Amazon has announced that it is starting the process of amalgamating its advertising solutions under one brand, Amazon Advertising. According to Amazon, it’s taking these steps to “provide a better experience” for its advertisers.
With the multitude of acronyms used across Amazon’s historical product offering, at times it has been difficult to differentiate between Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) and Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP). And that’s without even mentioning Amazon Media Group (AMG).
Amazon's Senior Vice President of Amazon Advertising, Paul Kotas, said:
"We've unified our product offerings under the name 'Amazon Advertising.' This is another step towards our goal of providing advertising solutions that are simple and intuitive for the hundreds of thousands of advertisers who use our products to help grow their business."
Historically, AMS facilitated the buying of display and search ads within Amazon, while Amazon AAP was a marketplace for inventory across different publishers. Amazon Advertising will encompass both of these services.
While the changes won’t directly affect the core product offering, they are positive steps towards simplifying functionality. Name changes to products within Amazon Advertising’s portfolio more closely align the names of each solution with the function of it, making it more easily negotiable for users.
For example, what was previously AAP, Amazon’s programmatic buying tool, is now Amazon DSP.
Serious About Advertising
The streamlining of their advertising offering is evidence that Amazon are serious about challenging Google and Facebook as the big two digital advertising suppliers. In the first quarter of 2018, Amazon’s revenue from advertising hit $2 billion for the first time, a growth of 132% year on year.
While it’s still a small drop in the ocean compared to the $209b annual digital ad spend worldwide, Amazon’s growth is exponential, and indicative of their intent.
Despite claims of simplifying its advertising offering, Amazon didn’t offer an update on the integration of buying inventory on Twitch, the continually-growing video streaming service that they also own, in addition to IMDB, Fire TV and Prime Video. Twitch continues to handle the majority of media sales internally.
The legacy names of services, such as AAP, AMS and AMG will still be felt for a little while yet, and will be phased during the “next several months.”
At our conference in October, we'll be welcoming former Amazon consumables director, James Leeson, to talk about the future of Amazon and how advertisers can compete with tomorrow's dominant ad platform. Early bird tickets for the day are still available, find out more here >>>
