TikTok x Amazon: Converting Trend Traffic Into Sales

At Market Defense, Dave Karlsven is the Senior Vice President with a focus on Client Marketing and Data Science, where his data driven traffic and conversion strategies profitably grow brands on Amazon. Dave's strength and passion is helping businesses grow with aggressive marketing campaigns, working closely with over a hundred businesses from Startups to Fortune 500 companies across a variety of industries to help them achieve their sales and marketing goals. Dave has helped several startup product companies go from no revenue to over $40 Million in online revenue within 3 years. He has also helped many clients with his innovative off-Amazon marketing strategies that help drive better organic rankings and sales on Amazon.

Vanessa Kuykendall is the Chief Engagement Officer at Market Defense, where she spearheads enterprise engagement and marketing strategies, driving success for beauty brands in the Amazon ecosystem. With a remarkable 29-year career in the beauty industry, Vanessa has honed her expertise in sales, training, and merchandising leadership, holding pivotal roles at renowned companies such as The Body Shop, MAC Cosmetics, Estee Lauder, and Tiffany & Co. Before co-founding Market Defense in 2017, Vanessa led the Beauty.com business for Walgreens. Her deep understanding of the beauty landscape and consumer behavior has been instrumental in crafting impactful brand experiences that resonate with customers.

Yarden Horwitz is Co-Founder of Spate, the artificial intelligence platform for identifying top trends in beauty and food/bev. Over 200 brands rely on the Spate platform to make critical business decisions in marketing and product development, including L'Oréal, Estée Lauder, P&G, Sol de Janeiro, Amika, and more. Prior to founding Spate in 2018, Yarden worked at Google where she specialized in data analysis, storytelling, and brand strategy for advertising clients. In 2015, Yarden launched the first Google Trends Report, and later co-founded the Google trendspotting division which identified trends such as turmeric, cold brew, and face masks before they took off. In 2016, she was named the Future Voice of Fashion by the Business of Fashion. Yarden sits on the boards of Cosmetic Executive Women (CEW) and NewBeauty Brain Trust, which are both exclusive to highly regarded experts in the beauty industry. She was named one of the most influential female leaders of 2022 by Entrepreneur Magazine.Yarden regularly covers top industry trends at high profile beauty events, including CEW's State of the Beauty Industry, Cosmoprof North America, and NYSCC Supplier's Day. She has been interviewed and quoted by top beauty industry publications including WWD, Vogue Business, Glossy, CEW, Global Cosmetics Industry, and BeautyMatter. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Techcrunch, CNBC, Forbes, ELLE, Byrdie, Vogue, Washington Post, Wallstreet Journal, Business Insider, Cosmopolitan, Beauty Independent, AdAge, Glamour, Popsugar, Refinery29, Good Housekeeping, Food & Wine, The Guardian and more.

Kelly Kovack is the quietly loud renegade of the beauty industry with 25 years of experience and an ability for intuiting emerging trends. Leaning right but fueled by left-brain thinking, her career is the culmination of identifying white space, developing category defining strategies and building brands from conceptual startups to tactical cleanups. Kelly is someone who makes things happen.

Kelly launched BeautyMatter in the Fall of 2016 with the firm belief that in a fast-moving world, information is knowledge, but context matters. And more importantly, innovation comes from the cross-pollination of industries and expertise. She set out to use her experience building brands and scaling businesses to offer a new perspective and holistic approach to B2B content that filled a void in the beauty industry.