Dive Brief:
- Amazon unveiled an ad-targeting solution called Ad Relevance that does not rely on cookies or other third-party identifiers via a blog post. The news was also announced as part of the company’s presence at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity this week.
- Ad Relevance, which is available via Amazon’s demand-side platform, uses artificial intelligence to analyze billions of browsing, purchasing and streaming data points from across Amazon properties, matching those insights against what content a consumer is viewing in real time.
- Years in development, Ad Relevance has already been tested on Amazon’s Audiences, Contextual Targeting and Performance+ offerings. Amazon boasted the product can improve addressability among previously anonymous impressions for advertisers, as well as lower CPMs by as much as 34%.
Dive Insight:
Cookie deprecation is still a work in progress, but Amazon is pushing ahead with its advances in creating an ad-targeting solution that does not rely on the types of third-party identifiers that have served as a bedrock for much of digital marketing. The e-commerce giant detailed plans for Ad Relevance at Cannes Lions, a major industry gathering that celebrates advertising creativity and has, over the years, seen more of its focus shift toward large tech platforms. Amazon also used the festival to trumpet progress with its generative AI-powered image generator for campaign assets, one piece of its strategy to bring the emerging tech to more advertisers.
Ad Relevance is supported by Amazon’s access to a high volume of first-party shopper, browsing and streaming viewership data, leveraging the latest AI bells and whistles to ingest that information and quickly identify consumers who are on different stages of the path to purchase. It can serve ads across a range of devices, channels and content types, and has already been piloted on existing Amazon Ads products, including the machine learning-powered Performance+ ads that launched in March.
Early results showed Ad Relevance can “extend addressability” on up to 65% of impressions that were previously anonymous under different targeting tactics. CPMs, or the price a brand pays for every 1,000 impressions an ad receives, were lowered, while costs-per-click improved by 8.8%. Amazon said these metrics were achieved with 100% budget delivery.
Amazon touting ID-free targeting capabilities comes as the deprecation timeline for cookies remains a moving target. Google originally planned to wind down cookies in Chrome in the second half of this year, but delayed its plans to 2025 earlier in the spring after facing regulatory hurdles and industry pushback against Privacy Sandbox, its proposed alternative.
Still, marketers are on the hunt for viable cookie replacements and Amazon clearly sees an opportunity to further shore up an ad business that is booming. Amazon’s revenue derived from advertising jumped 24% year over year to $11.82 billion in Q1, driven by demand for sponsored product ads. The company has recently introduced commercials to Prime Video, which it expects will contribute to further momentum in the months ahead.
