Amazon Unveils New Video Advertising Solutions 

Amazon unveiled a slew of new video advertising capabilities at its Unboxed event.  A bright spot for the retailer in the midst of economic uncertainty is its highly profitable advertising revenue. Alan Moss, VP of Global Advertising Sales at Amazon Ads in a statement,

“We have to provide our advertisers the flexibility, efficiency and scale to be nimble and responsive as their needs change.”

These include features like campaign presets, campaign recommendations, and video creation tools. Tanner Elton, vice president of U.S. sales for Amazon Ads said in a statement, “We want to bring the power of video advertising to more brands, no matter their size or level of resources.”  Here is a quick overview of 7 new features and programs follows:

1. Rewarded Sponsored Display

Brands can add an Amazon shopping credit directly into the Sponsored Display creative. Customers receive the reward by clicking on the ad and purchasing the featured product. This is an expansion of the rewarded ads already available across various placements, including Twitch and Fire TV.

Business owners that sell products and services in verticals that Amazon doesn’t carry, such as restaurants and hotels, can now use Amazon’s Sponsored Display ad product to market to Twitch viewers. The interesting part to note is it is available only to Sponsored Display Ads and not Sponsored Product Ads. The feature will soon roll out to U.S. advertisers in closed beta.

2. Sponsored Display for non-native brands

Amazon Ads is introducing Sponsored Displays for brands that do not sell in Amazon’s stores. This is currently offered to US advertisers in closed beta on Twitch. Previously, sponsored ads had only been available for brands that sell products on Amazon. Now, businesses that sell products and services in verticals not available on Amazon, like restaurants and hotels, can use Sponsored Displays to reach the highly engaged Twitch audience. 

This is currently offered to U.S. advertisers in closed beta on Twitch. There needs to be more information regarding when or if this will apply to Amazon.com on-site placements and other owned media properties. If it does then this could be an excellent opportunity for non-native brands. Amazon’s increasing focus on revenue generation beyond its own ecosystem could pave the way for bigger opportunities in the future. Existing advertisers will face competition, which will lead to an increase in Amazon’s auction-based bidding costs.

3. Sponsored Display video creative

Sponsored Display video creative available worldwide empowers advertisers of all sizes, particularly small and emerging brands, to easily create video campaigns that showcase their products and stories to millions of customers on Amazon and elsewhere online. Advertisers can deliver immersive video ads—such as tutorials, demos, unboxing, and testimonials—and measure campaign performance with new video metrics.

4. Digital Signage Ads in Amazon DSP

Amazon Ads is enabling a new inventory opportunity for brands to create campaigns on Amazon DSP to run in physical store digital signage, allowing customers to view or engage with a brand in a physical environment, at the time of purchase. It will be available in November to eligible US advertisers via managed service, making it easier for brands to advertise within Amazon Fresh stores. With Digital Signage Ads in Amazon DSP, brands can now purchase ads programmatically, giving them more flexibility and control over where their ads are featured.

Campaigns can be scheduled based on store location, by daypart, or by location of the digital signage within the store. This creates more opportunities for brand discovery and will enhance the customer shopping experience by creating a wider variety of in-store ads.  Amazon should roll this feature to other big stores like Whole Food stores and more placements in the DSP.

5. Sponsored Products campaigns with presets

Advertisers can now launch new Sponsored Products campaigns with preset campaign settings such as daily budget, bidding strategy, targeting strategy, and associated bids. With this feature, advertisers will see recommendations on how to set up performant, ready-to-launch campaigns—saving time and helping drive results from the onset. Amazon Ads found that campaigns launched with preset observed a 77% increase in clicks, and a 29% increase in conversions compared to campaigns that did not utilize presets.

This feature helps advertisers identify potential candidates for advertising and provides all the campaign settings tailored to the product being advertised. This is suitable for the launch of new campaigns that require high bids to attract traction. However, one has to trial and test to know the results.

6. Performance recommendations

Performance recommendations are in-console, actionable best practices for Sponsored Products campaigns. As advertisers browse the advertising console, performance recommendations work in the background, constantly looking for recommendations that can be adopted with one click such as new keywords and updated bids. This gives advertisers in-the-moment feedback to improve campaign performance based on rigorously tested and validated best practices.

7. Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)

In ad-tech, Amazon highlighted its Amazon Marketing Cloud, a data clean room solution, at UnBoxed. Increasingly, marketers are looking for clean rooms as third-party cookies are deprecated. The company is focused on improving signal coverage and ease of use. AMC now offers Sponsored Display and digital subscription events, pre-built instructional queries, and the ability to manage DSP audiences. Keerat Sharma, director, Amazon Marketing Cloud, and Ad Tech Solutions said, 

“We are constantly thinking about how we can better help marketers, particularly as they grapple with accurately measuring campaigns and adapting to the changes happening in digital advertising. Offering more actionable insights and increasing interoperability across our ad tech suite are examples of how we’re building to help brands operate more efficiently and make more informed business decisions.”

Furthermore, Amazon touts its Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) clean room service, which supports more flexible analytics and enables marketers to build their own ad tech solutions. Over the past year, AMC’s active customer base has quadrupled.

The tech giant also expanded CTV Integrations and Metrics. CTV advertisers on Amazon will now be able to see how valuable their audience is with the company’s new “incremental household reach” feature. Brands will be able to measure the unique, incremental audiences that were reached by Amazon streaming TV ad campaigns, in addition to those reached by linear TV ads.

Additionally, brand selling on Amazon can feature a variety of interactive video ads that feature CTA options such as “Add to cart,” or “Shop now.”. Off-Amazon brands can include an opt-in CTA “Send me more” and provide follow-up information.

Interesting Read: The Journey From Deterministic To Probabilistic Marketing