Meta’s Amazon ad account seeks specialist as social commerce rivalry intensifies

Meta is seeking to hire an Amazon specialist to help service the e-commerce giant’s ad account, according to a recent job posting. It’s a sign of growing competition among social media apps to facilitate closer ties with Amazon and its deep marketing pockets. The role is for a “client partner” whose responsibilities include “driving meaningful revenue growth,” according to the listing. It’s not rare for Meta, or any platform, to seek ad leaders who solely focus on a key brand, but Amazon has been a particularly high-value client among the social media apps. Last year, TikTok also hired a “head of Amazon.” Meta also has a job opening for a “solutions manager” for the Amazon account, with responsibilities that include working in tandem with the client partner. “For large advertising spenders, Meta will create dedicated sales teams to provide white glove service,” said Rachel Tipograph, CEO of MikMak, the e-commerce and analytics platform. Retail has been an increasingly lucrative category on social media. It’s been boosted by the rise of fast fashion out of China, which birthed big-spending marketers such as Temu and Shein, according to e-commerce experts. Amazon spent $6 billion on advertising in the U.S. last year, according to Vivvix, including paid social data from Pathmatics, and Amazon’s media mix skews more than 80% toward digital channels. Amazon also recently underwent a closely watched media review in which it picked new agencies to lead its $20 billion global account, splitting it between WPP and Omnicom Media Group. IPG retained the portion of Amazon’s business related to Amazon Ads. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Amazon has dominated e-commerce but it also has to adjust to new consumer habits, where people increasingly use social media to discover new products instead of walking the aisles of stores or clicking through specific retailers’ sites. Amazon already has partnerships with Meta, TikTok, Snap and Pinterest, where users of those apps can link to Amazon accounts and shop through their feeds. TikTok has made social commerce a core behavior within its short-form video app, and trends often emerge from TikTok that fuel viral sales of new products. Also read: Inside TikTok’s underconsumption trend “Everyone’s seeing the end game here of what is really driving purchase now and what’s driving impulse purchase,” said Beth Ann Kaminkow, global chief commercial officer and CEO New York at VML. “And so you've got a direct captive audience [on social] that’s already interested in the potential for purchase. There’s a complete benefit for both of the ecosystems.” For all of the platforms, Amazon is an important advertising client. Amazon spends the highest percentage of its social media budget on Meta properties, but in recent quarters that percentage has declined, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. In the third quarter of 2023, Facebook and Instagram represented 43% of Amazon’s ad spend when calculating total spend across Meta, TikTok and Pinterest, according to Sensor Tower. In the third quarter of this year, Facebook and Instagram represented 33% of Amazon’s spend across all those same properties. Sensor Tower also tracked the percentage of Amazon’s ad spend going to TikTok and Pinterest, as follows: Meta declined to comment for this story or about the Amazon-specific job it recently promoted. Meta has had ad team members in the past who focused on Amazon, so the client partner role is not new, according to people familiar with Meta’s organizational structure. Losing its percentage share of the Amazon advertising pie could indicate why Meta would want to double down on its work with such a major client. It is important to note that Sensor Tower’s data is not an exact accounting of total ad spend from any given advertiser or on any given platform, but the data helps analyze the direction of spend over time. Meta also has seen success catering to Chinese e-commerce advertisers, such as Temu and Shein, but those companies sometimes face pressure in the U.S. Just last week, the Biden administration signaled it could take trade action against Temu’s owner PPD Holdings out of China, claiming it used a workaround to avoid tariffs. Temu spent more than $2 billion on Meta ads in 2023, according to a Wall Street Journal report earlier this year. Meta generated $132 billion in total ad revenue in 2023, according to its financial reports. “If you’re trying to drive ad revenue, you want to work with your largest advertising partner to optimize what they get out of the advertising,” said Seema Shah, VP of research and insights at Sensor Tower. “That’s what [Meta’s client service] role makes me think of. Frankly, Amazon is probably a much stronger partner than Temu, right? And so the question for Facebook … if something happens to Temu and they can’t sustain themselves as an operation. That’s a big hole for another advertiser to fill on Facebook.” See Ad Age’s 2024 Breakout Brand Leaders and Work here

Meta’s Amazon ad account seeks specialist as social commerce rivalry intensifies

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