Emily Campbell, Head of Performance at Ice Media, explains why beauty brands need to move past ROAS fixation and DTC-only measurement. She shares how full funnel visibility through Fospha is reshaping budget allocation, why TikTok's halo effect on Amazon is consistently undervalued, and why brand building remains the most important strategic priority for 2026.
As beauty brands wrestle with fragmenting discovery channels, rising acquisition costs, and the limits of platform-native metrics, the gap between what marketers can measure and what actually drives growth has become a strategic liability. In this Q&A, Emily Rose Campbell, Head of Performance at Iced Media, explains how her team is moving clients away from ROAS fixation and bottom funnel bloat, and what full funnel visibility through partners like Fospha reveals about where growth actually comes from.
Emily Rose Campbell: The biggest shift that we’re really guiding our clients through at Iced Media is the pursuit of incrementality. We still see so many advertisers that are overly fixated on return on ad spend, ROAS, and really moving away from that mindset requires a lot of education and trust with our clients. Iced Media is really recognized as beauty’s business growth partner, so we know how to scale beauty brands. And one of the most transformational things we do when we start partnering with a brand is really trying to move them away from what we call bottom funnel bloat.
We see so many advertisers obsessed with retargeting, brand search, and saturating the bottom of the funnel and trying to squeeze every single thing they can out of it. Whereas that’s really not where growth is going to come from. So we’re really trying to educate our clients to drive that incrementality and generate that growth. Not squeezing the bottom of the funnel, but really investing in demand creation.
Emily Rose Campbell: I’d say they’re definitely missing a clear view of total business impact of the tactics they’re running. Without a true source of truth that connects spend to incremental and what the overall impact of a tactic is on their overall ecosystem and their overall business, brands can’t really invest properly or decide what to scale. So the question isn’t really “did this convert” anymore. It’s about if I invest X, what can I drive for the overall business and that halo effect.
Emily Rose Campbell: It’s been game changing. As growth experts in beauty, we’ve always had strong instincts and deep expertise of the optimal media mix, which tactics drive the greatest halo effect on the overall business and where we see that growth from and that demand creation. Whereas now that we have really robust, readily accessible data from Fospha, we’re really able to readily validate our instincts without having to aggregate all these multiple data sources to pull these things together.
This has really been game changing in conversations with clients, especially with finance teams and stakeholders that aren’t necessarily in the day-to-day of digital marketing that understand all that nuance.
Emily Rose Campbell: Is it a liability for agencies? Yes, and increasingly so. In my opinion, there’s just no need for it. It’s very near sighted and not getting the whole picture. We know that any lift that was happening historically on marketplaces, at retail, on Amazon wasn’t necessarily just happening by happenstance, but we really relied mostly on directional signals and correlated lift by aggregating multiple data sources without having one unified source of truth. So now we can really quantify impact very easily with Fospha.
This visibility has really reshaped budget allocations. Some campaigns that don’t necessarily show last click results or D2C conversions in platform are actually driving massive business impact, especially discovery channels like TikTok and YouTube, which are historically undervalued when it comes to legacy measurement frameworks. For instance, for our hair care client Moroccanoil, we drove 175% sales lift on a product that we featured in our full funnel marketing campaigns on TikTok that were linked to TikTok Shop and D2C. This just proves that even though we’re linking to D2C or TikTok Shop, TikTok is able to fuel larger, broader revenue outcomes for the overall business.
These results are not isolated. When we measure TikTok holistically, we consistently see this type of trend and this halo effect across the overall business, not just within the app. At Iced Media, as beauty’s leading growth partner, we’ve always focused on the overall business impact versus D2C metrics alone, but Fospha has really been game changing for us and the halo measurement has made our jobs a whole lot easier.
Emily Rose Campbell: Definitely. With Topicals, we use Fospha for measurement and it has completely changed how we evaluate our acquisition tactics. Looking purely at in-platform metrics, TikTok appeared to have a CPA that was about 3.5 times higher than the Meta CPA on user acquisition. But once we layered in Fospha and accounted for downstream Amazon impact, the picture actually totally flipped. Not only was TikTok on par with the Meta acquisition CPA, it was actually 30% lower.
Without this holistic view from Fospha, we would have easily over-allocated budget to Meta, just going off that in-platform information alone. But this layer of insight allowed us to get a lot more bang for our buck and spend and invest a lot more efficiently and get a lot more incremental growth for the same amount of money.
Emily Rose Campbell: It’s a combination of both. Iced Media really wrote the playbook for TikTok Shop in the US as one of the first business partners. And now we’re doing the same for AI shopping, which is why we have such a robust social commerce and TikTok Shop expertise. We launched our search and discovery practice in 2025, really making sure that our clients show up where users are searching. So Google Ads, AI search, and social search.
Discovery is becoming more and more fragmented across creators, platforms, AI engines. The brands that win are really going to be the ones that are creating overall ecosystems and systems to show up everywhere we’re discovering, researching, and converting. And that’s whether it’s TikTok Shop, Sephora storefront, Instagram, ChatGPT, wherever the journey’s starting next.
Emily Rose Campbell: I wish that founders would stop letting ROAS be the end-all, be-all and the gold star metric. To me, it’s a metric that really needs some nuance and it’s not about ignoring it, it’s about contextualizing it. We could easily, as digital marketers, inflate return on ad spend by shifting budget to brand search, to retargeting, and really capturing and saturating that bottom of the funnel. But this isn’t going to be what’s growing your brand. For acquisition, I really prefer to see founders focus on new customer CPA and lifetime value, bringing in measurement layers like Fospha for added accuracy and impact.
Emily Rose Campbell: We love collaborating with Fospha. The State of Beauty playbook that we co-published together last year is a great example and the response has been incredible. And equally important is really how we bring the beauty community together through moments like our upcoming beauty meetup at Shop Talk.
In our industry, there is so much misinformation and fear mongering and at Iced Media, we really believe that practitioners deserve experts and expertise that they can trust. This is really part of our mission to provide and be that source of truth for the entire industry and create these opportunities for learning and engagement. When we take people out of these massive auditoriums and into smaller, more intimate settings, this is where conversations totally change. People really open up, they share real challenges, candid insights, and lived experiences.
It’s really where so much meaningful learning and connection happens through that peer exchange, honest dialogue, and community. It’s something that you cannot replicate in another form.
Emily Rose Campbell: I love this question and to me it’s brand building, 100%. You can have the most optimized performance machine in the world, but without a clear point of view, a strong identity, and memorable storytelling, you really won’t be able to resonate with consumers or build that brand preference. We know that consumers buy on emotion. Roughly 95% of purchase decisions are driven by emotion. Over 70% of Gen Z buys products purely due to aesthetic or vibe. And we know brands that are culturally relevant grow six times faster than the average brand.
So it’s really about being culturally relevant and cultivating that brand love and having that strong brand identity. Our focus is really ensuring that our clients like Anastasia Beverly Hills and Chantecaille show up as a part of a larger cultural conversation, not just isolated product-focused campaigns. This really means going deep on niche stories, community building, and visual codes and having a really cohesive visual identity and embedding the brand consistently across every single touch point so it becomes a part of your lifestyle, not just a product.
To me, without that emotional resonance and memorability, brands end up competing on price. And when that happens, performance always hits a ceiling.
About Emily Rose Campbell:
Emily Rose Campbell is Head of Performance at Iced Media. She leads the agency’s new Search & Discovery Practice, guiding beauty and wellness brands to win visibility and conversion where consumers search (Google Ads, Social, ChatGPT and emerging channels).
A digital marketing veteran, Emily has used her search expertise to grow everything from legacy CPG brands to digital-native indie disruptors. Brands turn to Emily for future-proof strategies that anticipate where consumers discover beauty and convert—making their products not just visible, but sought after and shoppable.
About Iced Media:
Iced Media is a digital-first growth partner building and scaling modern beauty brands. Their client roster includes Moroccanoil, Kylie Cosmetics, Anastasia Beverly Hills, Topicals, Covergirl, Rael and others.
Known for pioneering a social-first commerce playbook, Iced Media integrates paid media, social storefronts and AI-powered shopping strategies designed for how beauty consumers discover and buy today. Their end-to-end approach drives measurable, meaningful growth for some of the most beloved brands in the industry.
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