We all know it. The boxes, the bags, the trucks, the smile logo. I know I’m not only one that has ever seen an Amazon truck pull up to their house and think “well what the heck did I order now?!” What started out as an online store for textbooks has grown into an empire. You can now get (almost) literally anything delivered to your house within a few days, you can watch free movies and TV shows, listen to music and podcasts, get groceries, and even have a virtual call with a doctor all through Amazon.
Amazon has become such an everyday staple in most households which has made life a lot easier for consumers, but it has also tapped into a whole different market that can benefit businesses- the advertising market. Amazon has so many different touchpoints where it is consuming data about its users and subscribers, and those data points are then used to advertise to consumers in various ways. Just a few ways that Amazon is gathering data about its users is looking at what they are searching for, browsing, or buying directly on Amazon.com. They are also looking at what users are watching on FreeVee or Prime Video, which are OTT streaming platforms owned by Amazon. IMDB.com is website that is owned by Amazon and it’s the world’s most popular searchable database for info on movies, TV, and celebrities with 83 million users. If you have a Fire Tablet, or an Alexa, or stream Amazon music, Amazon is also gathering data from all those various sources, and those are just a few examples of how Amazon gathers first-party data about its users, and notice how they are all owned by Amazon.
Back in 2022, about 3% of local advertisers were spending on Amazon, and then in January of 2023 there was a 22% increase in average spending on Amazon’s ad platform, while spending on Facebook declined 7% and Google dropped 19%. Amazon’s advertising platform consists of a lot of national advertisers, but it will eventually get to the point where they are maxed out and will start to take on more local advertisers. Now is the time to get ahead of the parade and stand out for competitors. For example, when watching the Super Bowl™, it is filled with national advertisers, but there are some local advertisements sprinkled in there as well, and those stand out! People make comments like “I wonder how much they had to pay to get an ad during the Super Bowl”, and they remember that. Imagine seeing your local ad in the mix with a bunch of national brands through Amazon; that carries a lot of weight with consumers.
When it comes to who uses Amazon, millennials are the biggest users. They outpace Baby Boomers by a ratio of two to one for using Amazon as a shopping tool. I am a perfect example of this statistic. As a millennial, I use Amazon far more than I should (to the point where my 5-year-old sees an Amazon box on the front porch and says “Jeff came today!”). At my parents’ house, my mom (64) uses Amazon, but not nearly as much as I do, and my dad (78) doesn’t know anything about it, except that my mom uses it.
When you think of digital advertising, two of the biggest names that are thrown around are Facebook and Google, as they should be. Google’s share of the U.S. net digital ad revenue is expected to be 25% in 2024, Facebook is expected to be at 20%, and Amazon at 14%. When you are talking about billions of dollars, those are some large percentages. Also, Amazon started it’s DSP in 2012, while Google and Facebook started a version of their DSPs back in the early 2000s, so in a short amount of time, Amazon has been able to capture a decent sized piece of the advertising pie.
As I mentioned before, Amazon accumulates all this data about its users and for an advertiser, this is the advertising jackpot because you can use that data and target people while they are on Amazon.com, but more importantly, while they are off Amazon. If you think about how consumers use Amazon.com, they go to Amazon looking for something, they put it in their cart, and then they leave, so they aren’t spending a great deal of time on Amazon.com itself, but that whole time they are searching, browsing, and purchasing, data is being collected about them. Now, all that data that was collected, we can use that and target that same person while they are NOT on Amazon.com, but instead are on Amazon owned properties like FreeVee, Twitch, IMDB.com, and across thousands of other websites and apps that Amazon has partnered with, called Amazon Publishers. Consumers are spending more time with these apps, websites, and programs, so they are now seeing the ads while consuming content on those sites. For example, if I am watching Bosch: Legacy through FreeVee, that’s a 42:00 program where I can see multiple OTT ads and those ads could be targeted to me based on all the information Amazon has about me.
Amazon also has unique opportunities to reach users on and off their site through various targeting strategies:
Behavioral Targeting- Showing a display, video, or OTT ads to specific consumers based on their Amazon purchase history, searches, and browsing, across Amazon.com (only display ads), Amazon owned properties and on Amazon publishers.
This data is gathered from:
- What people have searched on Amazon
- What people have viewed on Amazon
- What people are ‘in-market” for (uses 3rd party and Amazon data)
- What people have streamed on Amazon Prime Video
- What people have done online to indicate their demographic and economic attributes
Product Targeting- We build an audience of people who have searched, browsed or purchased specific products on Amazon, and show them display, video, or OTT ads on Amazon.com (only display ads), Amazon owned properties and on Amazon publishers.
This targeting strategy is a little bit more precise than behavioral targeting because we are targeting by certain products that can be purchased on Amazon.
This audience is gathered from people who have:
- Searched those products keywords on Amazon
- Viewed those products on Amazon
- Purchased those products on Amazon
- Similar characteristics to those who have purchased or viewed those products on Amazon
Custom Audience Matching/Lookalike Audience- We take a list of customer emails or addresses, match them to Amazon users and show them display, video, or OTT ads across Amazon.com (only display ads), Amazon owned properties and on Amazon publishers.
The final targeting strategy that can run in combination with those listed above is retargeting. This is where we follow people after they leave a website and continue to show them a display, video or OTT ads across Amazon.com (only display ads), Amazon owned properties and on Amazon publishers.
Amazon publishers is a collection of comScore 100 websites and apps that have a direct partner relationship with Amazon on and the ads can appear on desktops, mobile devices, and connected TV devices. Some of those publishers consist of:
- Pluto TV Fire TV
- TubiTV Fire TV
- Twitch CTV
- com
- IMDbTV
- Discovery Plus Prime Video Channel
- Amazon Video News
- Philo Fire TV
- Sling Fire TV
- History Fire TV
- Fubo TV Fire TV
- Lifetime Fire TV
- Investigation Discovery Fire TV
- NBCU_1
- Discovery +
- Fox News Fire TV
- Food Network Fire TV
- NBCU_4
- A&E Fire TV
- THE CW Fire TV
- HGTV Fire TV
- HBO Max Fire TV
- Fubo TV Roku
- Discovery Fire TV
- FilmRise Roku TV
- Paramount Channel Fire TV
- CBS News Fire TV
- Travel Channel Fire TV
- Adult Swim Fire TV
- VH1 Fire TV
- TBS Fire TV
- Hallmark Channel Everywhere Fire TV
- NFL OTT
- Discovery Life Fire TV
- Travel Channel Android TV
