Two Shoppers, Two Different Amazons: BTR Media CEO Destaney Wishon on the Customized SERP
Unpack Amazon's whole-page-optimization research, the 3 Cs of the personalized search page, and why ROAS is no longer a sufficient objective in the agentic era.
Destaney Wishon is the co-founder and CEO of BTR Media, a retail-media agency managing advertising across Amazon, Walmart, Target, Instacart, Search, and DSP.
She’s spent going on nine years in the retail-media space, getting her start running ad campaigns for mid-sized CPG brands out of Bentonville, Arkansas, and has been thrown into large accounts young and optimizing bids by hand, before the software existed.
She’s since built BTR into what she calls “the Ritz Carlton of agencies”: not the biggest, but aiming to be the best, with deep relationships across its brands. She’s also one of the most prolific voices in the industry on retail media strategy 👀
Listen/Watch Our Interview:
This week's we dig into a recent Amazon science paper on whole-page optimization and what it means for brands. It's less founder-journey, more roll-up-your-sleeves strategy with how the search results page is quietly becoming personalized per shopper, the framework Amazon's ranker uses, and where advertising dollars should actually go. If you sell on Amazon (or Walmart, or Target), this one is tactical.
Highlights
𝗧𝘄𝗼 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀, 𝘁𝘄𝗼 𝗦𝗘𝗥𝗣𝘀: Amazon’s whole-page-optimization research shows the same query can return distinctly different search pages depending on who’s searching.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘀: The paper reported a 1.87% lift in brand relevance and a 0.05% revenue uplift. Small on paper, but “in Amazon terms, huge,” and a preview of what fuller personalization could unlock.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝟯 𝗖𝘀: Amazon’s page ranker leans on Context, Customer, and Content, the same three things Destaney says she’s been preaching for years.
𝗢𝗻𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁, 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀: The same protein gets shown to a bodybuilder, an 80-year-old needing nutrients, and a mom on the go and Amazon has the inputs to tell them apart.
“𝗥𝗢𝗔𝗦 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮 𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗯𝗼𝗮𝗿𝗱”: Ad spend directly influences BSR and organic rank. If you spend strategically, drive sales and reviews, and Amazon repositions you on the shelf.
𝟯𝟬% 𝗮𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝟮𝟰 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀: On one ~$30-AOV account, over 30% of sales happened more than a day after the click.
𝗦𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗼𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘁𝘀: Lots of potential, thin results so far with one or two sales per campaign, not even live in half of Destaney’s accounts. But, users are being retrained by ChatGPT to search by prompt, and Amazon will follow.
Destaney is exactly the kind of practitioner this show is built for: no guru talk, just hard-won reps across hundreds of categories. If you want to understand where Amazon’s search page is heading and what to do about it, start here.
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