Amazon enhances video, streaming ad capabilities
Amazon is expanding the functionality it offers advertisers.
The e-tail giant’s Amazon Ads division is bringing video to its self-service sponsored display advertising solution. The new video feature, generally available to Amazon advertisers worldwide, enables the retailer’s brand partners, to create video campaigns for display on Amazon and elsewhere online.
Brands can leverage the new tool to deliver immersive video ads, such as tutorials, demos, unboxing, and testimonials, and measure campaign performance with standard Amazon sponsored display metrics. According to Amazon, this new feature is especially aimed at small-to-mid-sized brands.
Amazon Ads has also announced an expanded public beta program for its Video Builder solution, which streamlines the creation of videos for digital Amazon campaigns through ready-to-customizable templates.
Video Builder enables advertisers to use available product and lifestyle images to create ad content in less than 10 minutes at no additional cost. Amazon advertisers can also expand their use of video campaigns and experiment with creative variations to determine their effects on engagement.
In addition, Amazon is launching a new offering called Amazon Creative Services designed to help advertisers discover, compare, and directly book with service providers for the creation of videos and other creative assets. Brands can search and filter services based on their requirements, browse reviews and samples, and directly connect with providers, all within the Amazon ads console.
This new service is free to use, and there are no minimum commitments required to make a booking. All services provide a “moderation guarantee,” which ensures compliance with Amazon Ads policy.
Amazon Ads also introduced Amazon Streaming TV incremental household reach, a new enhancement to its Streaming TV ads solution. Streaming TV incremental household reach is a post-campaign reporting solution that helps brands measure the unique, incremental audience reached through Amazon Streaming TV Ads campaigns, above and beyond their linear TV campaigns.
The solution is intended to ensure accurate, aggregated results by combining first-party and third-party signals, augmented by machine leaning-based-projections. With in-flight reporting, brands can receive performance data and make optimizations during campaigns.
Amazon actively assists third-party brands (primarily small-to-medium-sized businesses) to sell on its e-commerce platform with at least 150 tools and services. In another effort to increase the functionality of its immersive, interactive advertising offering, the company recently released co-branded Buy with Prime social media ads, which are funded and managed by Amazon, in an invitation-only beta to help participating Buy with Prime sellers reach shoppers on Facebook and Instagram and drive traffic to products on their direct-to-consumer (DTC) sites.
[Read more: Amazon extends reach of Prime shopping]
Potential customers see ads from Amazon’s Buy with Prime page on Facebook and Instagram that feature specific sellers. When the shopper clicks on that ad, they’re taken to a product detail page on the seller’s DTC site where they can purchase directly from the seller using Buy with Prime.
“Our video ad solutions work together and make it simpler for brands to reach relevant audiences at scale, so they can deliver their creative work alongside popular content, engage viewers with delightful experiences, and measure and optimize their impact,” said Tanner Elton, VP of US sales for Amazon Ads. “We want to bring the power of video advertising to more brands, no matter their size or level of resources.”