Amazon puts display ads into Twitch livestreams

Amazon will start placing display ads, more commonly known as banner ads, inside Twitch livestreams, the company announced at its advertising conference on Tuesday. The display ads will pop up as streamers present videos on Twitch, which claims to have 30 million daily visitors and 7 million-plus creators. Sponsored Display Ads, which is Amazon’s name for the product, already appear on other parts of Twitch, like in the browsing section, but they have never flashed on screen during livestreams, as they will now. Display ads are often used by retailers, consumer goods, and video game and movie studios to promote services that also could be purchased on Amazon. Amazon already runs pre-roll ads before many livestreams and mid-roll commercials inside the videos. Amazon has been integrating Twitch more into the Amazon Ads platform, relying on it as an extension for marketing within its ecosystem. Twitch also splits ad revenue with creators who tend to stream for hours daily, and the creators specialize in a number of topics like video games, cultural and political commentary, stock tips, beauty, and sports. “Sponsored Display Ads are self-service, can be created in minutes, and help brands connect with relevant audiences both within and beyond Amazon’s store,” Amazon said in its announcement. The announcement was part of Amazon’s two-day unBoxed conference that started Tuesday, at which the e-commerce giant is outlining updates to its ads platform. Twitch’s head of sales Sarah Iooss spoke with NBA Chief Marketing Officer Kate Jhaveri about how the basketball league has put Twitch into its media mix. The partnership was an example of how Twitch is expanding beyond its gaming roots to cater to other fandoms. It also was an example of how a sports league can get involved with the site, just as Amazon is about to have an even closer partnership with the NFL. Next year, "Thursday Night Football" games will stream exclusively on Amazon, and Twitch was an essential component of the content that the NFL plans to create. “We leveraged popular streamers and basketball superstars to create custom content that resonates with new and existing fans,” NBA’s Jhaveri said in an announcement on the Amazon Ads blog, discussing NBA’s activity on Twitch. Amazon made a series of announcements at unBoxed related to connected TV, which for Amazon means IMDb TV, Fire TV, Prime Video and Twitch. Amazon laid out its strategy to build tools for marketers that use data to target ads and measure campaigns, which is a particularly timely subject. The ad industry is in a state of panic after Apple curbed data sharing on its devices, which made it harder for developers and marketers to reach targeted audiences and measure their ads. The issue came up in Facebook and Snapchat’s quarterly financial reports within the past week, where both companies discussed how they are fixing targeting and measurement to accommodate the new data rules around the web. Amazon used unBoxed to discuss new measurement tools like Amazon Brand Lift, which measures brand preferences and purchase intent based on surveys of shoppers. There also is Amazon’s Brand Metrics reporting, which calculates how many shoppers considered a brand while visiting product detail pages and conducting brand searches. Amazon also touted Amazon Marketing Cloud, which is a key data service that brands and their marketing partners use to play with data they collect on their consumers and ad campaigns. “Advertisers can upload their own pseudonymized data sets into their [Amazon Marketing Cloud],” Amazon said in its announcement on Tuesday, “and query them alongside event-level data sets from their Amazon Ads campaigns. This enables more holistic analysis and increased visibility into cross-channel marketing efficiency.” Register for Ad Age Next: Streaming at AdAge.com/NextStreaming.

Amazon puts display ads into Twitch livestreams

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