Dive Brief:

• As part of its expanding advertising business, Amazon is offering brands the option of “premium” product pages including features such as wide-screen videos and interactive multi-media displays — but at the price of $500,000, reported Ad Age.
• The option has been available for the past month and the cost covers all of participating brands’ products. Ad Age reported Bose is an early adopter and one anonymous ad exec said the videos basically turn Amazon product pages into what looks like a TV commercial.
• While Amazon has been actively turning its e-commerce website into an advertising platform, its competitor Overstock.com has plans to open a self-serve ad exchange for bidding on ad placements on its website, according to Digiday. The platform will include three tiers with tier one consisting of native banner ads on high visibility spots on the homepage or category pages, tier two being more transactional placements on search pages in carousel format or for product listings, and tier three for ads on product detail pages.

Dive Insight:

While Google and Facebook dominate digital advertising at the moment, Amazon is seen as a credible threat to that dominance by industry insiders, including WPP CEO Martin Sorrell. The e-commerce giant has been making major moves to beef up its role in digital advertising, including signing a lease for an office in New York City — where many ad agencies are situated — for its advertising team as well as reports that it is planning a direct strike at YouTube's advertising business. Brands are apparently taking notice, as many plan to increase their ad budgets with Amazon. Including new premium product pages for brands is just the latest example of how it can grab digital ad dollars and offer marketers a unique advertising option.

Investing in a premium product page could make sense for brands as anyone on the Amazon website is likely primed to buy, and even better from the marketers’ perspective, at a place where they can easily make a purchase. As Amazon's product selections and services for simplifying purchasing, such as the new Echo Look, premium product pages could be even more attractive to brands. 

One area of digital advertising where Amazon has a unique offer is in its data for targeting ads on its website. It not only has a great deal of transactional history with its vast customer base, it also has their browsing history on the website, interactions across Amazon’s other properties such as viewing on Amazon Prime Video and even more personal engagement from people who own its Alexa-powered personal digital assistants like the Amazon Echo.

Even though Amazon has great reach in the wide number of ways it now touches consumers, the fact that Overstock.com is expanding its own advertising options might be a sign that e-commerce sites consider themselves the new frontier for digital advertising.