Designing a new DSP
Amazon has been a rising power in digital advertising for years, and its DSP has become one of the core products it invested in to compete on the buy-side of advertising. Amazon is up against The Trade Desk, which is a DSP, and Google’s DSP Display and Video 360. Ad tech experts and marketers in the programmatic trenches have often noted that Amazon’s DSP had not yet matched rivals’ technology. The latest updates, however, may help shift perceptions.
“Over the last couple of years, we’ve completely re-architected the entire backend of Amazon DSP,” MacLean said, “ensuring that we’re able to leverage all of the trillions of signals that we have to drive the best performance. And we’ve been obsessed with performance, and we’ve heard the feedback that advertisers want a more full-featured, yet simple and easy-to-use, media buying tool … we wanted to figure out how we can design a new DSP experience with this input in mind.”
In the first half of the year, Amazon’s ad business generated $24.6 billion, up 22% compared to the first six months of 2023. At the start of this year, Amazon officially launched ads on Prime Video, an increasingly important source of new, premium ad inventory for the company. Also, Amazon is developing ad tech that serves publishers so ads can run on connected TV apps and websites outside of Amazon-owned properties. Prime Video is a prestigious ad offering, but the nuts and bolts of Amazon’s ad products are within its e-commerce engine, where brands use search, display, audio and other ad formats to reach consumers. Amazon’s shopper data is the fuel that powers the targeting and measurement.
At unBoxed, Amazon announced it would expand Prime Video ads to more markets, including Brazil, India, Japan, the Netherlands and New Zealand. Amazon said it would keep the ad loads “limited” in those regions, and positioned it as a way to help fund local content.
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AI and measurement
On Tuesday, Amazon also announced new generative AI tools to build the ads. Last year, Amazon announced AI image-generating tools that spruced up product images in ads, but the AI is getting more sophisticated. Amazon’s AI now ads some animation to images, like steam rising off a cup of coffee, in what Amazon calls “live” AI images. AI also can produce up to 10 seconds of video for ads that can run online and on connected TV. On Tuesday, Amazon launched a generative AI product that will produce audio ads.
“So, just like with images and videos, advertisers can create audio ads that can be heard all across Alexa-enabled devices,” said Jay Richman, VP of creative experiences for Amazon Ads.
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Amazon also launched an AI creative studio app for marketers that will incorporate all of its generative AI tools into one platform. AI is helping smaller brands stand up ad campaigns with fewer resources and helps brands meet the increased demand for content online, Richman said.
“That’s why we launched, a year ago, image generator,” Richman said, adding that it’s “a super simple but powerful tool that turns product shots into display ads, and we did that in order to make display advertising way more accessible.”