It was first reported a month or so ago, but Amazon has now confirmed its plans to consolidate and restructure its advertising businesses. Amazon has announced the retirement of the names Amazon Media Group (AMG), Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) and Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP). Instead, these will all fall under the Amazon Advertising name. The names won’t disappear straight away, instead, they will be phased out over the next few months.
When logging in to one of the previous platforms, users are now directed to advertising.amazon.co.uk and can choose which advertising product they require (Sponsored ads, Display ads, Video ads, Stores or Amazon DSP (demand-side platform). Within the new advertising platform, there is Amazon console (formerly AMS) and Amazon DSP (formerly AAP). Among the changes is the renaming of Headline Search Ads which will now be known as Sponsored Brands.
Originally advertising wasn’t a huge priority for Amazon and as such had separate platforms for Sellers and Vendors. Within these two separate platforms, the ad products were also split out into different areas, as such an advertiser wanting to run video ads and Headline Search Ads would have had to use both AMS and AMG to achieve their goals. Obviously, this meant that the advertising options on Amazon were not always that clear and at times it was difficult for advertisers to navigate around the different ad services. Now that Amazon has restructured its various ad services under the one Amazon Advertising platform it has removed some of the barriers and frustrations for advertisers and allows them a single platform for achieving their advertising goals.
Senior vice-president for Amazon Advertising, Paul Kotas has said: “We’ve unified our product offerings under the name ‘Amazon Advertising.’ This is another step towards our goal of providing advertising solutions that are simple and intuitive for the hundreds of thousands of advertisers who use our products to help grow their businesses.”
Amazon isn’t the first large company to rename/restructure its advertising services this year, with Google changing Google AdWords to Google Ads, Doubleclick and Google Analytics 360 Suite to Google Marketing Platform and DoubleClick for Publishers and Doubleclick Ad Exchange to Google Ad Manager.
It is not really that much of a surprise that Amazon would want to make the advertising process for both Vendors and Sellers easier. Its ad business is now worth almost $2.2 billion according to Q2 earnings, representing a year-on-year increase of 129%, so if it can simplify its services/platforms it is likely to encourage more and more people to utilise advertising on Amazon, thus increasing the e-commerce giant’s revenue from this.
Amazon is hoping that its changes can help it to seriously challenge Google and Facebook for digital marketing spends and it has also begun testing an attribution tool which will allow advertisers to compare the effectiveness of their ads on Amazon compared with Google and Facebook.
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