Amazon and its competitors are all building AI-automated ad products that relieve brands and agencies of some of the work managing campaigns. The AI ad products, such as Google’s Performance Max, Meta’s Advantage+, and TikTok’s Smart+, identify the customers with the highest likelihood of conversion—meaning those people are primed to act on the ads. The ad products take some of the workload off the advertisers, but they also take some of the controls out agencies’ hands. There are some concerns that the rise of AI ad products decreases transparency in ad markets, because inscrutable AI handles the targeting and bidding for advertisers; the decision-making and reporting could be somewhat of a black box. Amazon said its AI ad platform has transparency and won’t minimize advertiser “oversight or strategic input.”
As these ad platforms develop, they also provide more generative AI tools that assist with the creative design and copy within ads. Also, as Amazon is doing here, the AI campaigns are evolving to handle campaigns with brand-awareness outcomes, not just performance marketing. Google has paired Performance Max campaigns with Demand Gen, an ad product that targets consumers to increase their interest in a brand, before they are poised to make a shopping decision.
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AI decision-making is becoming more important, too, in advertising as marketers lose signals from cookies and other ad-tracking technology. For instance, Amazon has emphasized how its Performance+ campaigns match ads with people without needing third-party cookies, the web browsing tracker that is going out of vogue.
Amazon’s DSP competes most directly with Google’s Display and Video 360 and The Trade Desk. In Amazon’s DSP, the brand-awareness campaigns take an advertisers’ first-party data and match it with customers on Amazon who have searched for relevant products or streamed shows that indicate the viewer’s interests, Amazon said in the announcement. The idea is to get streaming TV commercials in front of the most suitable audience. “The machine learning models continuously optimize the campaign by analyzing new signals and engagement insights, helping reach high-potential customers early,” Amazon said.