The “Bed of Procrustes” is a Greek myth. Procrustes was a bandit and rogue blacksmith. He had an iron bed and forced his victims to fit it—either by stretching them or cutting off their legs. He tortured many until Theseus, the mythical king of Athens, killed him by making him fit his own bed.

When I started my career as an Amazon Ads Manager, I assumed that people who had worked in the field knew what they were doing and that the best approach was simply to copy them.

When I first accessed the ad console, I felt completely lost. The only way out, I thought, was to study what the “experts” were doing. I was mainly hunting for a product launch strategy. Somehow, I got my hands on a popular set of campaigns that experts widely recommended as the go-to launch strategy.

Guess what? The “perfect” launch strategy was a total failure. But it taught me one crucial lesson: there’s no perfect launch strategy, no golden campaign structure. You can’t advertise every product with the same set of campaigns or force every product into the same mold. You have to adapt to the situation—that’s the essence of being a great advertiser.

Why did the so-called perfect strategy fail? It was built for an ideal scenario: a strong product with high demand and low competition. Our product wasn’t ideal. It was premium quality with decent demand, but the competition was brutal. Giant brands dominated the category, and stealing sales from them was nearly impossible.

The smarter approach in such a market was to target areas where the big brands’ dominance was weaker. I started spying on competitors to spot loopholes and built a custom campaign structure. This time, the results were noticeably better because I now understood where we stood in the market and what kind of campaigns could actually help.

That experience showed me the experts’ dilemma: anything they proclaim loudly, like town criers, is ultimately misleading and sounds a lot like Procrustes. They try to fit every product into the same mold, when in reality Amazon advertising is experimental. Every campaign is a hypothesis. A good advertiser forms a hypothesis, builds campaigns around it, and tests it. You don’t need expensive Amazon tools for that. You also don’t need to obsess over every single product detail, which only leads to analysis paralysis. Instead, get a solid grasp of where your product stands, launch a few low-budget campaigns based on that understanding, and see what happens. If they perform as expected, scale them; if not, discard them and try new ones. This is adaptability. You’ll discover things about your product that no fancy tool or deep dive will ever reveal.

In summary, don’t become the Procrustes of Amazon.