Report: How brands and agencies address Amazon's growing influence

Dive Brief:

A report from the The New York Times pointed to a trend where brands and agencies are creating specialist jobs and teams that are focused on Amazon, similar to how many have addressed major social platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat. Examples include Tombras Group, a firm that recently put together an Amazon-focused division as well as WPP agencies Mindshare and Possible. More are expected to follow suit.
Whey protein powder company Optimum Nutrition, a Tombras client, sent products to influential Amazon reviewers, paid Amazon so it could customize its product pages with more images and information and is developing an Echo interface to provide recipes.
Amazon's advertising division, Amazon Media Group, encourages agencies to treat product pages as "brand marketing vehicles" and lets them know it can help them tailor the messaging and creative to each step of the customer-decision journey.

Dive Insight:

As Amazon's role as a hardware and content provider grows, product pages are evolving into even more important marketing vehicles, requiring a specialized approach by brands and agenices. Amazon also has a unique place in the digital advertising world in that ads served on its e-commerce site are being viewed by people who are already primed to buy. As a New York Times report put it, an ad on Amazon offers a direct connection between the person viewing the ad and making a purchase. As

Beyond its clout as a marketing platform, the latest example of how Amazon is outgrowing its e-commerce label is its push into consumer goods via Amazon Fashion which is collaborating with London Fashion Week in September per Digiday.

Amazon becoming much more than its e-commerce roots is hardly a secret. Its Amazon Web Services cloud computing division hauls in most of the company’s reported revenue, it is directly competing with Netflix on the over-the-top streaming video front and TV with its Amazon Prime Video service and it has become the leader in the voice-activated personal digital assistant space with its Alexa-powered devices.

Amazon’s impact on digital advertising has somewhat gone under the radar given Google and Facebook’s outsized influence in that business area. One industry player who has gone public about warily considering Amazon as an ad platform is WPP’s CEO Martin Sorrell. In the ad agency holding company’s Q4 earnings call from this March, Sorrell said Google, Facebook and Amazon are all frenemies of WPP and he singled out Amazon as being on the unfriendly end of that list. Sorrell added that Amazon represented a direct threat to Google in search ads for the exact reason highlighted in the New York Times report — people conduct research on Google making those ads valuable, but on Amazon they are primed to make a purchase making those ads even more valuable to marketers.