Amazon is giving publishers and developers—like Sesame Workshop, TikTok and the Washington Post—a way to deliver products from its e-commerce store to their audiences through a new marketing rewards program.
On Thursday, the company launched what it calls Amazon Moments, which has already been tested for months by a small group of partners. Moments works like this: The publisher or developer asks users to perform an action in their apps or on their websites. For instance, a music subscription service asks someone to listen to 20 hours of music and then sends them a link for a free pair of headphones. Then Amazon takes care of all the shipping—if the consumer has an Amazon account, of course. TikTok used the program to give prizes to new users who downloaded and shared videos on its app.
Amazon said that the Washington Post, TikTok, Sony Crackle, Sesame Workshop, Bravo, USA TODAY, Sago Mini and Bell Canada were the first to test the service. The Washington Post is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Amazon, as it builds its ad technology platform, can use Moments to create relationships with app developers and publishers, tapping a piece of the lucrative app advertising market. The app marketing space is a substantial chunk of mobile advertising and expected to reach about $64 billion by 2020, according to a recent report from mobile marketing analytics firm AppsFlyer. (The global total mobile ad market will generate more than $230 billion in 2019, according to eMarketer's forecast.)
Amazon is taking steps to secure its future in digital advertising, and last year it topped $10 billion in revenue from the advertising side of its business. Amazon overhauled its ad platform last year, too, giving brands more ways to place search, product and video ads on its site and across the internet.
The Moments platform is automated, and companies manage their promotions through a website, where they can create them and then set them to run on their website and apps or in ad campaigns across the web. They only pay Amazon when the consumer accepts the offer, also known as a cost-per-action model. Developers could see Moments as a way to keep their audiences coming back, known as re-engagement, targeting specifically people who dropped off with rewards.
