Thursday, January 18, 2018

Amazon has a plan to become profitable. It's called advertising.


Amazon is an amazing company that has dominated the e-retailing landscape and successfully moved into adjacencies like groceries and cloud services. During its meteoric rise, investors have made Amazon one of the most valuable companies in the world. But despite all of this, there is one area where Amazon has not been particularly successful: profitability. Over the last five years, Amazon’s average profit margin has been only about 1 percent.

Amazon believes that online advertising may be the cure for their profitability woes. Amazon has slowly been building out a marketing platform that will let it take advantage of – and profit from – the massive audience that flocks to its website every day. And unlike the e-retail side of the business with small margins and massive logistics capital investments required, advertising is incredibly high margin. With little cost and capital required, advertising can enable Amazon to finally push up its profit margins.  

Advertising on Amazon could change the game for marketers. Amazon has a captive audience of millions of users who – at that very moment – are looking to make purchases. This makes the advertising “real estate” on amazon.com highly valuable, and potentially a game changer for digital marketing.

As a consumer, I am less excited by Amazon’s move into advertising. Amazon has always felt like a site where a search would bring me the most relevant, popular and highly rated (by users) products. With manufacturers paying Amazon for advertising, I will have to begin questioning which products are really best, and which Amazon may be paid to say it is best.

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