Amazon brings Ad targeting to brands – it’s the jackpot!

With the dawn of May comes the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s NewFronts! The exciting annual four-day series of events gives digital advertisers a first look at all the latest digital content from the biggest names in media and entertainment. It was a star-studded night that saw cameos from James Marsden, T-Pain, Tracee Ellis Ross and Marcus Mumford, when Amazon did its NewFronts presentation.

Amazon has tied up with the NFL for the next ten years. That’s news.

In other news, Amazon is celebrating its new show on Freevee, “Jury Duty.”  The show stars James Marsden, who is well-known for his role in “X-Men.” This new show that started last month is one with some online caché that can help draw interest in Freevee. Freevee is Amazon’s ad-supported free app that competes with Peacock, Disney+, Roku and others.

What is even bigger news is that Amazon has made a slew of updates to its ad services going into the 2023-24 football season. One of the huge announcements from the giant is that NFL advertisers will have the ability to target ads during the games. This is something that brands have been asking Amazon to do for a while now. Amazon’s streaming offerings can now “help brands efficiently bridge content to commerce—spanning new content and advertising technology across Prime Video, Amazon Freevee, Fire TV, Twitch, Amazon Music, Wondery, Amazon Live, and Thursday Night Football”.

This is huge!

Now all the advertisers this football season can run creatives that are specific to specific audiences. In other words, using Amazon insights, advertisers can present different creative to different users in the same ad break.

After showing the NFL games, Amazon worked to get brands the kind of reach that they have from football on linear TV. Ad agencies have been assured of being given the capability to extend ad buys within Amazon to make good on any ratings shortfalls.

On the measurement front, Amazon has announced strategic partnerships with iSpot and VideoAmp.

It has also proclaimed all the upgrades done to its Amazon Marketing Cloud – this is Amazon’s offering of a data clean room for brands to use to connect their first-party data to Amazon audiences. 

So in all, it is now possible for marketers and advertisers and brands to run ad campaigns and then get a solid report on the effect of those campaigns on sales. 

This is a tremendous opportunity for brands to be right where it matters in front of their audiences – not based on any guesses or even heuristics, but on pure data. And data that is from one of the mammoths on the planet today, Amazon. 

For the very first time in all of NFL’s history, audiences across the US won’t watch the same commercials and ad spots while watching the live coverage. Brands will now have the capability to show multiple commercials that have been tailored to suit all the different Thursday Night Football audiences in the same advertising slot!

This now brings brands all the sophistication of processes that are needed for them to enhance their targeting to find their exact perfect audience. All the massive amounts of data that is present, is computed to help brands connect with their most receptive viewers on the big screen.

For example a car company will now be able to run a spot for EVs for young Gen Zs, a spot for an SUV for the outdoorsy types and a luxury car for the affluent – get this – at the same time!

What this means is that brands can track what their audiences are interested in, the kind of content they consume and tailor their messaging to suit them. They can now track, measure, and optimize advertisements in real time. Their campaigns can be adjusted / tailored very quickly to suit consumers. Not only that, brands can track all kinds of metrics like conversion rates, click-through rates, and view-through rates to know what works and what doesn’t and how! 

This allows for better segmentation. Better customer-centric content creation – which leads to better resonance of campaigns, and better conversion rates!

All this from the ginormous Amazon! 

In recent days, when every brand declared their quarterly earnings, we saw how Google dropped a bit – while Amazon forged on. 

This new phase is a win-win situation for everyone concerned. This will prove beneficial to brands, to consumers and to Amazon itself.