralized media management to eliminate overlapping campaigns and audience waste. Onboarded identity resolution to enable first-party lookalike audiences and retargeting cohorts. Partnered with Finance to align on unified LTV models and efficiency guardrails — ensuring every campaign was measured the same way.
Growth & Lifecycle Marketing →
03
Product Experience & Onboarding
Redesigned the onboarding experience end-to-end to reduce friction and improve personalization. Replaced manual taste collection with contextual signals — dynamically personalizing the experience based on the content that brought each user in. Implemented frictionless authentication, localized value propositions, and social-to-app flows that connected paid creative directly to in-product experiences.
Growth & Lifecycle Marketing →
04
Retention & Churn Reduction
Built coordinated retention interventions across four dimensions: early-use optimization through improved onboarding flows, cancel-save experimentation with re-engineered cancellation paths, product stickiness improvements tied to first-session relevance, and predictive segmentation to identify at-risk users before they churned. Achieved a 40% reduction in early-tenure churn.
Growth & Lifecycle Marketing →
— Transformation

Before & After Audience Development

Before
Dependent on bundled distribution channels in steep decline
No dedicated function bridging content, product, and paid marketing teams together to drive growth
Siloed paid campaigns, no audience suppression, inconsistent measurement
Broken onboarding flows with significant user drop-off
Promotion-led messaging with generic, non-purpose-built creative
After
New growth funnels through content, paid media, and product experience
+306% YoY acquisition growth with 75% reduction in customer acquisition cost
Centralized media management with unified LTV measurement and identity resolution
Personalized onboarding with frictionless authentication and localized experiences
Content-first creative with scalable formats and always-on campaign cadence
— Results

The Numbers Tell the Story

Measurable outcomes across acquisition, efficiency, retention, and consideration.

+306%
YoY Acquisition Growth
Year-over-year growth in customer acquisition driven by the new Audience Development operating model — replacing declining bundled distribution channels with content-led, paid media, and product experience funnels.
75%
Reduction in CAC
Customer acquisition costs reduced by 75% through centralized media management, identity-based targeting, audience suppression to eliminate waste, and unified measurement frameworks aligned with Finance.
45%
Improvement in Retention
Retention improvement driven by coordinated interventions across early-use optimization, cancel-save experimentation, product stickiness improvements, and predictive segmentation for at-risk users.
+2.8pt
Increase in Consideration
Lift in consideration for Amazon's entertainment services, driven by content-first campaigns that connected cultural moments to measurable shifts in audience perception and intent across key demographics.
— Impact

From Department to Playbook

What started as a mandate to replace declining growth funnels became a full operating model for audience-led growth. The Audience Development strategy — spanning content, paid media, product experience, and retention — was formalized into a comprehensive operating document covering the campaign framework, measurement standards, and team structure.

The strategy was reviewed and approved by leadership across Amazon's Global Media & Entertainment organization and became the blueprint for scaling audience growth programs beyond music into broader entertainment initiatives.

↗
The Audience Development model was adopted as a growth playbook across Amazon's Global Media & Entertainment organization — extending its principles from music streaming to other entertainment verticals.
— Capabilities Applied

What This Took

Go-to-Market Strategy Growth & Lifecycle Marketing Content & Creator Marketing Integrated Marketing Org & Process Design

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