This Week's Amazon News: Alexa+ AI Overhaul, Harry's Amazon UK Success Story, Falling Streaming Ad Rates, And More
Amazon Debuts New Alexa Voice Assistant with AI Overhaul
Amazon's recent unveiling of Alexa+, an AI-powered voice assistant upgrade free for Prime members and $19.99/month for others, offers brands new marketing opportunities through enhanced customer preference tracking and home integration capabilities.
Streaming TV Ad Rates Are Falling and Amazon's the Anchor
Amazon's entry into streaming TV advertising has significantly decreased industry-wide CPM rates to around $40 per thousand viewers, creating a more affordable opportunity for brands to reach Amazon's massive audience through Prime Video ads.
Walmart Takes a Page From Amazon's Playbook to Sell More Ads
Walmart is expanding its advertising capabilities by launching an API for retail adtech firms to build tools that sell display ads on its website and app, mimicking Amazon's successful approach to growing its advertising business.
AI Agents Are Changing How People Shop. Here's What That Means for Brands.
AI agents are rapidly transforming how consumers shop by searching broadly across retailers and brands for optimal products, shifting power away from traditional e-retailers while creating opportunities for companies that optimize for these new AI-driven recommendation systems.
Learn how our team helped Harry's transform their Amazon UK presence by pivoting to an upper-funnel strategy centered on Streaming TV.
The results speak for themselves:
Check out the full case study to discover:
Check out the full article from Laura Meyer to see exactly how Harry's did it.
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Post From Todd M. Piechowski, MPA :
500M Alexa devices sold. Yet almost no one shops by voice. Now Amazon is betting big on Alexa+ with AI. Will consumers finally open their wallets?
Amazon has unveiled Alexa+, a generative AI-powered overhaul of its voice assistant with a $19.99 monthly subscription fee (free for Prime members). This "complete re-architecture" transforms Alexa from a basic voice command system into an "agent" that can independently complete complex tasks like purchasing concert tickets, ordering groceries, booking reservations, and scheduling services—with updates delivered via the Alexa app or text messages.
[Read my analysis on whether this last-ditch effort can save Amazon's costliest experiment]
Post From Alexander Swade :
Search Query Performance API is finally here...
Gosh, what I have been waiting for this moment. You know, we have been building SQP dashboards for a very long time. And downloading many reports weekly by hand or with scrapers is tedious. it's not streamlined, it's complicated. it's messy. I was always hoping for a solution to fix these problems. A solution that allows us to GET data in a way we need it. at scale!?Across Brands, ASINs, Weeks and Countries.
And some people told me that this would never happen! And today it seems to have happened.? I am really happy with this new development.?
The API allows data to be retrieved in the weekly, monthly, or quarterly timeframe. It seems there is only ASIN level granularity available, so you would need to accumulate data on brand level yourself. But I mean, if you work with API data, you need to transform the data anyway in some way to make it accessible in a dashboard or so. ?
Post From Jessica Stevenson :
Hashtags are dead? I’ve been testing hashtags on both TikTok and Instagram for months, posting the same videos with and without hashtags—and guess what? No difference in views. No difference in engagement. So, I’m calling it: Hashtags are dead.
Instagram even stopped letting people follow hashtags, which is a clear sign they’re moving away from them as a discovery tool. And TikTok? The For You Page is built on the algorithm’s understanding of what you actually like, not what hashtags you slap on your post.
So, what’s working instead?
Hashtags used to be the way we got content discovered. Now? They’re more of an aesthetic choice than a strategy. (And honestly, sometimes they just make captions look messy.)
Post From Lauren Johnson :
Amazon confirmed to ADWEEK that it's testing video ads in Rufus—an extension from text-based search ads that started rolling out last year. As Amazon looks for shopping experiences beyond its core ecommerce site, Amazon is putting more investment into Rufus while shutting down other features like the TikTok-like Inspire.
However, advertisers don't have data to measure the performance of Rufus ads, making it hard to gauge its performance. Thanks Patrick Petriello and Matthew Koski for your insights.
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1 天前This is an insightful overview of the eCommerce landscape! I'm especially interested in the AI shopping agents and their impact on traditional retail power dynamics. How do you see retailers adapting to this new focus on AI Agent Optimization?