So much has changed on Amazon since we started helping sellers on the platform in 2016 (I can’t believe we’ve been in the Amazon game for 8 years).
In this episode, I chat with Trenton Bodenbach, OMG Amazon Strategist.
We discuss some new potential game-changers on Amazon for 2024, strategy, and who’s winning and who’s not on the platform.
Here’s a quick look at a few of our topics:
- Vertical Video for Sponsored Brand Video. Sponsored Brand Video is one of our favorite Amazon ad types. It’s usually in the top 2-3 most effective ad types for the brands we work with. Now, it supports vertical video. Likely, you have more vertical video than anything else. Now, you can use it on Amazon.
- Shop on Facebook. Amazon controls this for now, but likely there’s more to come. This will allow shoppers on Facebook to buy products directly from Amazon without leaving the Facebook app.
- Amazon’s continued growth and dominance and what it means.
- Amazon storefronts, posts, and other tools for branding. We believe that building your BRAND on Amazon is the ultimate key to success. Not just selling stuff. And Amazon has more tools than ever to help you build your brand.
Show Notes:
Transcript:
Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and on this episode, we're breaking down the trends and what to expect in 2024 from Amazon and how to set your brand up for success. My guest is Trenton Bodenbach. He's a longtime OMG or Amazon strategist, and we talk about what are the components of success, what has shifted, what is shifting and what to do this year on Amazon. We talked about the fact that it really all comes down to brand building. Yes, there's merchandising, and yes, there's ad strategies, and yes, we're looking at SEO, but really all of this is to facilitate brand building and more specifically brand demand. I think Amazon recognizes that top brands recognize that. We'll talk about some good case studies and the way to look at that. Let's talk about a couple new things that are here or coming for the Amazon ecosystem.
One is vertical video ads for sponsor brand video. We actually believe that's kind of a big deal. We'll unpack that, walk through that with you. We'll also look at a new integration between Amazon and Facebook that allows shoppers to buy something on Amazon without leaving Facebook. This is not the first time Facebook has kind of tried something like this, but it is the first time Facebook and Amazon have come together. So we'll talk about what that could mean and what to expect and what to look at there. We also talk about some fun stuff like, hey, running 36 miles to the woods and ice baths and how that ties to growth on Amazon. And so we want to gear you up and set you up for success. Please enjoy my interview with Trenton Boden bch and helping you succeed on Amazon.
I've got Trenton Bodenbach with me here, Amazon strategist, longtime, OMG. Going to talk about trends and what to expect on Amazon this year and how do we set ourselves up to really maximize opportunities on Amazon. Trent, how's it going? It's going well. I just got a haircut. I feel fresh. Dude, you did get a haircut. So you always live as a wild man. You go on these long runs. In fact, I think people will be interested in this. The most recent run that you and Bill Coover did, what was the distance? What was the location? What was that like? So we did the 36 miles on the Buffalo River Trail through the Buffalo River National Forest in northwest Arkansas, northwest Arkansas, close to the home of Walmart and whatnot in that area, about an hour and a half from Bentonville ish, somewhere in there.
And so 36 miles, how long does it take to run 36 miles through the rivers and forests the longer than it should have? Well, I feel we've done it before, so is we try to do it once a year. I was not as prepared this year as I should be. We had unexpected twins that came and my running is not as where it should be, but it took us, what time did we start? Right, about 12 hours to finish the whole thing. So 12 hours of basically constant running. Maybe you're taking a few breaks to walk or whatnot, but you're running essentially for 12 hours. Yeah, yeah. That's a good run. That's insane. I do think there's some interesting parallels there though. If you, and this wasn't planned, but I think it just worked out. If you're going to grow on Amazon, it's a bit of a marathon, not a sprint, and it's not one of those marathons just on clearly paved roads and everything is smooth and yeah, we got to find our way.
Yeah, you got to find your way stuff's broken. You're going to twist an ankle or break something, and so it gets a little bit gnarly and to really set the stage that you're a glutton for punishment. You and I are also doing, so I did not participate in any 36 mile runs at all. I think two, three miles as far as I want to go, but we're both doing something else. It's a little bit challenging, a little bit painful, but with a purpose. So talk about your cold plunge routine. I haven't talked to you about this. I recorded this yesterday. I don't record cold plunges. I don't like to talk about cold plunges because I feel like everyone, everyone is talking about cold plunges. So we'll keep this brief, but it's so fun. But it was negative seven degrees on Monday and I did the coldest cold plunge I have ever done and I got out and my feet froze to the ground and I went to open the back door to get back in and my hand, I couldn't open it, and so I'm banging on the door screaming for my wife to open the door, and so she finally did and I had to yank my feet from it.
So it's been fun. That's amazing. I've enjoyed it. It's amazing. And we won't go into all the benefits. You can easily Google that or you've heard it on the interwebs or whatnot, but I did not cold plunge yesterday, but I did over the weekend. It was like 16 degrees outside, water was 34. Took me a while to break through the ice, honestly. But it felt amazing, but also very, very cold. I've got this cold plunge though that kind of the sides are more of a rubber. It's a pretty small cold plunge. Whole thing's frozen right now. Yeah, it's been like negatives overnight. The whole thing is, I went to break it yesterday and I was, I don't think I can actually do this. And so we need to get into the upper thirties. We can get in this again. So anyway, hey, there are tons of rewards from being on Amazon.
We love the platform. We don't believe it's slowing down. We believe the opportunities are just as good now as they were before, but it could be a little bit dicey. You maybe need to have a little bit inside of you or inside of your team of like, Hey, we're going to do whatever it takes. We're going to trudge through this and make this work. So this isn't necessarily a predictions episode, this is more of a what to expect and how to succeed this year episode. But let's talk about some trends. What are the trends you're excited about? And actually, let's frame it this way. I think some people are like, oh, maybe I missed the boat on Amazon. Maybe I should do something else with Amazon. Is it too late? What kind of growth are you seeing as an Amazon strategist on the Amazon platform?
Yeah, we've seen a lot of people come in who are either new sellers and we're trying to figure out and navigate what it's like to be newly on Amazon. And they're excited, but they're also nervous that they have gotten on too late. And so I will say it is harder now to launch on Amazon, and that's just the truth of at one point, I feel like it was kind of, we called it the gold rush the other day we were talking is where you could just launch and everything would sell and it was kind of like you couldn't lose. And so I would say you have to be way more strategic with how you're positioning yourself, what you're selling and thinking through when you're first getting on Amazon and adding new products onto Amazon. But I will say what we are seeing a lot more, and the proof is in the pudding on Amazon, is that it's all about brands and it's about creating opportunities not just to sell a single off product, one product, but to create a cohesive amount of products that can sell under a brand.
And so I think through Amazon, they've released a lot of tools over the last three to four years where traditionally they didn't really care about brands, they just cared about selling stuff, selling products, but they realized that for them, the long game is about creating opportunities for sellers. And so they've been investing heavily in the ability to push brands. And so we're seeing that a lot more. And if you just look at the growth of Amazon, right? Amazon is still at a size that's kind of hard to wrap our minds around. They are so far ahead of anybody else in terms of online sales. It's scary and they continue to grow at a breakneck pace. So we're just looking Q3 of last year, Q4 data's not out yet, but Q3 was up 12 point a 5% year over year at $143 billion and then total 12 months trailing at the end of Q3, $554 billion, 10% increase year over year.
And that's even as we consider the covid wave and how e-commerce took off over that time period. Also, some interesting things about Amazon, if you look at the way they count revenue, they now sell more products to their third party marketplace, which is where OMG really comes in. As we're working with brands and sellers that have their products on Amazon, it's mostly through the third party marketplace. What's interesting is the way Amazon has to count that revenue according to Gap, the generally accepted accounting principles, they can only count their take of that revenue. So if I sell a hundred dollars widget on Amazon through the marketplace, Amazon's take is say 10%, they count $10 of that towards their total sales. The other 90 does not get counted towards Amazon sales, but that's still a hundred dollars sale that no other retailer got. Amazon. Got it.
So that's one of those interesting things where the numbers and Amazon's something like 50, 60% third party marketplace, those numbers are an order of magnitude bigger than what they look like because of those accounting principles. I'm going to be honest, I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. It's pretty crazy. So Amazon continues to grow, so the opportunities are there more tools like Trent said, it's just that you got to be better right now, right? You've got to move into that area where you are thinking a brand like a merchandiser, like the old school product developers like your p and gs and stuff. Even on a small scale, how do we build this brand experience even though we're going to leverage retailers, we got to think like a brand. And so really nothing is slowing down for Amazon. Also, it's kind of talking about some of the new online retailers that are popping up, some of the Chinese retailers like Shein and Temu, anybody using Shein and Temu, you hear people talking about that.
My wife has dabbled. You have younger kids not buying stuff online necessarily. Our stocking stuffers were kind of sponsored by Tbu this year, if I'm very honest. It was our first purchase from there and we did one and we haven't done anything since then. But we got a lot of modeling, clay modeling clay. Kids love art supplies, and we got a lot of art supplies. So we're on sort of different ends of the spectrum, but also overlapping. So you've got five kids now, which is insane. All under the age of oldest just turned seven. Wow. Five kids under the age of seven, so that's insane. My wife and I have eight from a pretty broad range, seven to 21. So our older kids are teenagers. They like to shop on Shein, right? I've never been on Shein cheap prices and interesting, a lot of fashion related stuff.
Temu is also a lot of fashion. Co-founder Chris Brewer is buying some stuff on Temu and showing it's just for fun. And what's interesting though, and I saw an expert talk about this recently, they're not so much concerned about, those brands probably aren't eating into Amazon's market share. They're probably eating more into market share of other apparel focused retailers. So maybe even some of the traditional brick and mortar retailers that continue to struggle or other online retailers, but likely they're not eating into Amazon's market share too much. Or if they are, it is imperceivable, you can't see it in the data, which is interesting. My take on not Temu is their shipping is interesting because it all comes just shoved in a bag and half of it's kind of damaged. It takes a while too. It takes a while a little longer. And so I think there will always be more growth in Amazon in the sense of the quality control is there that actually, I mean we were looking at the numbers earlier and was it Amazon is now bigger by parcel number than FedEx and US, PSPS and UPS.
Yeah. So I mean they deliver more packages than the delivery companies, which is crazy. So that gives them a real edge moving forward as well. And then just anecdotally, this holiday season, we host a small group at our church, and so I was just talking to a lot of younger couples and we were just talking to 'em about, Hey, what's your shopping pattern? I have a hard time turning off the marketer in me, and so I'm always doing market research. Yeah, I dunno. So I'm like, Hey, did you buy online or in store? Most everybody bought online and there were so many people, even younger couples in their twenties that said, I just bought everything on Amazon. I didn't ask them. They just made a point of saying that I bought everything on Amazon. That's where my parents work. A lot of people, they just shop.
Everything's on Amazon. Yeah, I think, well one, did you actually buy your gifts or did you have someone buy your gifts for Yeah, I outsourced that. Actually, no, my wife Brittany, she loves to buy gifts and so I just buy for her and I did not buy for her from Amazon. I bought from the retailers knight, from Nike and from Birkenstock and a couple other things. But yeah, I did not actually, you know what? All our kids' gifts came from Amazon and I would say I think we did one, my son got a electric dirt bike that came from Walmart, but mine for my wife all came also. I did not all from actually the stores. Interesting. We did some pans. Shout out to Caraway. Caraway. Dude, that is an awesome brand. They're doing some amazing things. We did some caraway pans and then also a jacket for her and those came from directly from the D two C.
Super interesting. And so kind of last point on all of this is just you need to be thinking thoughtfully, thinking thoughtfully. You need to be thoughtful about your approach to Amazon in that if you're doing really well from a branding standpoint and you're selling products D two C, someone is going to be profiting off your brand on Amazon and that should be you. But other people are going to be popping up. We saw this with Boom by Cindy Joseph. Someone's either going to buy your actual products and try to sell it on Amazon, even if you try to squash that it's going to happen some or they're going to build a knockoff and try to cap and bid on your brand name and stuff like that on Amazon, they're going to try to capitalize on that. So you got to have an Amazon strategy of some sort.
And I would also say some people think just because the same strategy doesn't have to be applied to your TTC to Amazon. And so what we see is a lot of companies will come in and they just put every product they have from their store on their Amazon store and they're like, eh. And for me, like, okay, you know what? You want to focus on D two C, that's fine, but there's a lot of branded search on Amazon. Okay, let's capture it with, let's get some of your bestsellers on there. We're not going to capitalize on everything you have from your D two C, but let's make sure that your customers who are going to be searching for you on Amazon are able to find your product and it's going towards you and not one of your competitors. Yeah, I love that. And so having that merchandising strategy, and that's ultimately what it comes down to is success on Amazon is part advertised.
We're going to talk about that in a second. You really can't grow on Amazon in any meaningful way without some advertising strategy. If you think about the way the search engine results pages look in Amazon, a lot of those are 30, 40, 50% ads. Those placements are ads. So really got to pay to play as far as that goes. It is merchandising. So how is my product showing up on the shelf from product photography to can I make sense of this product to the actual product detail page and understanding who it's for, what it does, why I should want it. And then it's also, it's part branding and storytelling that goes into that product detail page as well. And some on ads, which we'll talk about some formats that lend themselves well to storytelling. And then it's a little bit SEO, we're doing some things to try to get our products to show up to the right people at the right time.
I would say a lot of SEO, it's a lot of SEO. Yeah. And that all that work can be done in the fourth. Usually that work is done when you're building those brands out and you're building those product detail pages out. But I think a lot of people, they get excited about launching products and the work in the back backend of making sure you even go into your storefront or your a plus content, taking those keywords, putting those on the backend of the images just so that relevancy score for Amazon gets connected to those products. I think again, some of it's not as sexy as getting in and advertising. I'm talking about how advertising is. My wife would be like, what are you talking about? For us, advertising is fun, is sexy, but the SEO is so important, especially because Amazon is trying to really connect that product to the right customer.
They want to make a sale, they make more money. And really, to clarify my point of view on that, SEO is extremely important. Cool thing is some of those other pieces all feed into it. So the right ad strategy increases the volume and that can help with SEO, the right merchandising and storytelling that's going to increase your conversion rate, which feeds into SEO, but you have to think about it all strategically and you got to execute on all of it or you're going to be hitting some snags. And really, let's actually pivot to advertising real quick and we'll talk more about branding potentially in a minute. So some new things coming out, there's a vertical video on sponsored brand video that's coming out right now. And so for those that don't know what sponsored brand video is, it used to be called video in search ads because as you perform a search on Amazon, whether it's on a mobile device or desktop, you're going to see ads that are video based.
Usually they've got a listing next to it, under it, beside it, whatever, and a video with the sound off. Great experience for customers. I see this a lot in the pet space, but now it's really prolific across all categories, good shopping experience. It's one of those ways to like, hey, this would be kind of cool if I was in a store, if I was looking at these products, can I see this one in action? Can I see a demonstration here? But those have historically been more wide screen or whatever, or 16 by nine or whatever. If you had a vertical video, which for me, I've always was conditioned, never take a vertical video, but now everything's viewed on a phone, so vertical videos are not bad. Historically you'd have to take it and reformat it and you would have pillars on the right and left side.
It just didn't look as clean. But now what they're doing is they've kind of stacked it in such a way where your vertical video shows on the left and then you have the option to put one or two products on the right. So it looks very clean. And for me, what I'm really excited about is a lot of what you get from your users, so your user generated content is going to be vertical video. They pull out their iPhone, they shoot their little video, say, Hey, this product's great, I just got it in. Or they do their unboxing. You can now use that content really easy. Totally. And yeah, vertical video, I would argue most brands have more vertical video content than anything else. If you look at, we're trying to scale on tiktoks to a certain degree, but also Instagram reels and YouTube shorts.
And so vertical video is kind of the flavor of the day. It is funny though, I noticed this the other day too, just a little side note, I was shooting video. When we do family get togethers and stuff, I take pictures, a lot of video. I took photography in high school. I always been kind of passionate about photography, amateur level stuff, but I would always shoot video in landscape mode. Always. Yeah, always. And I remember hearing my sister-in-law was like, you don't ever do vertical videos, do you? And I was like, well, why should, that's wrong, isn't it? I didn't actually think about that out loud, but that's just the way I've been conditioned. That's the way you shoot video. But yeah, it's, we all have vertical video and it's the flavor of the day. And so now we can put that to use in sponsor brand video.
And what's cool is that if we look at what ads work the best on Amazon sponsored product ads, those are the listing ads. The ads, the normal shopper doesn't even know their ads. I talk to people when people ask me what I do and stuff I show them, I dunno if it still makes sense or not, but a lot of times you see the sponsored product ads in the search results, you don't even know it's an ad. So those are the most effective, but a really close second in a lot of cases, a sponsored brand video, those ads just crush it. They're often good at attracting new customers to your brand. They're a disruptor, they're a disruptor. You get in and you're looking through, say we're searching for, I dunno shoes, and you're looking through all these listings and all of a sudden there's something that, there's movement to it, there's sound.
It just captures a client's customer's attention. Just way easier than a historical gist sponsored. Yeah, if I know what I'm looking for, I know exactly what I'm looking for. I may not need the video. If I know the brand, I know the style, that's what I'm looking for, then kind of get out of my way. Let me find it. But if I'm kind of browsing, I want a moccasin or I want this type of button up shirt, whatever, and I don't really know what I want. Those videos, they're really helpful and that's why they're good new to brand. But what are we seeing with, or what are we hearing through our reps and through some connections vertical videos, how are they working? Well, honestly, I haven't seen one in the wild yet. Yeah, I was looking really hard for, I was looking too. I want to see these in action.
It's a limited use case, but our prediction is we're going to see a lot more of these this year. You're going to see a lot. And so I mean we're talking within the last, I think 30 days that these became available. And so I reached out to our Amazon specialist and said, Hey, have we seen any or have we implemented them? And so we've had two clients who have content that we are starting to implement, but we have not got to the point where they're actually live. But what they're claiming on Amazon, and again, everything's taken with a grain of salt. We're seeing about a 9% increase in click-through rate on average for these videos. And again, that's probably through their beta testing. So if you're at a one and then just to translate that, if you're at a 1% click-through rate, that's make you a 1.09, which is not insignificant, no, that can really help, especially if it's a high volume product, a lot of search volume there, then that can make a real difference.
And tie this back into the brand building again, this is another opportunity for someone to either land on your storefront, you can, if they click on a product, going to take to the product detail page just like your classic brand video or sponsor brand ad, but also it can lead to your storefront if they just click on the general ad itself. And so all of these opportunities are to send people to your storefront, which we can spend a day talking about the importance of a storefront because it's the only place that on Amazon that you're going to have where you're not competing against other people for ad space, there's no other competitors showing on your storefront. So you get somebody there and you have the ability to show them your whole catalog. And that's where that brand is really important. You have other products you can cross promote, you can show them what you have.
You can put a video content in there, you can talk about who you are, why you're selling. So it's super important that you're disrupting that list of just generic Amazon. You get that video, people click on it and hopefully they're going to be able to see and discover your brand as a whole. Yeah, and that's, again, you're kind of thinking about this from a, what was this, back in the old days when we were just shopping in store only and that experience by looking at the shelf, this allows you to bring some of that to life and allows you to really differentiate who you are. And as we look at storefront, and so you have to have an Amazon storefront. I have to be brand registered to use this, but one thing that, one of the myths we like to bust as we're looking at, hey, you need an Amazon strategy, is a lot of people say, Hey, when you saw an Amazon, it's not your customer, Amazon's customer.
And while there's a degree of truth to that scenario, I go to Best Buy some not that much, but I like to browse it. I like tech, I like gadgets, I like to walk around and stuff. I don't know the last time I've been to Best Buy, really? Yeah, it's been a long time. So if I go into the Apple store within a store, the Apple experience inside of Best Buy, whose customer am I at that point? If I buy some Apple stuff, my Apple's customer or my Best Buy's customer, the real answer is both, right? I, I'm buying from both, but I specifically want to buy Apple because of what Apple has done with their branding and the experience and I've got all Apple products. And so I'm an Apple customer, I bought it at Best Buy, but I'm an Apple customer. The same can be true inside of Amazon.
We were talking about a couple brands earlier that have done this really, really well. Anchor A-N-K-E-R really launched on Amazon. So if you need a charger, you need some of those peripheral things to help charge all your devices. They're certified, they're safe, they're really, really good. So I always tell people, Hey, if you're going to buy a replacement charger, either buy Apple Brand or buy Anchor, but anchors really, they're built on Amazon, largely a simple, modern is another one, Tumblrs and different drinkware and some of it's sports related and stuff. Awesome, awesome brand here in the Midwest, based in Oklahoma City, basically launched on Amazon. But they've got a real brand as you look at it. That's something you want to tell people, Hey, this is a simple modern mug, or Hey, I buy Anchor products. And I think one of the differences, you know, have a real brand when someone says, Hey, I buy Anchor, just buy Anchor when you don't have a brand is when someone's like, I bought this thing.
It's on Amazon. You go on Amazon, where Amazon is more important than the brand, that's when you know really don't have a brand. You're just selling on Amazon for sure. And so sponsor brand video, vertical video plays into this allows you to leverage all those video assets that you have and really lead into what we believe is that the overarching trend over the last several years. And it's going to continue. Those that win those really succeed are building brands on Amazon. This is going to help you do that. Now, this next thing I'm really geeking out about, we'll see, we'll see what happens is very early, we can't even test this yet, but Trenton talk about the shop in Facebook, and I don't even know actually what the real name is there. We saw our buddy Jeffrey Cohen from Amazon talking this, where now there's the integration between Facebook and Amazon.
But what does this allow Trenton? Well, I'll say this. When I first started working on the Amazon platform, their main goal was to never let anybody ever leave Amazon or do anything connected to any data, nothing, just all self-contained within Amazon. What walled Garden to the extreme. Yeah. But over the years we've seen more and more like Buy With Prime is being used on D two C sites. And so what this is is it's the ability to stay within either Facebook or Instagram and you can buy utilizing, you connect your Amazon account to your social media platform. And so if I'm scrolling on Instagram and I see that anchor or simple model bottom, that Tumblr that I really, I was like, ah, thinking about it, I can purchase that Tumblr straight through Instagram by just clicking on it and it'll give you your basic information.
It gives you price, it gives you your relative shipping date. I think there's some information that they're trying to figure out there. It's still very early in beta, but I can literally just click on it, buy it, and never leave the Instagram app, which is for me mind blowing that they're doing this because I never thought that was going to be the case. But this is going to hopefully, again, we're very early in on this, it's going to enable a lot of our client or a lot of our clients to be able to, one, to utilize and Instagram utilize meta to be able to push their products into such a new way into new customers. Well, new customers in the sense of they have maybe a following on Instagram that not connecting to their Amazon account, but you know what? They see 'em discover and they never have to leave that app to make that purchase.
So you're just taking that barrier down. So it's pretty exciting. And Facebook and some of the platforms, similar to what you just said about Amazon, they don't want you to leave either. They want you to stay within that platform, spend more time on Facebook and Instagram. And so this is going to lower friction and make it really easy just to buy stuff as you discover it, as you see it on the social platforms and connect it to Amazon. What's really interesting about this is what are the modes we like to shop in? Well, if I know either exactly the product I'm looking for, so I know that I need to buy, it's super cold here right now. I was looking at gloves, swimming on a ski trip and some other things. So I'm looking for gloves. If I know what I'm looking for or I know the problem I'm trying to solve, I'm probably searching, right?
I'm searching on Amazon, I'm searching on Google, I'm searching and trying to find it if I don't really know, but I'm kind of like I'm itching to buy some new clothes or whatever. I'm more like in this exploration type mode. And that's when Amazon or other social platform, I'm sorry, Facebook or other social platforms, they know like, Hey, I'm going to start showing you stuff and start suggesting stuff. And so if I can discover it and buy it right away on Facebook through Amazon where I trust Amazon, I trust the return policy, all of that is established. It's going to be a game changer. Now, whether this iteration actually works or not is TBD, but it seems like a lot of things are in the right place because this whole buy on social, social shopping is not new. Facebook tried to do something similar to this a few years ago where you could just buy and check out on Facebook, but it wasn't with Amazon.
And so I think this will be really interesting to see how this plays out. Yeah, it's going to be, I think, well, one, we don't have access to this yet. We don't sure how it's going to work, but it's something to continue to watch for because I do think as soon as this is available, testing just straight off for our clients will be super interesting. And those data points will be for me, and I don't know how they're going to report on it yet or anything like that, but I'm interested to see how well it does. And right now it's all one P, meaning it's all products that Amazon has purchased wholesale and they're selling directly. So sold by Amazon, not third party marketplace products. But you got to believe, and I say this with a pretty high degree of confidence, even though I didn't hear this, is that if it goes well, this is going to be opened up to a broader audience.
They want to make more sales. Yeah, absolutely. They're going to open that up for sure. Facebook wants the ad revenue. Amazon wants to make sales. So what are a couple of the other trends here as we're kind of running out of time trend, but what are a few of the other trends you're excited about on Amazon or excited to see released or really gained steam this year? Yeah, I think we come back again to that brand building experience. And what they're doing is more and more self-serve ads are being released on Seller Central. And so for me, sponsored TV ads historically, what was it, 30 grand? I think Amazon, when they first released sponsored TV ads, you had a minimum of 15 KA month was what we'd always heard. But for a certain number of months, that's what you had to spend to even test it.
And we had clients testing that and was, they never had a great experience. It's not bad. That's a chunk. You're trying something new. You're like, I don't really know how this is going to report. I don't really know how this is going to play out, but I got to spend a minimum of say, 30 to 45 grand. That's a lot. Yeah. So the commitment barrier is down. You can literally get on seller central now you can pick your, it's all CPM, your bids for CPM. And so the ability, what I'm seeing on Amazon is saying, Hey, do you know what? We can push this brand and we can push it through at higher levels. And so get people more in that discovery phase and bring them, because Amazon, again, it was always just, you went to Amazon, you were ready to buy. Yep, yep. You weren't necessarily, I know what I'm looking for, I'm searching, I'm getting ready to search.
Yep. Amazon's in a tremendous product search engine. You might have a couple options that you're thinking through, but you know what you're buying. And now we have the ability to say, you know what? We can reach customers before they even know what our product is and start pushing this at a higher level. And so really excited for the opportunities to come in the next couple of years of not necessarily just the demand side, but let's grow our brand. It's awareness through the opportunities, because historically we've to do that through YouTube, and then we'd have to do that also through Google to Amazon. But then again, that was always just kind of, it works, but again, those always don't jive. And so the ability not a direct connection. And those are still two areas like Google and Amazon, and a couple interesting things there. One, Amazon is Google's biggest advertiser, and nobody spends more money on pay-per-click than Amazon.
And Google is Amazon's number one source of traffic, but they don't like to share data with each. It's a catch each. It's a catch between two frenemies. Sure, frenemies. But yeah, it's so well put, right? The tried and true with Amazon is all demand capture where we're dependent on some other external factors driving demand for our product or demand for our category. And then we're just capturing that demand where really I think the brands as they grow and move into the future, and what Amazon certainly wants is some demand generation. Now there's a limit there. There's a point where demand generation can get wildly inefficient and wildly unproductive. And so that is one mindset you got to bring to this. If I'm doing sponsored TV ads or if I'm doing Amazon DSP or I'm trying to grow, go a little bit higher in the funnel to more that awareness stage.
You got to be careful. You got to experiment. You got to test with small budgets small enough to not be worried about losses not as easy, it's not like sponsored product ads, but Amazon is motivated to do this. You as a branch be motivated to do this. How can we get the right mix of demand generation and demand capture? That's where we're going to build this constantly growing demand for our brand and this flywheel that's going to really propel us into the future. It's definitely a balancing act. And so I think also for looking at that, for me also understanding Amazon posts. And so they've invested, I mean when posts first came out, what is an Amazon post for those? No, no. So it's like a brand, think of Instagram, it's like a brand feed. So you go there, you can make a post, connect your products to it.
It has an image, but also just a caption. And so you go there and you can discover it. It's more about the social side of your products and you can go to the storefront and the last option on that storefront usually is post, you click on it and you'll go to that brand feed. But when they first released this, it was really limited data, little more information. I was like, this isn't going to last. But over the last two years, they've released more information, they've released more options. And so what we're seeing is like, okay, the posts are not going away. They're still free. At some point they'll probably be some paid aspect of posts, but we were also ability to push video on post now or have the ability to really utilize these in such a way to grow a brand. And so utilizing that sponsor TV post, making sure your a plus content is connected to your brand in a cohesive way where again, we're not selling just a single off product, but we're really building a brand following here.
Yeah, yeah. It's so good. And so looking at all this, we'll kind of wrap a bow on this, but I think that the larger trend is Amazon is coming up with more tools, more ways to increase the amount of products that people are willing to buy, but they're also seeing that they're really supporting and helping good brands is how they succeed. And one analogy to maybe think about, we go to trade shows, some in our industry and we display and put up a booth and stuff like that. It's one thing to kind of have a booth at a trade show because there's demand and there's traffic there that the trade show has generated, but there's so much more you can do than just have a booth. And I think that's the way a lot of people are on Amazon. They have a product listing, so they've got a booth, but they need to be doing other things.
So what we try to do or what we see other people do successfully is like, okay, we got our booth. We're sending people out to talk and mingle. So we got people out to bring 'em in, reps and other people to bring people in. We're putting stuff in trade show bags, we're putting up displays and banners and we're showing videos. We're doing all kinds of stuff to find the right person who's there to come in and become interested in our services. And so I think there's going to be more ways to do that all contained within Amazon. So more tools to attract people to our products within Amazon. And we got to go beyond that some as well. And that's where we look at things like Google to Amazon and YouTube to Amazon and Facebook to Amazon. All of that is going to be getting better and there's going to be some new developments there as well.
So going to be exciting year. Amazon not slowing down anytime soon. Any parting words of wisdom? Trenton? I have a very, very important parting word. Awesome. And it's Happy Birthday. Oh, happy. A little birdie told me that it might be Brett Curry's birthday. That's true. On the day of recording, it is my birthday. 72. Yeah, my kids did these balloons for me. And the kids always like to exaggerate like you're 5,127 years old today, which is a fun number. So that was really cool. But I'm actually 44 today. So 44 today. Alright, feeling great man. Feeling great. Feeling full of energy. 44 and thriving. Thanks dude. And so I hope you enjoyed this. Hey, if you do need help with Amazon, you're looking at like, Hey, my strategy on Amazon is probably not what it should be, but you do have some traction, you have a brand and you're doing multiple seven figures. We would love to talk to you at OMG Commerce and if you're looking at that Amazon strategy, it's probably going to be this guy helping you map that out and at least talk through that. So with that, Trenton, thanks for coming on, man. We'll have to do this a little more consistently, but excited about Amazon this year. I'm excited. Awesome. Thanks man. Looking forward to next time
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