Emerging technology is “exciting” but if it isn’t “simple and addressable, and doesn’t save time for media buyers and marketers” then it doesn’t deliver, that’s the message from Amazon’s global VP of advertising Tamir Bar-Haim.
In an exclusive chat with B&T ahead of Amazon Ads’ upfront in Sydney yesterday (more on that in a moment), Bar-Haim said the industry was facing a number of challenges and it was the job of tech platforms to make work easier, not to obfuscate with more, well, stuff.
“From the conversations we’ve had with agencies and clients here, it’s clear there’s a lot of downward cost pressure,” Bar-Haim said.
“The brands are being challenged to do more with less, even more so than in traditional times. At the end of the day, it’s quite difficult to be a CMO in this world. Customers’ paths to purchase are more fragmented than ever. Consumers’ time is split across so many different mediums and the way we do marketing is really no longer viable if you can’t prove demonstrable impact and clear customer outcomes.
“While emerging technology can be really exciting, if it’s not simple and addressable, if it doesn’t save time for media buyers and brand marketers, then it’s not delivering on the promise. One of the most exciting things about working with Amazon is the promise of being able to connect the brand discovery with real customer outcomes through Amazon Marketing Cloud and the intelligence layer that sits there. But we want to make that easier, including removing some of the barriers that have existed in the past.”
SQL, MCP, DSP and other three-letter acronyms
To that end, one of the big announcements from Amazon Ads’ upfront in Sydney last night was its MCP Server and its Ads Agent. The Agent combines agentic AI with Amazon’s first-party data insights to help DSP self-serve advertisers build, optimise and analyse campaigns using natural language. No longer will planner/buyers need to learn SQL to access Amazon’s insights.
The MCP Server, similarly, is now available to Australian businesses in beta. It gives tech partners, agencies and advertisers the ability to plug AI tools directly into their existing solutions for campaign creation, reporting and account management.
“I was geeking out,” Wavemaker’s Kristy Kinzett told B&T after the show.
“The SQL queries [are] like the bane of my team’s existence. We get so many custom questions about what we’re doing in Amazon and then we’ve had to teach ourselves SQL.”
Willie Pang, Amazon Ads’ ANZ MD, told B&T he was “particularly excited” about the MCP Server’s launch.
“We know that our brands, agencies and publishers are building their own AI workflows using the likes of ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Think of the MCP Server as a translator between the systems to be able to plug in the Amazon Ads capability. It’s in the early stages of integration, but we think it will be the future and it’s a big unlock as folk are chasing down outcomes.”
Non-endemic hits
The outcomes brands can glean from working with Amazon Ads can be impressive. L’Oreal Group’s chief digital and marketing officer (and B&T CMO Power List-er) Georgia Hack told the 400-or so marketers and agency folk in the room that its partnership with the Prime Video show Elle reached more than a million unique viewers, drove more than 5,000 branded searches on Amazon and more than 1,600 purchases.
“But my favourite part was the global brand lift study, which showed a 25 per cent uplift in unaided brand recall versus the control. For us, that’s proof that it’s not about choosing reach or outcomes. You can have both,” Hack said.
Amazon’s sweet spot has, naturally, been with endemic brands. Kristiaan Kroon, CEO of Omnicom Media told the crowd about its exceptional work with Logitech. But Pat Crowley, GM of paid, owned and earned media at CommBank — perhaps the most entertaining speaker of the night — showed the crowd how Amazon and Prime Video could work for non-endemic brands.
Together, CommBank, its agency EssenceMediacom and Amazon Ads created a machine learning-based propensity model which allowed the bank to reach the 18 to 39-year-old audience it was trying to reach.
It used first-party signals from across Amazon’s portfolio — including Prime Video, Twitch, Audible, Alexa and more — to “identify the behaviours and attributes of customers that had a high likelihood of considering a credit card”. The audience segments refreshed every 24 hours, too. CommBank also used Prime Video interactive ads to send information to potential customers’ email and homepage takeovers of the Amazon.com.au landing page across the six-month campaign.
“Guess what? It worked!” said Crowley, explaining that the campaign improved CommBank’s brand consideration by 15 per cent, ad recall by 13 per cent, brand awareness by 10 per cent and 4-8 per cent increase in click-through rate when the propensity model was applied.
“Across Prime Video, display, online, custom store, we saw our strongest brand lift results for quite some time,” said Crowley.
Paige Wheaton, national MD of Initiative, told B&T that Amazon’s expanded focus on non-endemic advertisers was “smart”.
“It’s their biggest opportunity for growth. Retail media with endemic brands is well established. They’re all fighting for a share of the same dollar and [Amazon] is competing with partners that have a lot of local contracts.
“The non-endemic push is opening Amazon up to a whole new world and a group of clients which historically have not found them a hyper-relevant place to be. Having a brilliant video ecosystem is an awesome gateway,” Wheaton added.
Content Slate
That content slate is relatively weighty, too. The Test is returning for season four and there are several new documentary series including Free Spirits: The Backpacker Poisonings and Madness of Three. Elle and The Summer I Turned Pretty are also due to return. New shows include Fourth Wing, Subversion, starring Chris Hemsworth and Tomb Raider, crafted by Fleabag creator and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Chris’ lesser-known and shorter brother Luke will also star alongside Chris Pratt in the second series of The Terminal List.
But the way Amazon arrived at its new shows proved to be of more interest to media buyers than the shows themselves. Prime Video’s head of content told the crowd that it used signals from book purchases on Amazon.com and listening patterns from Audible to inform which books to adopt or topics to cover on the video platform.
“I love it,” Dentsu’s head of digital Shae Healey.
“I really liked when they spoke about the number of shows that originally were books and they can see the popularity of the books and which to turn into shows. But even then, they know who bought or listened to the books and then watched the show and link those back.
“I think what’s most unique about Amazon is the scale of their sales data. We’ve run tests with audiences based on sales history and things like that and they’ve been the most incremental. That’s definitely a USP for them.”
It’s this direct connection between content, culture and commerce that Amazon believes offers it an unparalleled full-funnel solution for advertisers.
There were some interesting parallels between YouTube and Amazon Ads’ upfront. While YouTube has long claimed to be one of the primary drivers of culture, it has been adding new commerce features to capture performance budgets, as well as brand budgets. Amazon is coming from the other end of the spectrum. Its place as a performance platform has never been in doubt. But now it is adding content that can help build brands and generate results for non-endemic brands.
Every day I’m funneling
The number of times the word “funnel” was said during the presentation was a running joke — one lucky marketer even won a hat for guessing that the word was uttered 21 times over the hour-and-ten-minute presentation. But Amazon Ads’ full-funnel proposition is hitting the mark.
“We’ve landed that full-funnel advertising all the way through to measurement and demonstrating those outcomes for some of the biggest brands and their agency partners here in Australia,” Pang told B&T.
“[The full-funnel proposition] is more connected than it’s ever been,” Kinzett told B&T.
“We’ve got an amazing team at Amazon that we work with and we are doing a lot of analysis to understand the impact of the top on the bottom because we’ve got endemic brands in there.
“I think it’s getting better every year. Not the offering, but the perception of the offering,” said Healey.
“Being Amazon, it’s hard to break through the perception of being lower-funnel only because they’re sitting on this mine of sales data… I don’t know if tonight necessarily changed my perception, I think what we’re seeing through the likes of Prime Video is that it’s happening organically.”
That perception won’t have been harmed by some of the new ad formats that it revealed last night.
Next Up Ads on Prime Video enable advertisers to place a brand message the moment a viewer finishes one episode and queues the next. Amazon said it allows a single brand to tell a “cohesive story” through an entire viewing session. Brands with Prime Video sponsorships will receive first access to the feature later this year.
Location-based Interactive Video Ads will allow brands to tailor streaming TV creative by geography within a single national campaign. Amazon said it bridges the gap between national reach and local relevance with regional offers, pricing and local business information. The ads will also have a “Send to Phone” and “Sign Up Today” buttons.
Dynamic TV Creative will automatically personalise Interactive Video Ads on Prime Video based on viewer shopping behaviour. AI will use the information to optimise and adjust ads by adjusting product imagery, calls to action, headline copy and product detail. It will be available to Aussie brands selling on Amazon early next year.
Wheaton said the new formats were “a good development” but that she didn’t get enough information about them to issue a definitive statement — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing considering the amount of information dispensed during the presentation.
Kinzett agreed that she would have liked more information. But she said the Dynamic TV Creative format jumped out.
“It could be pretty incredible, especially as the brands that we have often get big global assets. It feels like the natural evolution of the big screen, which I think is quite exciting,” she said.
Healey added that the location-based ads would be “an awesome opportunity” for some of Dentsu’s clients.
Amazon has also signed up a list of Australian publishers to its DSP including SCA, ARN and Nova, giving buyers access to audio, podcasts and radio in one place. It also announced a direct integration with the Spotify Ad Exchange, deepening the business’ existing partnership. Amazon Ads is also extending its Amazon Audiences to Netflix, again expanding that partnership.
Bar-Haim told B&T that there is a uniquely Australian “hunger and openness for experimentation” that the market needs to leverage.
“You really don’t get that everywhere and it’s obvious that brands are willing to test, experiment with new formats and adopt new technology,” Bar-Haim said.
“They push us to build faster and more creatively. From my end, it feels like Australia has a really unique opportunity, due to some of those headwinds, cost pressures and other dynamics, to lead the world in responsible, customer-centric AI innovation.”
What now?
Kinzett said it “doesn’t necessarily change” her investment plans. But it was a “starting point to think about how we try to work closer with Amazon and tap into their innovation lab and how we start to think about the signals they have to fuel what we do in a different way. That naturally often grows investment.”
Healey, meanwhile, said the show “reiterates” that Prime Video can be important from a “cultural standpoint”.
For Wheaton, the upfront was a “really good reminder” of what Amazon’s ads ecosystem can deliver for clients and “particularly for non-endemics”.
She added that Pang was “excellent”.
“I love seeing his passion and ambition for what he’s set out for that team to achieve in the market… He gets it. Because he does. He gets what clients want, he gets what agencies want. I think that’s a pretty powerful combination.”
