Willie Pang’s CV is enviable, to say the least. Between 2006 and 2021, he was an adlander — first as the MD of Yahoo, then as the co-founder and CEO of Emerge Digital. Then, he spent six years with GroupM, more than five-and-a-half as the CEO of MediaCom Australia.
Then he quit. He became the CEO and MD of digital payments company Lime Pay which would later rebrand to April.
But in August last year, he returned to adland, becoming the GM of Amazon Ads. He joined at a critical time for the global behemoth as it sought to expand further into Australia, double down on its vast Retail Media Network and launch Prime Video ads.
Now a year into the job, Pang has been talking to B&T exclusively about his time so far. That time, he said, was just as “special” on day one in Sydney as it was on day 365 in Amazon’s Seattle HQ.
In fact, Pang described his first year at Amazon as a year of day ones.
We’re talking to Pang in Amazon’s swish Sydney office — replete, as all tech company offices are, with a pool table, beer taps, well-stocked fridges, a comprehensive security process and, of course, dogs. In fact, Amazon has more than 10,000 ‘pawticipants’ registered in its Dogs at Work program around the world — including Monty.
Re-entering The Corporate World
“My wife asked me before I joined Amazon ‘Are you sure you’re ready for the big corporate thing?” explained Pang
“Not just the big corporate thing but the biggest of corporate things? An organisation that employs millions of people worldwide,'” he added.
“What has blown me away, in a positively surprising manner, is how much that ‘day one mentality’ is real in this place. We speak about this being the world’s biggest startup. But it’s all very authentic inside the business. It’s lean, it’s scrappy. There’s a lot of permission to go and create as well as create on behalf of customers. There is a relentless drive to innovate.”
That might sound like the kind of thing that someone an exec doing his first interview at a large organisation might say. But with Pang, you do believe it.
Last year, he told B&T that he’d “missed the energy and creativity” of adland, for instance.
“One of the things that has really impressed me about Amazon is its customer obsession and its ability to attract people who are, what we call ‘builders’. They existed here before I arrived. What I’ve brought is my unique set of experiences from the biggest end of town through to startups,” he added.
Pang said that he and his team are dedicated to inventing and simplifying the network for Amazon Ads’ customers and agencies.
“We’re committed to supporting the brands we work with to invent and deliver first-of-its-kind customer experiences powered by Amazon’s vast reach and with adtech that leverages Amazon’s billions of shopping, browsing and entertainment customer signals,” he said.
At the same time, he said he’s encouraging his team to think and move quickly — “A good idea is only valuable if you can also move quickly to get it out there before anyone else. Simple as that,” he said.
Big But New, Small With Scale
Around the world, Amazon is a Leviathan business. But, in Australia, it isn’t quite at the same scale. Just a month ago, Amazon launched same-day delivery for Prime members in Sydney. In the US, it launched the same service nearly a decade ago in May 2015 and in November 2015 for Londoners.
“It’s a really exciting time,” Pang said.
“What drew me to Amazon was that I’ve always admired its focus on customer obsession. Amazon in Australia is a relatively young business. But there are these dual tailwinds of Prime Video and the rise and rise of retail media.
“But the evolution of a retail business now becoming an incredible entertainment business, also very young in the country, and the ability to stitch those things together, to go and create new things for my customers — an advertiser, marketer, an agency — for them to be able to go and create amazing work on a canvas like Prime Video and to do it at scale is extremely exciting. It also happens to be the largest ad-supported streaming TV offering in the world.
“I can’t think of another example in my career where you get to do something completely new and be the leader at the same time.”
In Australia, Amazon Prime Video had 4.8 million users according to research from Telsyte — or 17 per cent of the population. Netflix is its only larger rival controlling just under 23 per cent of the population. However, Prime Video is growing nearly four times as fast as Netflix.
The SVOD sector is growing, too, though largely as a result of overall population growth, again per Telsyte. However, close to nearly half of SVOD users are interested in an ad-supported streaming plan, a sharp nine per cent increase from a year ago. Combined with Amazon’s extensive first-party data, this could make it a very, very attractive proposition for advertisers.
“This is what excites me most — the combination of retail media and our entertainment proposition. First and foremost, the job is to make advertising accessible to all brands, big and small. In bringing these two things together, we’re offering full-funnel impact. Coming back to my experience trying to help CMOs justify [marketing] investment when I was agency-side — brand activity through to transaction could never be demonstrated,” explained Pang.
“We have that as part of the proposition. I don’t look [at Amazon retail media and Prime Video Ads] as a bifurcated set of priorities, all of my time is spent bringing these things together on behalf of customers and brands in a way that they haven’t had before, which gets them to better outcomes so that they have smarter and more productive boardroom meetings.”
Creative, Media, AI & Pricing
Those “more productive” boardroom meetings will come, in Pang’s mind, from helping brands and agencies do their “most effective” work.
That may come from the smart use of first-party data and full-funnel attribution. But it may also come from brands and agencies thinking differently about the platform — Prime Video is not necessarily a place (or the best place) to re-run your TVC, and its Retail Media Network is not necessarily all about pure bottom-funnel performance, either.
Just a fortnight ago, Mars and EssenceMediacom (coincidence?) unveiled “For You Who Did That Thing You Did”.
This campaign, in an industry-first collaboration, gave Amazon.com.au users a “Thing” for completing actions such as finishing a series on Prime Video, supporting a local Australian business through a purchase at Amazon.com.au, or buying a children’s book. If the AI agreed they had done a worthy “Thing,” it could issue them with a code to claim a free Mars chocolate bar.
Describing the campaign as “groundbreaking” work for its use of generative AI, Pang added that “Amazon is not traditionally known as a creative business”.
“But my proposition is that creativity is more than just beautiful pictures. The application of technology is, in and of itself, also interesting from a creative standpoint. To be able to bring that to life is really exciting,” he explained.
Amazon operates in an increasingly crowded and sophisticated market. It surely has greater first-party data-based insights than any of its rivals. Plus, Pang said that it is investing more in locally produced content — listing the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup and the Australian Office being examples — potentially giving it a point of difference from some rivals.
In the battle for the growing ad-supported SVOD audience, Amazon’s scale could be able to offer the financial muscle to produce the best content. Or it could out-compete its rivals on price.
“There isn’t one single answer,” said Pang, diplomatically.
“What I will say is that our focus on effectiveness means that our job is to make sure it is delivering value to the brand or to that customer in the way they need it to get that effective outcome.
“We’re finding ways to price and it varies because there are such a range of options across the canvas, between retail media through to the entertainment offerings. People measure effectiveness in different ways, so therefore it’s priced in different ways for different customers.”
Unpicking that sweet spot will surely take up most of Pang’s time in the next 12 months of first days.
“Having launched Prime Video, to be a leader in-market, to do it at the scale we’re doing it and, more importantly, unlock the power of those billions of signals, making that come to life more meaningfully for brands is what will be driving us and where I’ll be spending my time,” he said.
