Today in Digital Marketing - Weekend Edition: What's New at Amazon Ads

Episode Date: October 30, 2021

CORRECTION: In this interview, the guest indicates that Brand Metrics is in a closed beta. In fact, it’s an open beta and available to customers.• Get a Free 14-Day Trial of the Premium Newsletter (with exclusive content, videos, links, and more) — https://b.link/pod-newsletter Does your brand need a podcast? Let us help: https://engageQ.com/podcastsADVERTISING:• Ads as low as $20: https://todayindigital.com/ads JOIN OUR COMMUNITY!- Slack: https://todayindigital.com/slack- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/todayindigital- Discord: https://todayindigital.com/discord- Reddit: https://todayindigital.com/reddit ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Welcome to a special weekend edition of Today in Digital Marketing. I'm Todd Maffin. The big players get the headlines, the Facebook platform, Google Ads, God, maybe even TikTok these days. But there are others out there that are vying for your media dollars. And one claims it owns about 10% of the U.S. digital ad space. A study out last week from Jungle Scout found that 56% of American consumers say if they could only shop at one store, that store would be Amazon. So I've asked Tamir Barhaim to spend a bit of time with us.

Tamir leads international expansion at Amazon ads. And he's Canadian, or at least works at Amazon's Toronto office. Tamir Barhaim, to spend a bit of time with us. Tamir leads international expansion at Amazon Ads. And he's Canadian, or at least works at Amazon's Toronto office. Tamir, welcome. Thanks, Todd. Nice to meet you. And I am Canadian. All right. Good. You get to stay. You get to stay. By the way, that 10% figure, which I think Amazon actually said was 10.3%, was last year's number. Do you have a sense of where you stand now in the overall digital ad ecosphere? I don't, unfortunately. I don't have a number handy for you.

I could say that our focus isn't so much on market share as much as it is just driving innovation for customers and trying to respond to the many, many changes we've seen in the industry over the last year. So the past week was busy for you. You folks just hosted your Unboxed conference and announced some new ad products. And I want to get to those things in a moment. But for people who might be new to what Amazon offers on the ad side of things, can you walk us through the basics? I'm thinking of sponsored products and sponsored brands. Yeah, absolutely. So believe it or not, we've now had an ad business for over 10 years. At the highest level, our job is to pair brands with customers in ways that add value to their shopping, their entertainment experiences. And that could be on Amazon. It also could be on

other sites we own like IMDb or Twitch. It could be on devices like Fire TV or third-party websites and apps through our DSP. And we offer a pretty wide portfolio of different ad products, everything from brand building tools for video, audio, out of home, all the way down to those keyword-based cost-per-click performance products that you mentioned. The goal is just to bring those all together

to create useful shopping, discovery experiences for customers, but also create great campaigns that can help brands meet their goals as well. I know you have others, but I mean, the vast majority, like 95% plus, is grouped in sponsored products and sponsored brands, is it not? Sponsored products and sponsored brands are two very big products that we have. They're amongst our most established, yes.

And what are those in terms of like, what does the ad product actually look like if no one's been on the ad side of things? Sure, yes. Sponsored products placements, they sit alongside search results, enable advertisers to bid on keywords in a cost per click model to reach customers who may be browsing for specific genres of products

or even specific brands or individual products. Sponsored brands would sit slightly upstream from that and play a little bit more of a brand discovery and consideration role in helping customers discover new products or families of products they may not have been aware of. When you say keywords, is it like Google Ads? Am I going into the ad platform and typing in product names

and then that's how it plays out? Yeah, it could be individual product names or it could be generic. So, you know, maybe I'm looking for shampoo or maybe I'm looking for something very, very specific, herbal essences, you know, all-in-one shampoo and conditioner. Is cost per click the only pricing model or could I pay when I get a sale? For sponsored products and sponsored brands, it's a cost per click pricing model today. Yes.

Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. And do you have in the ad platform cost caps and bid caps and those sorts of kind of more advanced type things? Yeah, we do offer a lot of tools for advertisers, both those that are, you know, sophisticated, it could be agencies or large individual advertisers, you know, to set their own thresholds. But we also offer simpler tools for folks who are maybe just getting started, you know, SMBs that are looking for just quick, easy to use tools. Right. So at this conference, you announced some new placements and ad products like interactive ads, brand metrics, brand follow campaigns. Can we start

with interactive video? What is that kind of a campaign? Yeah, sure. So yeah, we were excited to announce specifically for Canada. There were four new products that we launched. But happy to speak to interactive video ads first to start. I would say really interactive video ads is an opportunity for us to provide a more natural way for brands to reach streaming TV audiences and foster engagement. So if a customer or a viewer sees one of these ads, they can take an Amazon action that you might be familiar with, like adding a product to the cart, adding something to an Alexa shopping list, buy now, directly from that ad unit. At a really high level, that's what the interactive video ad looks like.

And where does that ad show up? So the ad will show up on Fire TV. Oh, okay. Is Prime Video, I know it's not really an ad platform, but is there any placement on Prime TV or Prime Video? There's no interactive video ad placement available, no, within Prime Video. Gotcha.

Can you talk a bit about Fire TV? What sort of percentage of the market? What is it? Are we talking about the stick? Yeah, we have a number of different Fire TV devices that are available. The stick is one of them, yes. But think about this as a great way to control your living room experience when you're sitting back with a family kicking back on the couch after a long day. So that could include, obviously, watching Prime Video. It can include watching other apps,

whether it be Netflix or Crave or Disney+. You can actually watch Twitch, consume Twitch content on the Fire TV as well. So at a really high level, that's the Fire TV experience. And there are ad units that are embedded within the Fire TV UI. Do you know where you sit market share-wise, Fire TV compared, and there are ad units that are embedded within the Fire TV UI.

Do you know where you sit market share-wise, Fire TV, compared to the other CTV platforms? I don't. No, we don't release that data at a country level, so I don't have that handy here. Sure. Fair enough. All right, so that's interactive video. What, interactive audio ads are ad units that a customer would come across when listening to Amazon Music's ad support tier. So these ads have calls to action that customers can take. For example, Alexa, add shampoo to my cart, just to go back to my same shampoo example. And so really what we're excited about here is making that experience a little bit more intuitive and natural for customers. So if a customer is listening to an ad, really all you need to do is prompt Alexa to add that product to the cart. Whereas previously it would have required the customer to remember the specific name of the product or the specific model or brand and repeat that. So making that action a little bit easier for the customer and helping the brand a little bit more from driving that engagement. And how is that placed? Like you go to the ad platform, is it like Google Ads has got ad extensions where you have the primary ad and then you've got these kind of bolt-on additions to it.

Is that implemented similarly or is it its own placement? This would be its own placement. And this is a product I should add as well that's in beta right now and specifically in the US. Okay. In beta, widely available or with a small group of people? Right now, it's in beta with a limited set of advertisers. Right. And what is the pricing model? I guess it's not cost per click in that case. How are we paying for that? I actually don't have the pricing model on me.

My hunch is it's CPM-based, but I believe it would be CPM-based, similar to the rest of the ads that we serve within the Amazon Music ad-supported experience. Gotcha. All right, so another thing you had in there was brand metrics, which you described as a measurement solution. But I could not figure out for the life of me what it is. Is that a brand lift survey, or what does brand metrics mean to Amazon ads? Yeah, for sure. So brand metrics is really a combination of 15 different metrics designed to help marketers

sort of get sharper in how they think about understanding their engagement with their brands on Amazon. Just to give you an example of what one or two of those metrics could look like. Return on engagement is one that I'm particularly excited about. I think we'll help our brands a lot. It helps folks understand the value of shopping engagements based on post-engagement sales generated over a longer look-back period, so 12 months in this case, whereas typically we might look at a seven-day or 14-day attrib attribution window. So really helps them understand a little bit more of the lifetime value of their brand investment.

We also offer an ability for brands to look at the total size of their audience relative to their peers in their category. So that also can give a brand a pretty good proxy for sort of the overall health of their brand. So this isn't an ad product. This is a new reporting feature? It's a suite of different reporting capabilities. And where does someone find that?

So brand metrics would be available both for managed service advertisers as well as for self-service advertisers within our console. And so you're going into the console. Is there a tab for reporting or is it going to be fairly obvious? The reason I ask is often these things, when they come out there, especially in the first month or two, they're kind of hidden. Some platforms kind of, you know, while they roll it out slowly.

But people can find brand metrics now across all the self-service platforms? Across yours, I mean? It is in beta today. And so I think as we get closer to GA, those are some of the things that we want to better understand from advertisers and make sure that, like you said, the discovery process is fairly seamless for them. Oh, this is not rolled out. It's a closed beta right now.

It will launch shortly. That's right. Okay. You mentioned interactive video was in closed beta as well. Is interactive audio ads also in closed beta? It is in beta as well. Is everything in your news release that you sent us in closed beta right now? No.

Some of the releases that we have specifically around Amazon Marketing Cloud, for example, are available now. What I mentioned around brand metrics, again, we'll be launching in the next few weeks. Similarly, our releases around Twitch and sponsored display as well will also be available in the next few weeks. Okay. You also had brand follow placements, which I guess are kind of similar to like letting customers follow a brand. Um, maybe like a likes campaign on Facebook. Is that, am I reading that right? Yeah, brand follow is available today. Uh, it's, it's similar. So the notion is that, uh, you know, a customer can go and click a specific follow button on a brand that they might be passionate about

and want to specifically get more content around. So by clicking that follow button, the customer will have an opportunity, for example, to see deals from that brand throughout their Amazon shopping experience. So that gives you a kind of a view of what you might experience if you were to click on that. And that's a paid placement.

Is that paid per follow? Brand follow is not a paid, it's not a paid experience. Oh, it's not? So that's something that's available to any brand on Amazon. Oh, I see. Okay. All right. Apologies.

I thought that was part of the ad thing. And the news release had mentioned that these were specific to Canada, but you mentioned that some of these are being beta tested in the U.S. Can you kind of bring some clarity as to where these are going to launch? Sure, absolutely. So the key products that we're bringing to Canada in the short term specifically are brand metrics, which we covered today, sponsored display on live streams and Twitch,

which is a new self-service cost-per-click experience that enables advertisers to surface their ads next to Twitch streaming experiences. And then two specific updates to Amazon Marketing Cloud, which is our holistic media measurement analytics solution. So those two updates are specifically around enabling advertisers to upload their own data sets. Also, the addition of an instructional query library in the AMC UI. Those things are all available in Canada or will be available very shortly. I want to talk about measurement as a focus area for Amazon and some of the Twitch options

you mentioned in a second. But one of the stories that came out this month was reporting from Reuters that Amazon had used purchase data to figure out what products were popular in India, create knockoff goods, and then tweak the search engine to boost those product lines. And I'm not asking you for comment. I know Amazon has already denied this, but do you feel there's a trust gap between Amazon and marketers? I don't think so. If I look at our business, really everything we do goes back to the customer experience. And if I think about that from an advertising lens, our advertising solutions wouldn't be effective if we did anything different.

So our bar, I'll speak to advertising because obviously it's the business that I know best, but our bars that are ad experiences should be of such a high quality that customers should welcome them. And that might be on our websites or devices or boxes or anywhere. And I say that because I think advertiser and customer interest should be inherently aligned. And advertising only works if we make it a great experience for customers. They should be aligned, but they're often not, right? I mean, there's the customer trust path and then there's a trust path with marketing. I mean, there are different audiences.

Is there work that Amazon needs to do with marketers, or do you feel that you're sort of geared up and full steam ahead? I would say that, first and foremost, customer trust is not something that's negotiable. So we take the privacy of our customers, for example, very, very seriously. As we look beyond that to our advertising customers, we think that by helping customers discover new products, discover new brands within Amazon's sort of vast selection that they may just not have known about, often products they can't find in brick and mortar shelvesmortar shelves.

And advertising can and should be very useful for customers, and that's the high bar that we hold ourselves to. I see measurement is a focus area for Amazon. Do you feel you approach this in any way that's, I don't know, unique or different to the other platforms? I would say for us, obviously, measurement is critically important for all of the brands that we work with today, especially in a time of now increasing inflation and budget cuts. That only becomes a little bit more pronounced. I would say the unique thing for

Amazon is the visibility throughout the customer's journey. So really from awareness all the way through to conversion and loyalty, we feel like we can give the brands that we work with rich insights that elsewhere they might need to piece together from a bunch of varying sources. Whereas for Amazon, we can paint that more holistic picture and give them some of those rich metrics, like I mentioned with brand metrics that I think are really only useful if you have that full view across the funnel. So if I'm going to read between the lines, I think what you're saying is you have first party data and many of the other platforms don't. Is that sort of a summary of what you meant? I'm trying to understand what rich data means in that context. Yeah, it's the first party relationship with customers, which gives you

that proprietary view of how a customer is engaging with a particular brand all the way through the funnel from awareness down through conversion and loyalty. Yeah, it's the direct relationship with customers that we have that gives us those insights, the rich insights that would be very difficult, I think, to glean elsewhere. And indeed, when you look at sort of Amazon's results in this last quarter compared to Facebook and even Snapchat, both of which suffered, I think, to some extent with the iOS changes because they are relying on third party pixels, whereas Amazon's really not. So there wasn't much of a bump there for you. is twitch a growing area of focus for you it really is yeah for for for your listeners who maybe aren't as familiar with twitch it's a really unique

incredible community it enables live authentic really highly engaged interactions both between you know streamers and followers but also between consumers and brands. And Twitch continues to break records for us in terms of unique viewers consuming content on the service. Initially started very much with a gaming focus. Today, obviously, gaming is still a critical part of Twitch, but it goes far, far beyond that. Just to give you a sense of the scale, the global Twitch community watched over a trillion minutes of content in 2020. From an ads perspective, we actually brought Twitch advertising and Amazon advertising together in January of this year. Twitch offers everything from premium media products, native site integrations, brand partnerships, sponsorships. We have an in-house team of strategists, producers,

gaming experts to help brands connect in a more authentic way with the Twitch community. So it's a really exciting part about our business. Given Twitch is so popular, and it is, of course. In fact, I usually watch it agree, small the market share of Fire TV is, I'm surprised that the interactive video ads are not on Twitch. Oh, I think it's early days for us. As I said, the product is in beta. We very much want feedback both from customers and from advertisers to get a better sense of, you know, of where we kind of take that product going forward. So I just, again, it's early days. Yeah, for sure.

What do you see as the major trends in the year ahead? Yeah, I would say if we look at, you know, everything that's gone on in the last year and a half or so, you and I can certainly reminisce about all the things that we've struggled with. But consumers have had it pretty tough. And I think as a result, their expectations of brands are much, much higher than they ever have been. If I put it more simply, when a customer wants something like toilet paper or food, they don't really have a lot of patience for excuses. And I think one of the cool things about that is it presents opportunities for brands who aren't leading in their space today. They could take a leap forward that might otherwise be tough. And I say that because e-commerce, from our experience, really levels the playing field between those large established brands and smaller, scrappier challenger brands.

Shelf space is limitless in an e-commerce environment and barriers to entry end up being really low. And so what that means is we end up seeing a lot of brands thriving and in some cases even leading their space on Amazon that in a brick and mortar environment actually couldn't even afford to list their products on the shelves. So I think that's one trend that obviously isn't net new. But I think, you know, everything that's happened in the last year and a half or so, I think, has only further accelerated that. Tamir, if someone wants to check out Amazon ads website, what is it and how do they get started? Yeah, I would just visit Amazon.com slash advertising.

And I think we've got a lot of great information there about our products and opportunities to reach out. I'm also, of course, happy to help directly as well. So if any of your listeners want to reach out and ask any specific questions, they can feel free to reach me at barhimt at amazon.com. Tamir Barhaim leads international expansion at Amazon Ads. Tamir, thank you. Thanks so much.

Yeah, I really enjoyed it. It was great chatting with you. Back with the regular episodes on Monday.