It’s unbelievable how much attention Amazon Advertising now gets. Prior to 2018, very few media outlets or Forrester clients even spoke about Amazon’s ad products. That has all changed, and we are now seeing a surge of questions from clients across the ecosystem — tech vendors, agencies, CPG clients, non-CPG clients — asking about Amazon Advertising.

Over the past six months or so, while everyone has started to wake up to Amazon as the latest ad giant, the eCommerce company has put the pedal to the metal. There’s been a few recent advancements in Amazon’s ad strategy that are noteworthy to everyone in the ad industry, showing that it is getting more aggressive in its quest for ad dollars against Google and Facebook:

  • Amazon is now selling direct-to-marketer. We called back in 2016 that Amazon would eventually try to cut out the middle man (ad agencies) and go directly to the marketer to forge relationships and lure ad dollars to its platform. And guess what? It has started to happen. We have heard from a few clients who have been in touch with Amazon directly, and we’re willing to bet that this will only continue as Amazon tries to make the case to in-house media teams that Amazon’s ad tech stack is right for them.
  • Amazon is slowly starting to share more data. A big gripe of many CPG and retail advertisers has been that Amazon does not share much data at all, which makes targeting and measurement on its platform a challenge. But that is slowly starting to change. It was recently announced that Amazon is allowing advertisers to use its search data to target customers through Amazon’s DSP. This move will now allow advertisers to retarget consumers on properties across the web based on the intent that they have expressed within Amazon for a product.
  • Amazon is raking in the dough. Amazon’s aggressive strategy is paying off bigtime. In its most recent earnings release, Amazon announced that it made $2.5 billion in advertising and other service offerings in Q3 alone. This is massive growth and means that Amazon has more than doubled its ad business since Q3 of 2017.