How Front Row Group uses AI to connect commerce channels
Yuriy Boykiv is CEO of Front Row Group, a commerce partner that helps brands manage marketplaces and other commerce channels. This conversation explores how the company uses AI for marketplace analysis while keeping brand voice and creative concepting human, and why connected measurement matters.
Focus on the channels where customers already buy, then use data to prove what works before expanding. AI can support analysis and measurement, while human teams shape brand voice and creative.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
Front Row was founded in 2012 as Fortress Brand by Alex and Matt Beer to help brands grow on Amazon. In recent years, we have integrated several specialist agencies—School House, Taylor & Pond, Bizmut, and Finc3—and added Build in Amsterdam for Shopify and creative services. This consolidation allows us to serve as a single, connected commerce partner rather than five separate vendors. Unlike most agencies, we do not treat Amazon, D2C, social, and retail media as isolated channels, we focus is on closed-loop measurement and direct sales attribution to prove true campaign ROI
Shoppers move seamlessly between these platforms, often seeing a product on social media, checking it on Amazon, and comparing it in store. While many brands still manage these channels separately, we unify them using our proprietary technology, Catapult, ensuring that strategy, media, and creative are all informed by the same data.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Most of it comes from proof, not pitching. Much comes from word of mouth and people who’ve worked with us before. A brand leader who had a good experience moves to a new company and brings us in or recommends us to a peer. The second driver is our case studies because they show actual results in categories prospects care about. Social media rounds it out. It’s often where a brand first sees our work before anyone calls.
While it’s already in place, I’d like more of it to come from brands finding our thinking before they shop for an agency, through what we publish and share. That way, the first conversation starts with trust.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
Our proprietary platform, Catapult, now drives the analytical side of marketplace management using AI. It automates tasks that are impossible to manage manually at scale, such as analyzing performance data across channels, identifying early trends, and optimizing daily Amazon growth for our brands. Catapult continues to expand its capabilities and the share of our clients’ business it supports.
We maintain a human touch in brand voice and creative concepting and we do not plan to engage AI in it. While AI generates content efficiently, it cannot create authentic brand experiences. In beauty and consumer goods, authenticity drives consumer choice. Our team develops the ideas and voice, while AI supports execution and measurement.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Our working hypothesis is that more buyers now do early research with AI tools, so by the time they reach out they’ve already compared options and want proof rather than an introduction. We’re acting on that by making sure our work and results are easy to find. But AI hasn’t changed who makes the decision. A brand still chooses a partner because people trust people.
AI can shortlist us and indeed the AI traffic grows, because we produce a lot of relevant content and work on our own marketing. And we spot the attribution links in the analytics (if the traffic comes from AI, the link would have utm_source=chatgpt.com attribution as in https://www.frontrowgroup.com/en/solutions/marketplace-acceleration?utm_source=chatgpt.com) but still, the most of the leads come from organical search and in the end, it’s still human who signs the contract, so our business development is still built on personal relationships.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
As for the ignoring it’s the personal choice for every business owner. But from my experience, launching on every new platform at once can just drag away your resources and bring no substantial results. It’s much better to focus on the channels where your customers already buy, prove it with the data and then expand.
As for the advice, social is now a conversion channel not just an awareness channel so you need to link it to marketplace sales and measure the full loop. Product listings have to be complete and accurate as every discovery point (Amazon search, AI assistants etc) draws on that data. The brand experience has to be consistent from first post through to checkout.
Thank you to Yuriy Boykiv and the team at Front Row Group for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
Want to share your playbook?
Leaders Perception publishes founder and operator interviews every week. A few questions, about five minutes, no calls. It is free and everyone we accept gets published.