How an Omnichannel Toy Retailer Got a New Collection to Match Bestseller Sales in 2 Months

Quick answer: An omnichannel toy retailer (online and physical stores) needed a newly launched collection to become visible to buyers and start selling at a meaningful volume. Using AI-driven ad analytics, bold social media creative, and parallel YouTube brand advertising, the collection reached sales parity with the retailer's other popular collections within the first two months — alongside a 12% increase in physical store traffic compared to prior months. The campaign is ongoing, with remarketing and second-purchase incentives now driving repeat sales.

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The Challenge

Launching a new collection inside an already-crowded product catalog is a visibility problem before it's a sales problem: buyers default to collections they already recognize. For a toy retailer specifically, purchase decisions are often driven by visual appeal and brand recognition built up over repeated exposure — not a single ad impression — which meant the strategy needed to build recognition and desire simultaneously across channels, not just drive one-time clicks.

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What We Did

AI-Driven Ad Analytics

Before scaling spend on the new collection, we implemented AI-driven analytics to audit the retailer's past advertising performance. This surfaced specific, previously unaddressed problems in how earlier campaigns were structured and targeted — issues we corrected before building the new campaign, rather than repeating them at a larger scale.

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Bold, High-Visibility Social Creative

Given the buyer profile for toys, we built campaigns around bright, high-impact visual creative for social media — prioritizing scroll-stopping visual appeal over conventional, text-heavy ad formats.

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Parallel YouTube Brand Advertising

Alongside social, we ran dedicated brand advertising on YouTube, running in parallel with the social campaigns rather than sequentially — reinforcing the same collection across two different content environments at the same time.

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Brand and Collection Awareness as the Core Objective

Campaigns were deliberately structured around video views and audience activation metrics rather than direct-response metrics alone — recognizing that for a new collection, building recognition is what unlocks sales, not a single conversion-optimized ad.

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Remarketing With Second-Purchase Incentives

Once initial interest was captured, we layered in remarketing campaigns offering discounts on a second purchase — turning first-time buyers into repeat customers rather than one-time conversions.

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FAQ

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How do you make a new product collection visible against already-established competitors in the same catalog?Build recognition across multiple channels simultaneously rather than relying on a single ad format. Running bold social creative and brand-focused video advertising in parallel — rather than one after the other — builds the kind of repeated exposure that mirrors how buyers actually come to recognize an established collection.

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Does video-view and engagement-focused advertising actually drive in-store visits?It can, particularly for physical retail businesses where the buying decision is often visual and brand-driven rather than purely price-driven. In this case, campaigns optimized for video views and engagement corresponded with a measurable increase in physical store traffic, not just online engagement.

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How does remarketing help a new collection specifically, rather than just general retail remarketing?For a brand-new collection, the first purchase is often the hardest one — the buyer doesn't yet have a relationship with that specific line. Remarketing with a second-purchase incentive targets exactly that gap, converting a one-time trial purchase into a repeat customer relationship with the new collection specifically.

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