Amazon Advertising Unveils 8 New Tools and Features

At Amazon Advertising’s annual UnBoxed event on Oct. 26, the ecommerce giant announced a slew of new features and tools it said will enhance brands' ability to tell their stories and improve customer relationships. Experts agree advertisers are likely to find the new features attractive, which will in turn help Amazon capture additional media spend—particularly among the advertisers that sell goods on the platform. “No one knows how to tell a brand story and educate their customers about its products and services better than the brand itself,” said Alan Moss, vp of global ad sales at Amazon Ads. “And we're striving to help brands accelerate this by creating differentiated interactive experiences that can help them tell their stories and cultivate long-term relationships across video, audio, display and brand shopping experiences both within and beyond our store.” Here’s a closer look at what Amazon unveiled: Amazon Muscles In On Google’s Turf With New Search Tool for Sellers Interactive video ads First, Amazon is adding the ability for viewers to request more information in interactive video ads on the IMDb TV app on Fire TV. Shoppers who request product information will receive an email or a QR code, which will take them to the brand’s landing page on Amazon. The ecommerce platform first debuted these interactive video ads in the U.S. in May with additional verbal calls to action like, “Add to Cart,” “Add to List” and “Buy Now.” According to research from eMarketer, Amazon’s U.S. market share topped 10% in 2020 to hit $15.7 billion with growth driven primarily by interest in its ad space on Amazon Fire TV, IMDb TV and Twitch. Interactive audio ads In a similar vein, Amazon Music is giving listeners the option to “Remind me,” “Send me more information” or “Add to cart” in its interactive audio ads in a limited beta in the U.S. Brand Follow Amazon is expanding its Brand Follow feature, which, as the name implies, allows U.S. shoppers to “follow” brands for notifications when they are about to stream on Amazon Live. Now, Brand Follow will also display deals from the brands consumers follow on Amazon’s homepage. Moss said this helps brands give their loyal followers special offers. Per Amazon’s figures, more than 20 million Brand Follow connections have been made since it first added a follow button to livestreams in 2019. In mid-2020, the platform started adding the ability for shoppers to follow stores and posts. “Our vision for Brand Follow is to help brands create a community of advocates and enable them to reward and grow a loyal shopper base in Amazon’s store and, importantly for customers, Brand Follow offers a way to personalize their shopping experience,” Moss said. “[They] see more products and content from the brands they love across Amazon." But there’s another important reason from both the brands'—and Amazon’s—perspective. “We see that customers who follow a brand and Amazon store on average spend more than double on the product from the brand than other shoppers that aren't following,” he added. Sponsored display ads on Twitch Amazon is also building on the sponsored display ads on Twitch's Browse tab and directory pages, which were first introduced in June. Now, these ads will also be integrated into Twitch livestreams in the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Amazon Marketing Cloud Next, Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), an analytics platform that debuted in January, is now more closely integrated with the ecommerce giant’s demand-side platform. Advertisers can upload their own data and query it alongside data from Amazon ad campaigns. Amazon also recently launched a library with templated queries for a range of measurements. “We're continuously enhancing Amazon Marketing Cloud’s capabilities based on user feedback,” Moss said. “[We’ve] reduced query times, we're adding a simple user interface that complements our API, and we're enabling brands to bring their own first-party data sets into their AMC instance and customize queries based on their needs.” Brand Metrics Amazon also announced a measurement tool called Brand Metrics, which includes data like the total number of shoppers who have considered a brand based on product detail page views or brand searches and the value of shopping engagements based on sales generated over a 12-month period. Brands can also see awareness and consideration data alongside competitors using predictive consideration and sales models. Reports are updated weekly. Brands can use this tool to measure the long-term value of brand engagement and evaluate what’s driving growth. Brand Metrics is in beta and available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Spain. Connected TV Enables Effective Audience-First Advertising Amazon Brand Lift Finally, another tool, Amazon Brand Lift, allows advertisers to create surveys and solicit responses from a panel of Amazon shoppers. Brands can look into six campaign objectives, including awareness, preferences and intent. Amazon said reporting is typically available within two weeks. This, the platform said, helps advertisers “glean fast, reliable and actionable insights at scale that help them understand the impact of their brand marketing efforts.” Amazon Brand Lift is in beta in the U.S. In a blog post, Amazon said it is launching the new features as the relationship between brands and consumers evolve, media consumption becomes more fragmented and customers engage with content and brands in more places thanks to omnichannel shopping. Early reaction Multiple industry sources noted advertisers are likely to be attracted to the interactive ad formats, such as the shoppable audio-visual formats. Several buy-side sources also remarked the data onboarding capabilities offered within AMC are likely to further the flow of brands’ media spend toward it. “The Amazon Advertising solution continues to go from strength to strength, onsite and offsite,” said Wayne Blodwell, CEO of consulting firm The Programmatic Advisory. “The enhancements in reporting as well as the additional call to action ads are smart steps to building a product consumers will find value in and buyers will therefore likely adopt.” For her part, Nicole Perrin, vp of business intelligence at research firm Advertiser Perceptions, noted the bigger factor in how media buyers view Amazon Advertising comes down to whether the advertiser sells goods on Amazon. “While non-endemic advertisers do use these products, and see success with them, they are much more popular among marketers that are selling goods on Amazon in some capacity,” she added. Perrin also pointed out many of Amazon’s offerings—including its DSP, CTV ad products and search-type advertising—are in more direct competition with Google. “Research suggests Amazon has gained share of the search ad market as Google's share has decreased,” Perrin said. “But all three triopoly members are considered a ‘must buy’ when it comes to advertising retail products, and digital retail advertising continues to gain budget from traditional media, growing the overall size of the digital pie.” First-Party Data Is the New Arms Race for Advertisers