IAB Canada held its annual State of the Nation event on May 31st in Toronto. With several presentations focused on the current state of the economy in Canada, we followed up with the Amazon Ads team to see how they are working with clients during this period of uncertainty and budgetary constraints.
IAB Canada (IABC): Given the current economic landscape – What is Amazon Ads doing to help marketers achieve business goals, improve performance, and reduce costs?
Amazon Ads (AA): Even before the current economic situation, marketers were feeling the pressure to do more with less. But now, according to a World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) survey, inflation and declining optimism have led 30% of major advertisers to say they’re cutting their ad budgets this year.
So, as important as it was to stretch every dollar a year ago, it’s even more critical now.
At Amazon Ads, we are focused on helping our customers work backwards from business outcomes, and that influences everything we do—especially when it comes to Amazon DSP. In fact, recent enhancements to bidding, pacing, and pricing strategies, as well as boosts to addressability, have helped eligible advertisers more efficiently meet their objectives—whether they’re selling products on Amazon or not.
Today, Amazon DSP isn’t just a go-to for marketers looking to reach Amazon audiences on Amazon-owned channels. Instead, it is an enterprise demand-side-platform for marketers who want to reach the right audiences—no matter where they are—as efficiently as possible and get the most out of their advertising spend.
IABC: Can we dig a little bit deeper into Amazon’s DSP? Specifically, how does the DSP help boost campaign performance and conversion?
AA: For every campaign run on Amazon DSP, our Amazon Web Services–powered machine learning models are continuously running tests and optimizing, helping our customers better reach their ideal audiences and achieve improved ad performance prediction—and, most importantly, helping advertisers attain their campaign goals.
Given the need to do more with less, it’s important to underscore that these improvements benefit all of our advertisers with no incremental fees or additional work by campaign execution teams. That means our customers saw these results without having to pay for any third-party signals, conduct manual optimizations, or put in additional time or financial investments to leverage their own insights.
Our signal-based marketing enables Amazon DSP to match the right messages to the right audiences at the right moments. And now, that includes audiences that were previously non-addressable. This is possible on Amazon DSP through the use of event- and context-based signals, which enable our technology to work to predict audiences’ in-the-moment interests without sacrificing reach, relevancy, or ad performance.
Those audiences aren’t just reachable on Amazon properties. In fact, the upgrades to Amazon DSP most significantly impacted addressability on non-Amazon inventory.
IABC: With the pressure do more with less, what can brands expect when considering Amazon’s DSP?
AA: Amazon DSP employs machine learning to discern the ad opportunities that are the right fit for an advertiser—and those that aren’t. Thus, we are inherently lowering costs for our customers while delivering higher returns because our machine learning has an improved “understanding” of what to buy and when, as well as the optimal cost per ad placement.
Regardless of what economic changes lie ahead, marketers will always strive to be as efficient as possible in how they allocate advertising spend. That’s why now is the time to experience how Amazon DSP can help maximize budgets, regardless of whether or not an advertiser sells on Amazon.
IAB Canada is proud to have Amazon Ads as a valued member and Elite Corporate Sponsor. To learn more about how to reach the Amazon Ads team or get involved in the IAB Canada community, please reach out to membership@iabcanada.com.