Anything You Can Do Amazon Can Do...Better?

What Amazon's Audience Match Tool Means For Advertisers

In early June Amazon quietly launched a self-serve platform called Advertiser Audiences, which lets advertisers upload their audience lists and CRM information, enabling tactics like audience matching and lookalike modeling. The Advertiser Audiences offering is similar to solutions Facebook and Google already had in the market; however Amazon’s offering has some key differences, such as unique insight into consumer path to purchase and access to Amazon’s audience data. Both of these differentiating factor will allow Advertiser Audiences to engage consumers deep in consideration or already at the purchase phase as opposed to creating awareness and consideration.

It seems to me that Bezos’ strategy of aggregating consumer information on an unparalleled scale has put Amazon in a unique position to monetize the data as its newest offering has the ability to leverage consumer purchase and behavioral browsing data and facilitate marketers’ ability to deliver more relevant ads and boost their return on ad spend across the funnel.

I wrote earlier about Amazon challenging Google and Facebook for a bigger share of the digital advertising pie, and this is a bold challenge indeed. While some might raise concern about the level of involvement and influence, not to mention privacy issues, using data collected on them presents, I for one am a big fan. I hate being shown random ads, they annoy me. I rarely click on ads for products that I would not be likely to buy. I actually dislike shopping and view myself as a surgical consumer – I know what I want and I go to that particular site, buy the product and close my browser window. In fact, if I’m not buying a particular brand name product directly from a website (e.g., Bonobos or Chubbies) I already do the vast majority of what I’ll call commodity shopping through Amazon, so they know everything about me! By offering marketers this data, I believe that I will be shown ads more tailored to me and it will make future online purchasing easier for me, thus giving me the one resource that everything has hereto failed – TIME.

Maybe I’ve drank the Amazon Kool-Aid – but if I’m going to drink any Kool-Aid, why not Amazon’s? I mean it probably knows which flavor it should give me before I do – sure saves me time on deciding which flavor!