No one is a better fit to serve as an Amazon Ads evangelist than my friend, Jeff Cohen.
Jeff is a founding member of Seller Labs and has been keynoting, exhibiting, and attending Amazon events for the last decade.
If you’ve been to an Amazon event, you’ve probably seen Jeff. Now, he’s serving as the official Amazon Ads Tech Evangelist.
I wanted Jeff to join the pod to talk about what’s new and trending with Amazon Ads.
This is important even if you’re not selling on Amazon.
Amazon is now the 3rd largest digital ad platform behind Google and Facebook. And it’s growing rapidly.
Here’s a look at what we cover:
- How vertical videos are improving shopping experiences and making ad performance better
- What is the new integration with Facebook, and what it means for shoppers
- How Sponsored TV ads are democratizing TV advertising and utilizing Amazon’s rich buyer signals
- Prime Video Ads and what they could mean for your brand (and when to consider running them)
- Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) what is it, how and when to use it to unlock new actionable insights about your business and advertising effectiveness
- Plus more!
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Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(07:54) Vertical Video for Sponsored Brand Video
(15:43) Amazon’s Facebook Integration
(19:27) Prime Video Ads and Sponsored TV
(31:33) Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)
(39:22) AI’s Role In Amazon Advertising
(42:15) The Importance of Your Feedback
(43:46) Outro
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Show Notes:
- Jeff Cohen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreycohen/
- Mike Brown: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-brown-31a03059/
- Death Wish Coffee: https://www.deathwishcoffee.com/
- Simple Modern: https://www.simplemodern.com/
- Anker: https://www.anker.com/
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Connect With Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce
- Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/
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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.
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Other episodes you might enjoy:
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Transcript:
Jeff:
Because every time you advertise, you're making an investment in yourself and your product and your brand, and you want to be gaining some insights from that so that you can learn, you can iterate, and then you can reinvest.
Brett:
Well. Hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today is a first for the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. We have someone directly from Amazon joining us on the pod, and I am absolutely thrilled. This is actually a gentleman that I've known for a long time. We go way, way back from his entrepreneurial days and now he is at Amazon and Gee's, a close Amazon ad partner. I've got to visit some Amazon offices and so love our partnership with Amazon and thrilled to be diving into some trends, some new things, some stuff you need to know about as it pertains to Amazon and Amazon advertising. And so my guest today is Jeff Cohen, and you may know him from Seller Labs. If you went to any Amazon show, any Amazon conference, you saw Jeff. Jeff was there, and so really appreciate taking the time. Jeff, welcome to the show and how's it going? Oh,
Jeff:
I'm doing fantastic. It's obviously great to be on the podcast with you. We have known each other for a long time. We're both fellow Missourian. Yes, we have those extra bonding moments and I think ultimately I've always appreciated everything you've done for the community. We've kind of grew up in two different slight areas of this overall community of Amazon, but we definitely get to run into each other here and there, and it's been great to see the growth of your business over all these years as well. So thanks for having me.
Brett:
It's cool, man. Yeah, really appreciate saying that. And yeah, we're big fans of Seller labs and cool to watch that evolution and so kind talk about that, Jeff. So you're an entrepreneur, founder, owner of Seller Labs, but now you're working with Amazon. So tell us what that connection is like and tell us the story that kind of made that all happen. Yeah,
Jeff:
I guess technically I was a founding member of the company. I wasn't the actual founders. That gets kind of weird at times, but I like to be truthful. I think when it came down to it, somebody recruited me to try to leave seller labs and I made a joke with her and I said something like The only job I'd ever take is if Amazon would hire me to be an evangelist because that's what I already do. I run around and I talk about how great it's to be on Amazon to sell on Amazon. So I liked to joke. So then she came back and she was like, Hey, this position's actually available. And I applied and was hired, and I like to say I didn't come to Amazon and drink the Kool-Aid. I was drinking the Amazon. If you followed me for any length of time, you'd known that I've been strong advocate of Amazon and the community behind sellers and supporting sellers for the last eight to 10 years.
And so it's great to kind of be at Amazon representing all of the partners that I worked with who were all of my competitors. And so today I work with agencies like yours, tech providers, everybody within the Amazon partner ads partner system to really understand how to integrate in with Amazon, where priorities should be, where Amazon is putting their investments and maybe where advertisers should think of putting their investments. So it's really cool. It's been kind of an interesting journey. Amazon is definitely a more entrepreneurial company than you would think for the size that it's so, it's a great place, it's a great place for entrepreneurs to be.
Brett:
Yeah, it probably does not feel like a foreign space foreign entrepreneur, and I think Amazon treats their people like, Hey, you're owning this thing, and so operate like an entrepreneur would. And so that's funny. So you were talking to this recruiter, so you didn't know the position existed. You were just making up like, Hey, if Amazon needed an evangelist, I could do that. And then turns out that actually existed.
Jeff:
Yeah, I mean, you come from the SEO world, and so I had always Danny Sullivan, Matt Cutz, those are the people from the Google world that I always looked up to, and I always wondered, why doesn't Amazon have somebody like that? And so that was my vision when coming here was that's who I could be and that's how I could serve the community and what I strive for every day. I mean, I take it really as a responsibility because I know that the community wants representation at Amazon and they do have ways of being heard, and I know that they consider me as another way of hearing through things like this as well as being heard through the feedback that I get.
Brett:
That's awesome, man. Yeah, I can totally vouch for you that you've been preaching and evangelizing for Amazon for going on a decade now. And I agree with you. I mean, there's never really been a platform. There's never been a place for merchants to sell their wares and to build a business, and you may know off the top of your head, but the number of millionaires and the support that Amazon has given to brands, it's a pretty phenomenal opportunity. You have to approach it the right way, and there are challenges there and things like that, but it is an unbelievable
Jeff:
Opportunity. I mean, listen, it's not a golden ticket, but for the people that do it the right way and build upon it, you and I have seen the success stories over the years of the companies just like my buddy Mike Brown over at Death Wish Coffee when I met him, he was just an average guy. He's still an average guy, but he was just an average guy running a small business and now he's got worldwide distribution his products. So there's cool stories like that within the s and b world that we hear about all the time, and I think it's really an awesome opportunity for people that have great products and want to build brands. And I think that's really what you need to be successful on Amazon today. That's the
Brett:
Key one. That's the key building brands and coming up on the pod, actually interviewing one of the founders of Simple Modern, which just a phenomenal story and really they launched on Amazon, so they are great. It's a great brand. They've really built it over the years, but now I think I heard somewhere in we'll find out on the podcast, but they sell more drinkware than almost anybody else on the planet, which is crazy. That's cool. Then you got Anchor. So if I'm buying a replacement charger for my iPhone or MacBook or something like that, if I don't buy Apple, I'm buying Anchor. And that was kind of a brand that was my understanding was born on Amazon. And so, but this is what we're telling everybody. To be successful on Amazon, you got to build a brand there. Don't just sell products, build a
Jeff:
Brand, right? And that takes time. That takes time, it takes energy. And as I like to remind people, I shared this the other day, it starts with a great product anchor is what it is. I just bought one for my daughter yesterday because their products are good, they're quality, they have a reputation behind them that drives people to want to be raving fans. And ultimately as marketers, that's our goal. Our goal is to drive and create raving fans, and you need good products to do
Brett:
That. A hundred percent. So let's dive in. Let's talk about some new things that are here and that are available to marketers and will help us sell great products and build great brands on Amazon. So one of the first ones, and I'm pretty excited about this vertical video for sponsored brand video. Tell us what that is and why is that exciting?
Jeff:
Yeah, so you'll see that vertical video has kind of come in a couple of different areas. So sponsored brand ads is one of 'em also within Post. And the biggest problem that we're trying to solve with that is that people are shopping on their mobile devices. And so when you have horizontal videos, they don't play well on mobile devices. So the move to vertical was really to make that ad unit, to make that free unit through post a better shopper experience for people who are viewing on mobile devices. Now, it also solves another problem, which is that as marketers, we're creating content for all our other social media channels. And so when there's some consistency of how that content needs to be created, that's helpful to you as a marketer. I know for myself as a content creator, I might sit there at a show and I'm sitting there and I'm videoing it horizontally and then I'm flipping it and I'm doing another video vertically because I'm not sure where I'm going to be using that content or how I want to use that content in the future. And so being able to port your content from one social media channel to another is something that we want to make easier for our advertisers or for our brands because Post, which is another place you can use those videos is actually a free tool that brand builders can use to expand their audience. And so it's not just about ads and selling ads, it's about just overall that viewer experience and that sharing of content across the social media channels.
Brett:
Totally makes sense. And for those that don't know, can you explain what posts are and how they impact the shopping experience?
Jeff:
Yeah, so the easiest way to kind of describe posts is that, again, it's a free tool. They sit within the stores function of Amazon, of Amazon ads, and what they do is you put an image or a video within the post and then it will show up in different places throughout the shopping experience. So it might be on a thank you page or on a a product detail page. And they're really set to be an inspiration for people to say, oh, I'm interested in this, but what are other cooking things that I could do? And then within the post, people can either interact by clicking on a product and going to buy or by following your brand. And so what it allows is it allows your brand to create followers. And then as you do other activities throughout Amazon, through both the retail and the advertising side, there's ways to use the signal of followers as a way to make promotions. So on the retail side, you can create coupons that are specifically for those who are following your brand. You can do emails through your customer experience piece on the retail side, and then on the advertising side, you can set signals through the Amazon DSP and through other channels to say, Hey, this is somebody who's made a signal that they want to follow my brand, they want to get more information from me, so therefore I'm going to present an ad to
Brett:
Them. Yeah, it's been really great. And on the agency side, we advise all of our clients and help all of our clients create posts, and we've been kind of surprised by the thousands and thousands of followers that some products and some brands get through their posts. And then, yeah, it just makes it easy to talk about new products or to send an email or to really connect with that customer. And so it's an awesome free tool and it's one that if you're not taken advantage of, you absolutely need
Jeff:
To. Yeah, and it's similar to any social media. You have to post consistently, create, generate creative that's engaging. You just have to think of it in that same way, and no, on day one, you're not just going to post and get 10,000 followers, but the brands who have been doing it habitually for the last couple of years as it's kind of risen up and its popularity is probably the easiest way to say they're the ones that are benefiting today because they're seeing the amplification of the audience that's able to see it. Then the other cool thing you can do got away from vertical video is you can see what images are working well within your post, and you can then integrate those into other ads that you're running. So you can almost use post as an AB test type of environment, and if a post is getting a lot of engagement, then you may want to use that image to create additional ads because it's engaging, it's got high CTV stuff like that.
Brett:
Yeah, really glad you mentioned it. That's one of those under-leveraged, underutilized areas of posts. Use it to image test and use it to understand what can I build my next ad from, or what image do I need to add to my product carousel images or what image do I need to use for DSP ads? And so yeah, love that aspect of it. And circling back to the sponsored brand video, the vertical video piece, we were early adopters of sponsored brand video back in the video in search days when it first launched. And that's always like the number that's always like the number one or number two most effective ad type for our clients is the sponsor brand video. And what's great about it is because of the way Amazon shares that it's often below the fold, it's often on more category searches. We find a lot of new to brand shoppers buy from a sponsor brand video ad because they're usually scrolling a little bit further because they don't have a brand preference yet. They're still exploring this category, this product type, and so they see those videos. It's a product demonstration video with the listing next to it. It's just a super compelling ad type. I love it. But yeah, there was a gap. Most of the content that we're creating, even for YouTube shorts that OMG commerce is using or other social platforms, Facebook, Instagram reels, TikTok, vertical video. And so most brands user generate content or your demo video, it's often vertical video. And so now we can use that on Amazon and it's making a difference.
Jeff:
That's awesome to hear. And I think one of the things you said there that I think is important for people to pick up on is that when you're running video type ad units, you're not looking at straight performance metrics. You're not just looking at how many sales that video's generating. You want to be looking at things like how long was the video viewed for, right? Did it get to 25%, 50%, 75%, very, not everybody gets to a hundred percent, but did you get enough of the video view there? And that's going to start to give you a signal back to tell you, do you need to change your video? Do you need to make something more compelling? Did you get their attention in the first three seconds? And so think about all these things in a test and iteration type of mode that gives you the ability to be building upon the investment that you're making because every time you advertise, you're making an investment in yourself and your product and your brand, and you want to be gaining some insights from that so that you can learn, you can iterate, and then you can reinvest.
Brett:
Yeah, so great. Yeah, anytime we can get that data, make the next video ad better just gives us a chance to improve and more effective. So let's talk about, this next announcement doesn't really shift anything for advertisers, and there's not really anything we can do differently here, but I think it's just good for folks to be aware of, and there's been a bit of a splash about it, so would love to hear directly from you, but Amazon announced Facebook integration and so explain what that is and how that's working.
Jeff:
Yeah, so the Facebook integration with, I'm sorry, the integration with Facebook, what it does is it allows a user on Facebook to create a connection between their Facebook app and their Amazon app. And then when the user makes that connection between those two, it allows them to make the purchase within Facebook. And so the problem that it's solving for is that somebody sees an ad on Facebook and then they have to click on a link, go to Amazon, buy the product check out. But if you think about it, if the connection's made and Facebook knows what you want to buy and they know you have an Amazon account because you've given the permission to create the linking, they can create almost a one click checkout from the ad to the acquisition. And so this is really about user experience. And if you think about it, Amazon's always about removing friction from the checkout process.
It's why Amazon OneClick checkout has become so popular, and you can use it both on Amazon and off of Amazon, and we'll see how that program grows over time based on consumers and their desire to want to make those connections and want to do that. But this is just, I think social media in general trying to become more of an acquisition type of play. And if you think about the types of ads that were run on Facebook a year, five years ago, it was more about drawing into the lead funnel. And so they're just trying to remove hurdles, they're trying to make a better customer experience. They're trying to be able to tell you when you see this ad on Facebook, you can buy it on Prime. I was buying something the other day, it wasn't on Facebook, but I was buying something the other day and literally with my phone I was able to use two clicks and buy that product. Overall, it's, it's a super clean, easy checkout process, and when you're able to deliver that, you make customers happy. And at the end of the day, that's who Amazon wants to serve as the end user and the customer, and they want to make them happy, which then gets them to be happier about their purchase, be happy about the product, give better reviews, all that other stuff.
Brett:
And this is super interesting to me because we've seen some success with TikTok shops and Facebook and Instagram have tried some direct checkout type things over the last several years, but really this to me feels different. This is Amazon. We all have our Amazon account set up and our wallet set up. We trust Amazon. Just so easy to say yes to that. And so I'm very excited to see how this progresses and how this evolves. But for right now, this is Amazon choosing to run an ad and place it on Facebook,
Jeff:
Which is nothing new. Amazon's been running ads on, they've been running ads on Google, they've always kind of done that. Even for your products as a seller, you might not even realize that they're doing it for your products. It's remarketing, right? They're remarketing people back to Amazon in the same way that if you owned a website, you'd be remarketing people back as well. They're just trying to remove the friction so that they're able to convert more of those people into shoppers or into buyers.
Brett:
Yeah, can't wait to see how that unfolds more. So let's talk about another area of video ads. And I'm a huge video ad fan, grew up loving TV ads and actually did some TV for a little while, and now we do a lot with YouTube, but also as an agency, we're investing in streaming TV or STV, as you like to say in the business. And then a newer offering is Prime video ads. And so can you talk about those two and why you are so excited about those offerings? Yeah, I
Jeff:
Think, well, my excitement comes in really maybe two or three areas, but the first is that streaming tv, if you're not familiar with the numbers, overtook linear TV as the primary source that people are using for television. Now, what's interesting, there's two interesting pieces about that fact. I think the data was from e-marketer. The interesting part of that fact was that when you add up the number of streaming TV users and the number of linear TV users, the total number is higher than what the market was before at its peak. So they're not just taking away from linear tv, which they are because linear TV is declining, but the overall market is increasing. And what we're finding from that market increase is that the demographic of the people who are engaging with streaming TV that make up that Delta, they're not watching linear tv. So it's picking up a whole new audience that you didn't even have access to before. So I think that's a really cool, interesting kind of fact about this. Now, the second part is that streaming TV or linear TV used to be very difficult for brands to access, especially a linear TV where you had to create, generate the creative, you had to do buys, you had to have all these tests,
Brett:
And usually a pretty big buy. There's often pretty large minimums, especially if you're looking at any regional or national, you're talking about some pretty big minimums. So
Jeff:
What Amazon's done is they've democratized that. And so they released in October a new product called sponsored tv. It's inside the ad console and sponsor TV allows you to do streaming TV ads with no minimum. Now you still have to create your own creative. And so there is an investment that's there, and it's not for everybody. So I like to say that if you've been investing in, we'll call it middle to upper funnel ads, you've been investing in sponsored brands, you've been investing in sponsored display, you've been doing a dsp, streaming TV may be another avenue for you to expand to reach a larger audience. If you primarily are focused on pure performance based advertising, you've just been doing sponsored products, this probably isn't the medium for you to be using today. You need to kind of build up your knowledge, your experience, your understanding of the metrics that indicates success before you just jump into it. Yes,
Brett:
100% agree.
Jeff:
So the democratization of streaming TV I think is super exciting. Then I think the last thing that I think is super exciting,
Brett:
And one thing to just add to that really quickly, Jeff, we really recommend you need a very strong foundation. Make sure you're doing all you can with your other sponsored ads, sponsored product brand sponsor brand video, make sure you got some remarketing in place, make sure your listings are optimized and make sure you're in a category and with some margins where it makes sense to go top of funnel. If all of that is true, then I love sponsored tv. But yeah, it's not the first thing you do. It's not something you do if budget is really tight, right?
Jeff:
Because think about this, right? Think about this, that you put an ad on sponsored tv. So now your question is where does it show up? And I'll answer that in a second, but then they come to Amazon and they search for your brand, and you're not running a sponsored brand ad for your brand. You've just given your competitor
Brett:
Driving sales,
Jeff:
Potential sales, and so you're very right. There is a proper build to be ready for something like sponsor tv. The third thing I'm probably most excited about is around the type of inventory that Amazon's making available. So if you look at the investments that Amazon's been making, the type of inventory they have available with streaming television ranges from free V-I-M-D-B, which would put you onto shows like jury duty or judge duty, my son's favorite, which is really weird, but we can talk about that later. So funny. It can also put you onto devices like Fire tv, which are in, I think over 200 million homes was the last data point. Crazy.
Brett:
We have a fire tv. Yeah,
Jeff:
They're great. So fire TV or the Fire Stick or something like that, or Prime video, which recently went to an ad supported format or even potentially something which the buy is a little different, but something within the Amazon sports arena, which is around Thursday night football. And if you think about Amazon and the properties that they own from an intellectual property perspective around streaming television and shows, it's the MGM library, it's the Amazon Prime originals library. So whether you're a fan of the marvelous Miss Mabel or whether you watch the Boys or whether you're watching the Kelsey Reacher or something like that, right? Reacher, I mean there's a whole range all the way up to oh oh seven, James Bond, Rocky Creed, all the things that sit within the MGM library. So all this is just super exciting because it's creating access for brands to be able to place their ad in of people, but more importantly, they're not just putting their ads in front of people like you would in linear tv. They're able to read the signals and Amazon generates billions of signals that allow you to put your ad in front of the right person at the right time based on the buying behaviors that you are trying to generate. And that's working for both brands that sell on Amazon, the traditional brands that we think of, as well as brands that don't sell on Amazon, who are able to now tap into this market and able to tap into this inventory.
Brett:
And think about it, nobody has more behavioral shopper data than Amazon. Amazon knows what we shop for. Amazon knows what we're in the market for right now. They know what we're looking at. And so being able to tap into some of those signals for our ad targeting is a total game changer. And what's interesting to me about this, Jeff and I got my start in offline, so I did some TV back in the day in the local regional arena. And what's so interesting about TV is I remember helping a couple of a car dealership, a furniture store, jewelry store, get really going with their TV investment. And I remember not too long into the investment in tv, the owner would stop me and they would say, I can't go anywhere. I go to the gas station, people say, Hey, I sat on tv, and I go to the store and people are like, Hey, you're on tv. And it's like, I'm feeling like a celebrity here. And that's something that doesn't happen with other media. Nobody, and I'm a big Google ad fan, but nobody sees you in the grocery store and smacks you on the back. And man, I saw your Google ad. Whoa, big time. It just doesn't happen. But somebody sees your product on tv, they're like, man, this is legit. Yeah,
Jeff:
There's definitely a cachet to I can be on television. So there's definitely a little bit of an I made it, hopefully we're democratizing that, right? And maybe we're not losing that immediately, but we're democratizing that to where more people who didn't think that was something they could use is something they could use. I wanted to go back to the behavioral signals because I think it's important to talk about, I don't know if we have the most, or I've never seen a lineup of chart of who has what. I'm just right. But I think what's important is to say that Amazon is able to aggregate these signals across the board, and a lot of times use machine learning to make predictions around potential buying behaviors. And so it's not necessarily that Amazon knows who's shopping for your product that day. It's more like, oh, there's a signal that would say you've bought this, therefore you might be in the market for that.
You're buying baby food, therefore you might be in the market for baby products. And so it's more at this aggregated level that starts to really, and I think this is the part that people should understand, is when you're just using sponsored products, you're targeting only people on Amazon who are doing search. When you go to sponsored brands, you're targeting people who are searching for more category type based. When you do display, you're showing up in this bigger world, and as you move up into sponsored tv, TV or streaming tv, you move to this giant world of people who are in category, not necessarily just in aisle for your product. And so it's a huge multiplier to the potential audience that you can target, but it still goes back to what you said earlier. You want all those other pieces in place so that you can maximize that investment.
Brett:
And we would call that kind of in aisle, we would call that more demand capture. I'm capturing the demand that's there, but as we go broader and look at STV or other things, that's demand generation, I'm finding the ideal shopper who's likely to buy from me, and I'm generating that demand. And yeah, I mean, I saw the power of video and of TV when all we had at our disposal was age and gender, and hey, we think our shopper watches this shit. Where's going to run our act? Where now it's like, no, we know what they're shopping for and we can reach them individually. And then we see on the backend how many people are watching it, how are they engaging with it? Is this the right creative? Do we need to switch our creative? Where before it was just like, yeah, let's hope that this is the right program, and then let's see if anything happens.
Jeff:
There's a couple other things that happen within streaming television too. One, it's a captive audience. So think about your own behaviors on streaming tv. You're not flipping channels in the same way you are on linear TV two, especially on prime video, the amount of advertisement content to viewer content is very low. So traditional tv, I don't know all the numbers, but it's a lot. Just think about how often you get commercials on streaming tv. It's low. We want to put that customer experience first and foremost, and ensure that the customer is getting what they want. The next is is that you can build interactivity into your ads. So you can have QR codes, which I think are okay, but even more importantly, you have the ability to interact through the remote. And so as more and more devices are working through the remote, you'll be able to click a button and say you're interested, click a button and add to cart or speak into your remote. And then finally, because of all this, but were
Brett:
Prompts for Alexa too, I think I've seen some ads say
Jeff:
That
Brett:
Ask Alexa to do this add to cart.
Jeff:
And then also think of this is you can create dynamic creative. So one of the things that we tested this year within on Thursday night football was that you buy a spot and you could run different creative for different markets. So the easiest explanation for me is think about a car dealership and you have a different type of persona that's going to buy an EV than it's going to buy a pickup truck. You're from Missouri, so I'll go pickup truck,
Brett:
Pickup truck in Missouri. Absolutely.
Jeff:
Because everywhere bigger, the
Brett:
Bigger the better
Jeff:
Baby. That's right. And so that's a different persona, but the car dealer in this instance, the car dealer can have one ad spot, and that one ad spot can then be shown different creative to different audiences. And that's something that just, again, it's allowing for a better user experience, it's allowing for a better advertiser experience. And those are the things that I think are super exciting.
Brett:
That's amazing. Well, this perfect segue to talk measurement now because that's obviously something that we have gotten a little bit spoiled by or come to expect in the online marketing world. And again, comparing to the offline days, the tools we have at our disposal are amazing, but there's still challenges that pop up. And so let's talk about A MC Amazon Marketing Cloud and what do we need to know about that, and then how does that unlock new opportunities for
Jeff:
Measurement? Yeah, so I'll go back to, you'll see a theme, but I'll go back to what's the problem we were trying to solve And the problem that we were trying to solve with a MC or Amazon Marketing Cloud is that one, cookies are going away. Identifiers are becoming more and more difficult to identify cross channel, cross product, cross device type of activity. Two marketers need to be able to see what happens in a multi-touch attribution environment. And so a lot of advertisement that you're doing on, I'll say traditional Amazon ads is using what's called last touch, which means the ad that touched the consumer last is getting all of the credit. And then three, our brands are getting more sophisticated, and so they're asking more questions and they're wanting to bring in their own first party data to help answer those questions. And so we needed to create a tool that would allow us to solve for all these problems.
So a MC is built on what's called a clean room. And the easiest way to describe a clean room is that there's three components of a clean room. And you as the advertiser can come into the clean room and you can ask questions of the data that's inside the clean room, but what you get back is not customer identifiable information. So it's a real rich privacy safe environment. It's allowing you to ask it questions of like, well, what are the age of the people that are buying products from me? And you can then come back and you can see what the ages look like, and then you can say, how many people at this age buy this product and then buy this product? And then you can get that information back, but it's never going to tell me where does Brett Curry live and what does Brett Curry buy?
So that's where it's kind of protecting the consumer within that, what this allows us to do is it allows us to create a more sophisticated, multi-touch attribution type of model that looks at the customer journey. And so that's just one of the many things that it can do. And so now instead of just seeing that sponsored products drove the sale, I can actually see that the customer that was the customer who only sees sponsored products will see an X percent conversion. But when they see sponsored products and sponsored brand conversion turns to Y, and when they see sponsored products sponsored brand and A DSP conversion turns to Z, and I can start to see what the optimal path is, I can also start to see frequency. So a big thing within DSP is setting frequency, how often you want an ad to be shown. And so you can see like, oh, well, when a consumer sees my ad more than three times the conversion rate does this, I don't want them to see it more than three times.
I can then set my controls by having that aggregated data to understand how my consumers are shopping within their panels or within their path of purchase. And so A MC is like this giant, what questions do you have about your business? And then it's going to spit that back out to you. And we make a lot of templates available. And then a lot of our partners like yourself who are integrated into this will develop their own templates, their own reports, their own way that they want to be able to use this. And it's really kind of created this new paradigm for how marketers can understand how their advertising is working and understand where they want to continue to make investments. And then one last thing, and then I'll let you jump back in and ask a question, but then you can also bring in your first party data. And so if you want to start to see incremental to your web sales, you can bring in your hash data so you're not bringing in customer identifiable data either. And AMC is able to marry that information together and give you an understanding of how Amazon's doing in addition to maybe your own site or addition to another third party or another first party data set that you're bringing in to give you more rich information for the types of reports that you're trying to generate.
Brett:
And it's really a game changer and almost necessary, especially as you grow, if you've got a really robust D two C business and you're investing in Facebook and you're investing in YouTube and you're running Google Ads and you've got the full Amazon suite of ads running to be able to have some of that connected so you can see, okay, what's the true lift or how many new customers am I getting on Amazon that I'm not getting in my store and things like that. And so really you don't get that data unless you're connecting it with something like A MC and bringing in your first party data there. And so then who should start exploring a MC versus when does it not really make sense to invest the time and effort?
Jeff:
So today you have to be running DSP to have an A MC instance. Now, I would say that if you are running DSP, you should have an a MC instance. So you can see more holistically how your ads are running. Again, there are basic templates that can start to give you information, but anything, it's a whole bunch of additional information. So the question becomes, what are you going to do with it? What's your agency doing with it? And that's where the turning the insights into actions become kind of the critical piece and the critical component to the success. So I'd say AMC is a complicated tool. They probably don't want me to say that, but it's a complicated tool. It requires some programming background to understand. You have to understand SQL to be able to ask and write the queries correctly. You have to be able to understand what the insights mean and how to turn them into actions.
And so when you're able to do all of that, you can get to a much higher granular level of how you're trying to turn the dials on the pieces of the business that you're trying to do. And so there's lots of tools and tool providers that are out there that are giving you some of these insights. And there's many agencies like yourself that are able to turn these insights into the actions that are driving what you do. And all this comes back to this idea that advertising should be a test and iterate type of mindset and mentality. And you want to use data to understand, are you reaching the audiences? Are you hitting the KPI metrics that are important to you? Where are you going to make additional investments? At the end of the day, you have to be figuring out how these different investments are going to stack upon each other to get you to the end goal that you're trying to get to. And we're just trying to make that all easier for you, and we're trying to provide you more information so that you can be more sound in your decision making.
Brett:
And you nailed it there. It's actionable insights, actionable data, but really as you get bigger, it becomes more complex and you need to have everything connected as best you can so you can make sense of it. And yeah, we're big believers in Amazon DSP, we've been one of the fastest growing Amazon DSP agencies and help a lot of people with DSP. And so that totally makes sense. As you're pushing into DSP, you need to look at and consider A MC as well. Well, we are coming up against it a little bit. Jeff, any other new things, insights, other comments on what we've talked about so far that people need to know? Yeah,
Jeff:
I mean, the other thing, and obviously we would behoove ourselves if we didn't mention AI just real quickly, and I think there's a lot of excitement for brands around AI and what Amazon's doing on the retail side around helping you optimize your listings better or review sentiment analysis or on the advertising side around image generation. And I think one of the big things to really keep in mind specifically to Amazon ads and how we look at ai, AI is, I think part of it is part of our DNA, right? There's a lot of AI that goes into how goal-based advertising works within sponsored brands and within sponsored display and how you connect audiences to find new audiences within your DSP and within A MC. And so yes, all the good talk of AI and generation and all those things is fun and exciting. But I think for us, to us, AI is not about generating and creating new tools.
It's around solving the problems that our advertisers are having to help them be more efficient, to help them be more effective, to help them place the right creative with the right background and the right setting at the right time to the right customer. Those are the problems that we're trying to solve. And I think it's a super exciting time for brands. There's some great case studies coming out about how brands were able to use the AI generator to add holiday images and saw an uplift in their sales. So little tweaks that you could do that would've taken you a lot of time and a lot of energy you're able to do very quickly now through the types of technology that we're developing. And I think there's a lot more to come in the future. I mean, everyone's investing in ai, and I think you can see where Amazon's investing and what we're building into and what that means for the future, and I think it's super exciting for our advertisers.
Brett:
Yeah, I'm very excited to see how this unfolds. And yeah, we've seen the power of AI and machine learning on the goal-based advertising, and now to begin to see generative AI and potentially image manipulation, what can be done there? It kind of goes back to the point you made about, Hey, we're running one TV spot. We can customize the creative based on where you are. Am I showing you a truck or am I showing you a Prius or am I showing you a chief's gear or a 49 ERs gear? What am I showing you? And that's sort of what AI is potentially going to enable on the image side. Can I just easily, quickly and at scale change images to fit a promotion or a seasonality or a use case? And so yeah, pretty exciting to see that unfold.
Jeff:
Yeah, definitely. I think there's a lot to be excited about as Amazon brands and Amazon advertisers. And I think ultimately as a consumer of the product, remember that your feedback's critical to us. We want to know what's working for you, what's not working for you, how it's working for you. That's all that Amazon works backwards from. That's the customer that we're trying to solve. And so hit me up on LinkedIn, share it with me, let me know. Let me know your thoughts about vertical videos, about posts that, it's kind of funny, I don't want to say LinkedIn's a big source for us to do customer information, but I think that over the last two years I've demonstrated that there's some great conversations happening on LinkedIn and our product managers do appreciate a lot of that feedback when they see those conversations and they're reading the feedback from the end user who's talking about what's working for them or what else they would like to see. So that's really what drives a lot of the innovation that we have here at Amazon ads. And so I think you and your team for adding to that as well, because I think that's a big part of how the flywheel circle all occurs is that that feedback's necessary.
Brett:
And speaking of which, I'd love to hear that you're taking that feedback sharing with Amazon. I know you guys are very well, your goal is to be the most customer-centric company on the planet. And so you are an amazing follow on LinkedIn. So if you are not following Jeff Cohen or Jeffrey Cohen on LinkedIn, you need to, is that the best place to connect with you? If someone wants to say, okay, I need to stay up on all the latest and greatest from Amazon ads, so I need to follow Jeff. Yeah, I mean,
Jeff:
If you see me in the grocery store, say hi, right,
Brett:
Chicago land. Yep. Shout out.
Jeff:
I have had a few random, Hey, wait a minute, are you Jeff at the museum? Which is kind of always weird. Yeah, LinkedIn's the best place to connect with me. It's where I spend a lot of my time. I'm also at a lot of trade shows and events. And so I encourage you, if you do see me at an event to come up and say hello, I'm often surprised at sometimes how many people say like, oh, I've seen you, but I haven't wanted to say hello. I'm sure, Brett, you feel the same. We want to to hear from you. We want to engage. Absolutely. We want to talk. So please come up and say hi and yeah, connect on LinkedIn. But I always say I remind people don't just connect on LinkedIn. Say, Hey, I heard you on Brett's podcast. I heard you on e-Commerce Evolution. Find a way to break that Ice city. You're not just one of however many people have connected with me on whatever period of time. Yeah, I mean, I thank you for having me on. I thank you for being an awesome partner to Amazon, and I think that the growth of Amazon and Amazon ads has been largely driven by our partner population and companies like yours. So we thank you guys for everything you do and everything you do for your partners or your advertisers, your customers as
Brett:
Well. Appreciate that, man. Yeah, it's been a fun ride. I guess we're almost eight years in now as an agency, but excited about future. This year's going to be amazing and beyond still, I think one of the best places ever in the history of marketing to build a brand and so pumped about it. But Jeff, really appreciate it, man. Thanks for taking the time. This was super insightful and we'll have to do it again sometime.
Jeff:
Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
Brett:
Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in and we'd love to hear your feedback. Would you like to hear more of on the show? And if you've not done it, would love that review on iTunes helps other people find the show. And hey, if you're listening and you're like, man, so-and-so that I know would really enjoy this episode, please share that with them, share it on LinkedIn or on the socials, that would be greatly appreciated. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.
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