By Ronan Shields • October 25, 2023 • 3 min read •
Ivy Liu
Amazon’s ascent in the digital advertising sphere has been one of the more notable aspects of the U.S. digital media landscape in recent years, with the e-commerce giant today using its flagship advertising conference Amazon unBoxed to trumpet its wares.
According to Insider Intelligence, global digital advertising spend will top $600 billion this year in a marketplace led by a triopoly of Alphabet, Meta and Amazon. The latter of this group is the only one to have gained market share in recent months, with the research outfit claiming Amazon Advertising will generate $33.96 billion in U.S. revenue this year.
However, compare this to the $78.86 billion and $51.35 billion in U.S. revenues generated by Alphabet and Meta and the scale of the gap is clear. Albeit, Amazon executives expect the unfurling of its latest offerings, in which its cloud computing offering plays a key role, will go some way toward closing this gap.
Among its announcements are a new clean room service for publishers, and updates to its demand-side platform including cross-channel planning tools to enhance advertisers’ reach using Amazon Marketing Cloud.
Amazon DSP updates
Among the updates to its DSP are Amazon Ads APIs, plus enhancements to Amazon Marketing Cloud, a.k.a. “AMC,” that let advertisers generate more holistic audience insights, as well as advanced campaign planning, activation and optimization controls.
Kelly MacLean, vp of Amazon DSP, told Digiday another key part of the updates to its buy-side tool was the simplification of its user interface. “We’ve heard feedback from our customers that we need to be more simple and we’ve completely reconfigured our user interface,” she said, adding that it was aimed at improving “goal-based workflows and investment.”
This makes it a lot easier for marketers to devise specific campaign KPIs “and then actually deliver against that,” according to MacLean, who further detailed how Amazon Ads wanted to better promote its “full-funnel capabilities” beyond its core reputation as a retail media offering.
Amazon Publisher Cloud
Meanwhile, the e-commerce giant has also unveiled Amazon Publisher Cloud as a means of complementing its DSP offering with several media owners including NBCUniversal and DIRECTV already experimenting with it. Built on AWS Clean Rooms, the latest offering, currently in beta, promises advertisers and media owners alike better privacy assurances enabling deals via its DSP.
In a press statement, Steve Rabuchin, vp of third-party supply at Amazon Ads, said, “We built Amazon Publisher Cloud to ensure that publishers securely maintain control of their first-party signals with the ability to analyze them alongside Amazon Ads insights, create customized and more effective deals, and easily make them available in Amazon DSP.”
Speaking separately, Amazon’s MacLean told Digiday that early experiments with Publisher Cloud have enabled brands to reduce their required audience reach by as much as 67% in certain instances. “This is an industry-first solution with Amazon publisher cloud and … this is just kind of another part of our quest to build more interoperability and simplicity into the industry,” she said.
https://digiday.com/?p=523158
More in Marketing
How the NBA hopes to use generative AI to attract more users to its app
October 25, 2023 • 3 min read
In the process of revamping the NBA app this year, the league was seeking to glean insights from the behaviors observed among its fan base. The goal was to create an experience that resonated with fans and felt intuitive to use. According to Carney, a key element of this initiative was to leverage social media and content creators as a driver to funnel users into the NBA app. The overarching strategy aimed to seamlessly transition fans from social media engagement to a familiar and user-friendly experience within the NBA app.
As agencies merge, agency brands may wane in importance
October 25, 2023 • 4 min read
As holding companies combine agencies — a trend that’s likely to continue given the ongoing squeeze of the current economy — the importance of the individual agency brand may be waning.
How social media pros are rewriting brand playbooks for the wave of new social platforms
October 24, 2023 • 6 min read
As the list of trending social media platforms grows, social pros navigate which ones are worth it.
