“If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.” – Jeff Bezos – Founder and CEO Amazon.com
Amazon has been declared the world’s most innovative company recently by Forbes and they thoroughly deserve the title. Jeff Bezos’s vision is simple. In his own words, “Our job is to invent new options that nobody ever thought of before and see if customers like them.” The resounding success of Amazon is a clear proof that Amazon is growing and how and Bezos is also reaping the benefits at a personal level too. He became the richest person in the world, although for a few hours, in August 2017.
Amazon’s influence on its customers is largely based on its exemplary services. In the USA, Amazon Prime can be the sole reason for that as over 80 million paying users, as of April 2017, can’t be wrong. That’s why Amazon was fully confident when it started to invest chartered into yet another territory, online advertising. And it is already creating waves in the industry as they have started to challenge Google and Facebook, the two giants in this field.
What Is Exactly Amazon’s Ad Business?
Amazon’s ad business is based on how search engine giant Google acts but with a slight difference. It focuses on driving online sales with targeted ads on sites across the Internet. It does so by using its rich and huge data it has masses over the years working as an eCommerce leader worldwide. An example will clear your doubts about how it can be such a big force to reckon with so that it can compete with Google and Facebook in terms of revenue.
Assume that you are an advertiser who wants to target people who have recently searched for or actually bought leather jackets in the past 2 months. Amazon, on the basis of the huge data they already have, can help advertisers like you in getting to their target market. The targeted ads you will place on different apparel sites will be enough to entice the audience looking for leather jackets as they are already interested in such a product.
Other Areas Where Amazon Is Trying To Dominate
The eCommerce conglomerate is has been catering to a wider range of products lately, with an advertisement on TV and focus on “top of the purchase funnel” metrics. Example of it is making people feel favorable about their brands and to ultimately make them buy it. It also sells search ads on Amazon.com and has a “header bidding” product meant to help publishers make more money off programmatic ads.
But all of the above-mentioned aspects are just tip of the iceberg as little is known about Amazon’s actual ambitions about online advertising. Amazon has the power and resources to make a killing at different advertising domains but it has been tightly lipped about any of its future endeavors in this regard. Up till now, Amazon has mostly targeted eCommerce shoppers with digital ads. But there’s something cooking besides all this that people aren’t aware of and that’s where Google and Facebook should feel worried.
Taking On The Big Guns
While the revenue from the ads generated by Google in 2016 was 79 billion dollars and Facebook reaped in 27 billion dollars, considering Amazon’s ambitious mood, the figures may come down and Amazon’s projected 2.5 billion dollars revenue by 2018 may go up considerably.
The Birth Of Amazon Media Group
Amazing Media Group will be the advertising unit that helps vendors serve ads and reach shoppers. It will be a self-service platform so that advertisers will have more control so that they won’t have to go through Amazon’s manager services anymore. Furthermore, Amazon is allowing sellers that are brand owners to buy headline search ads from them. These appear above Amazon product search results just like Google search results. These new offerings will be useful for Amazon for a variety of reasons. Some of them are as follows:
