Amazon unBoxed: A Treasure Trove of Strategic Announcements

The Amazon ads business is changing and we are here for it. At the event last week in NYC 10/25-26, it became clear to me that we all benefit from the revolutionary platform changes from Amazon this year. So what is it? What does it mean and why should we care? Here’s a short list of what I heard last week and what I think that path forward should be.

By now, many of you have seen my colleague Bradley Sutton’s post on the new AI-enabled image generator tool Amazon announced. While on the surface it seems like a game changer for the SMB’s, but there are opportunities for large brands and agencies. The opportunities range from increased ROI to reduction in production costs to more efficient multivariate testing.

Pacvue analysis has consistently shown that Sponsored Brand Ads with branded creative can achieve increases of over 50% in click-through rates and branded searches compared to ads featuring only a basic product image. Amazon’s new AI-powered Image Generator will make this level of creative performance more accessible to brands and advertisers thus allowing them greater creative freedom.? As Colleen Aubrey , Senior VP Advertising put it, “It’s a perfect use for generative AI—less effort and better outcomes.” How do I know this? Well, as a long-time Amazon partner, Pacvue and Helium10 were selected as beta partners. As Bradley noted, we have been testing the tool for a few weeks and we have seen firsthand that it provides several immediate benefits for advertisers large and small:

●?????Removal of creative barriers, improved custom creative ability: the tool has been designed to remove creative barriers and enables brands to produce a variety of image assets and improve performance. It allows SMBs and enterprise brands to provide more tailored creative for seasonality and micro moments that they may not have had scope for previously.

●?????Enabling advertisers that do not have in-house creative capabilities or agency support, along with bigger brands who are constantly looking at ways to be more efficient around developing creative content.

●?????Simplicity: Within the Amazon Ad Console, advertisers simply select their product and click “Generate” – with the tool leveraging generative AI to deliver a set of lifestyle and brand-themed images, based on product details, in a matter of seconds.

●?????Multivariate testing: Images can be “refined by entering short text prompts, while multiple versions can be quickly created and tested to optimize performance.” source: Amazon Press release 10/25/23

• The price is right: Free

Along with the Amazon Image Generator tool, Amazon announced a few more platform changes that benefit the brands we work with. Let’s take a look at three of these:

Amazon Publisher Cloud:

What is it: An AWS-powered clean room for publishers to leverage Amazon data & insights. This is the first and only clean room solution that enables a publisher to analyze its first-party signals with Amazon Ads insights to create deals optimized for reach. Publisher deals are made available for activation in Amazon DSP through a single, streamlined workflow.

Why we care:

Amazon Publisher Cloud is a significant step forward for Amazon to compete with Google and others in the democratization of programmatic access by providing a modern, privacy-friendly, sandbox where suppliers/publishers can come together to better understand consumers. It helps Amazon garner more facilitation of programmatic guarantee deals and offers an incentivized method for suppliers and advertisers to connect ecosystems and prove out performance.

The Pacvue perspective:

APC increases the value of Amazon DSP for the entire market, elevating Amazon’s ability to be a primary DSP. The enhancements tie back to a broader trend toward open web programmatic and click-out media to sales segments. With our suite of tools, and Amazon’s advancements, Pacvue now has a stronger position to be leveraged with open web programmatic.

Cross-Channel Planner:

What is it: Amazon has released a planning tool aligned with advertisers’ needs, which appears to rival similar tools from major DSP competitors. This Cross-channel Planner is part of a new media planning suite in Amazon DSP that provides holistic insights and performance data related to audiences and supply, across both Amazon and third-party sites and apps. Advertisers can forecast relevant reach by channel or determine where to de-duplicate reach based on campaign performance over the last 12 months, and then allocate campaign budgets to drive the desired business outcomes.

Why we care:

Being able to properly plan audience reach and frequency with subsequent project performance is everything to a modern marketer. Previously, Amazon provided limited reach projections and limited insight across the supplier ecosystem. This new planner enables users to start and end their media workflow in Amazon DSP.

The Pacvue perspective:

As a long time Amazon partner, Pacvue understands that brands on average are likely working with upwards of 20 retail media partners and solution providers across channels. A holistic view into activity across all channels is filling a much-needed gap that brings us all that much closer to the standard of transparency we’ve been feverishly working towards.

?Sponsored TV:

Sponsored TV enables brands to run campaigns in the US to reach audiences in streaming TV content on Amazon Freevee, Twitch & Amazon devices, using the flexibility of Amazon Ads self-service tools with no minimum campaign spend, no minimum daily spend, and no upfront commitments

Why we care:

This is one of the more significant products. TV is prestigious and has had dozens of barriers to entry. This release makes TV accessible to anyone,? including the ability to target and plan creatively to get the most bang for ad spend. This could prove to be one of Amazon’s stronger performance-driving mediums/units, given its lack of skip ability and its high recall / engagement.

I’d love to hear what you felt was most exciting about the unBoxed releases, so please do drop a comment. And to learn more, feel free to DM me.? If you’re already a Pacvue customer, you can also connect with your Account Manager for more information.

Thanks to Andrew Ruegger & Morgan M. for their contribution to this roundup.

And if you made it to the end of this article, you might as well also checkout our latest RMN Benchmark report for Q3: https://www.pacvue.com/downloads/us-q3-2023-retail-media-benchmarks-report

about the author: Melissa Burdick is an ecommerce expert having spent a decade at Amazon and then co-founded the market-leading commerce acceleration platform Pacvue to help brands, sellers, and agencies optimize their returns efficiently & effectively and win online.