The continued rise of Amazon
Jim Hawker
Exited agency founder turned fractional CMO and board advisor. Bringing modern marketing and entrepreneurial thinking to growth focused brands and agencies.
It's rare that a day goes by that i don't have a conversation about Amazon. Way back in 2000, I was fortunate to have spent a year working at Amazon and to have seen the embryonic stages of what it was to become. Clearly it was a very different business back then and I don't think many (other than Jeff) would have predicted what it would have become.
Amazon is both a huge opportunity and threat for so many businesses. Just see the downward swing in a competitor company's share price when Amazon announces its impending arrival. The positive share bounce that Amazon enjoyed, combined with the losses of its competitors when it announced its acquisition of Wholefoods practically paid for the whole deal. I would certainly be 'shaking in my boots' if i were at Hello Fresh at the moment. It's almost as if you are waiting for the tornado to arrive and disrupt everything you have spent years building up.
More and more of our client conversations turn to Amazon and they are very wide ranging, from how they can rebalance sales away from Amazon, to better understanding the company’s media ecosystem and how they can work across it to drive incremental sales.
Just in the last week we have seen huge product innovation announcements with the launch of messaging services and a social product that looks very much like Instagram. This of course is all on the back of a huge year in which it has completely driven the voice search market (and started to push own label more aggressively) through its own hardware development (Alexa).
Agencies are responding by creating dedicated Amazon teams and offerings which makes sense to me. Working within Amazon is very different to every other platform and the pace of innovation requires dedicated thinking. The amount of money being spent directly with Amazon Media Services is rapidly increasing and unlike Google, Facebook and Snapchat, the company was nowhere (visible at least) to be seen at the recent Cannes festival, where other media companies were falling over themselves to court agencies and brands.
Amazon does things differently and looks set to be the first trillion dollar business. Who will stop it? The only threat that people are now predicting is the US Government, as it becomes more concerned about the power the company has across multiple sectors.
Love it or loathe it, you have to be impressed with it.