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
YouTube Tests New Shoppable Video Ads Tools
Amid a pandemic that created havoc around the world that resulted in prolonged store closures. This has led brands to advertise their products online to drive sales as more people are online now. To make things easier for them, YouTube has introduced new direct response solutions that make video ads more shoppable, drive conversion, and automate content delivery across the platform.
The idea is to make video ads the new ‘storefront’ for the brands as an increasing number of brands are using video ads that connect them directly to customers. YouTube Ads director and product manager Nicky Rettke wrote in the blog post, “Last year, the number of active advertisers using TrueView for action grew over 260 percent.”
Increase in sales with Shoppable TrueView for action
In the new test, the eCommerce advertisers can show their products in their TrueView for action ads. When the user clicks on the expansion arrow, browsable product imagery appears below the video.
The advertisers are required to sync their Google Merchant Center feed to the video ads, expand their call-to-action button, and drive traffic to a specific product page. However, Facebook recently released “Shops” creates on platform storefronts but keep the users and transactions within Facebook.
Retailer Aerie used Shoppable TrueView for action to increase awareness and sales for its 2020 Spring campaign and saw a 25% higher return on ad spend than the previous year and nine times more conversions compared to their traditional media mix. Rettke said in the post that 70% of people bought a brand after seeing it on YouTube.
Video Campaigns drive conversions
The next tool announced is ‘Video campaigns’, a cost-effective way to drive conversions, boost web traffic, or generate leads across the platform. It automatically brings video ads to the YouTube home feed, watch pages, and Google video partners in one campaign as well as include any future inventory that becomes available like the What to Watch Next feed.
YouTube tested the video ad campaign with a start-up Mos to help students raise funds for college to avoid debts. Rettke said in the blog post that it saw 30% more purchases at one-third of the cost of its previous ad spend.
Lead Generation to a Video campaign
The third tool is adding lead forms to a brand’s video ad campaign. Lead forms help advertisers reduce costs and obtain potential costumers. It appears below the video ad and asks the viewers to fill the form while the ad is running.
Automobile giant Jeep tested this approach with its Korea branch and saw a 13-times increase in completed leads at an 84% lower cost per lead as well as generated more leads.
Finally, Google has included YouTube in the Google Ads attribution report that will help advertisers identify the maximum impact across YouTube, Search, and Shopping campaigns.
Shoppable Ads, a new focus for social media platforms
Shoppable ads also considered as direct-response ads have become a major focus of all social media platforms in the pandemic when ad sales went down. Facebook introduced shoppable ads on its platform and Instagram. Snapchat has in-app shopping whereas buy groceries without leaving Pinterest. Shoppable ads are also seen on Tik Tok.
DR ads have helped Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat to maintain profits, and CPM’s. As per Adexchanger reports, YouTube sales VP Adam Stewart said,
“YouTube storefront isn’t a traditional DR advertising product.YouTube has a bustling DR business, because it’s popular for app-install campaigns, especially with mobile gaming companies.”
Direct response advertising features will be the focus of YouTube’s NewFronts presentation to advertisers. As a part of YouTube’s pitch, Stewart said the storefront isn’t meant to rival Facebook-Instagram or Snapchat commerce offerings but its natural counterpart is television.
