Amazon’s annual UnBoxed conference brought forth a series of advertising products, including a data clean room designed for publishers and an artificial intelligence (AI) image generator to enhance campaign assets. In addition, new campaign management features are on the horizon for Amazon’s DSP, Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), and the Amazon Ads API. A cross-channel media planner has been introduced to assess audience reach and relevance by channel, allowing marketers to allocate budgets more effectively.
The AI-driven image generator, currently in beta, rapidly creates background images that enable brands to showcase their products in a lifestyle context. These enhancements are intended to maintain the momentum of Amazon’s thriving advertising business, which has become a dominant force in the retail media sector.
One significant development is the launch of Amazon Publisher Cloud, a data clean room service that empowers publishers to plan programmatic campaigns through Amazon DSP by integrating their first-party data sources with Amazon’s. The service is built on the infrastructure of Amazon’s existing AWS Clean Rooms, introduced the previous year.
Users of the clean room tool, part of Amazon Publisher Services, can evaluate contextual ad signals from their end, combining them with Amazon Ads audience data to identify consumers interested in specific products. Publishers can then create programmatic deals for brands targeting such in-market customers at scale. Beta launch partners for Amazon Publisher Cloud include DirecTV, Dotdash Meredith, Fandom, NBCUniversal, and TelevisaUnivision. In a trial of the service, NBCUniversal achieved more than triple its desired audience compared to an unoptimized campaign, emphasizing the service’s effectiveness in delivering privacy-conscious advertising.
Amazon is also tapping into generative AI to help brands enhance their marketing materials. The image generator feature, available to select advertisers, is designed to assist smaller brands without the resources or time to create extensive creative content in-house or through external agencies. Advertisers can input their product pages and click the “Generate” button to see potential image options within seconds. This feature aims to diversify the often monotonous white background images prevalent in many campaigns by introducing more lifestyle-oriented backdrops. Amazon claims that these backgrounds can improve click-through rates on formats like mobile sponsored ads by up to 40%.
These investments in Amazon’s advertising suite coincide with the company’s growing ad sales segment, which has become one of its fastest-growing business areas. The enhanced offerings also come ahead of the deprecation of third-party cookies, pushing brands to invest in the retail media category and explore data clean rooms, promising greater privacy without compromising precision. Amazon is set to report its third-quarter earnings, emphasizing the significance of its expanding advertising business.
Source: MARKETINGDIVE
