Amazon Advertising releases new ad, measurement features | WARC | The Feed

Amazon Advertising releases new ad, measurement features

Amazon’s capabilities stretch far beyond retail and now its advertising tools are expanding to meet users across video, audio, display, and the core retail site.

Why it matters

Ad sales at the retail behemoth are expanding at a breath-taking rate. Its offer spans from its retail business to its variety of streaming services – whose strength among older, typically wealthier customers is worth noting – and these new features firm up its position.

Increasingly, the theatre of the streaming wars is shifting toward Amazon’s model, with systems like the Fire Stick an early indication of the OS model that competitors like Comcast’s XClass TV (very similar to Sky Glass outside the US) are seeking to emulate. Effectively, bundled simplicity for both advertisers and consumers is the name of the current streaming game.

New features

Announced at Amazon Advertising’s unBoxed event, the firm unveiled seven new tools to broadcast and measure marketing activity. 

Interactivity built into high-reach formats using voice

• Interactive video ads: these give users of Fire TV and IMDb TV the ability to request more information – either by having product info sent by email or by on-screen QR code, or simply saying ‘add to cart’ or ‘buy now’.
• Interactive audio ads: Amazon Music listeners can ask for reminders, emails, or to make a purchase.

Twitch gets display ads

• Livestreams on the gamer-friendly platform will now have sponsored display ads for users in the UK, US, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

Brands can build for loyal customers

• Brand Follow: similar to a feature in Amazon’s bookstore where users could follow favoured authors, brands can now amass a following and communicate deals and other offers to their most loyal customers. According to Alan Moss, VP of global ad sales, customers who follow brands spend double on average, compared to customers who don’t follow.

New analytics features

• Amazon Marketing Cloud expands to allow brands to use their own first-party data alongside Amazon’s in order to further customise queries. 
• Amazon Brand Lift lets brands quickly and simply survey a panel of Amazon shoppers to measure campaign objectives such as awareness, purchase intent, and ad recall.
• Brand Metrics attempts to show brands the value of different customer touchpoints (on Amazon) that affect the whole consumer journey.

Sourced from Amazon, WARC, Variety [Image: Amazon]