Save the date:
unBoxed returns 2022

Updated 13 April 2022

We’re excited to announce that we will be hosting unBoxed 2022 in person at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City from 25–27 October. Mark your calendars to discover the latest innovations and trends coming from Amazon Ads that can help your brand reach audiences, measure campaigns and grow your business. Stay tuned for registration and additional details this spring.

Watch last year’s keynote below.

The following blog post is part of Amazon Ads’ 2021 unBoxed virtual conference. Take a look at the products we launched last year.

Amazon Ads “unBoxes” eight advertising and measurement solutions that help brands create authentic customer connections and grow their businesses

26 October 2021

Today we virtually welcomed our advertising customers to unBoxed, Amazon Ads’ annual conference. For the next two days, our customers are exploring the solutions and technology we’re building to help them grow their brands, learning from each other’s success stories and hearing from leaders at Amazon, Twitch, Wondery and more about building authentic customer connections.

“Ultimately as marketers we’re here to make connections – connections between brands and customers, between business challenges and solutions, and between audiences and the content and services they love,” said Alan Moss, VP of global ad sales, Amazon Ads. “If we relentlessly invent and are rigorous enough, these connections add value to our customers’ daily lives because they provide utility and are relevant to their real-world experiences – however quickly those experiences are evolving.”

Arguably, creating authentic customer connections has never been more important or more complex. Customer expectations are evolving, as is the relationship between brands and consumers. Media consumption is fragmented as consumers shift their attention between streaming and linear TV. And, with omni-channel shopping, customers are engaging with content and brands in more places than ever before.

At Amazon Ads we embrace change. It’s a tailwind for invention. We also know there are things that don’t change – such as brands needing to achieve reach, relevance and results through their marketing investments. Today’s unBoxed keynote highlighted several of the customer-centric marketing solutions we’re building to help them do exactly that.

Reach

We’re continually re-imagining both advertising and shopping experiences for Amazon customers – experiences that bring them increased discovery, convenience and entertainment. Brands are important partners in this, and we’re building differentiated and interactive experiences that can help them tell their stories and cultivate long-term customer relationships both within and beyond our store.

Interactive ads

Streaming content can be one of the most powerful mediums for creating connections. With interactive ads, we’re making it seamless for audiences to engage with Amazon Streaming TV and audio ads in ways that help make their lives easier and foster community engagement.

Interactive Video Ads: At the 2021 NewFronts we introduced our Interactive Video Ads beta in the US – turning a traditionally passive ad-viewing experience into one that invites customers to easily take an Amazon shopping action using their voice or remote, without interrupting the stream itself. Advertisers can include voice calls-to-action (CTAs) – such as “Add to Basket”, “Add to List” or “Buy Now” – directly within Streaming TV ads in the IMDb TV app on Fire TV. We’re introducing a new shopping action, “Send Me More Info”, to the interactive video ad experience. This enables viewers to request product details via email or by scanning a QR code on screen to visit a brand’s landing page.

Interactive Audio Ads: Currently brands can run a 10- to 30-second audio ad on Amazon Music’s ad-supported tier, and include voice calls-to-action so customers can engage with that ad if they are interested. Today, we shared that we’re making it even more natural for audiences to engage with our Interactive Audio Ads. For example, after hearing an Interactive Audio Ad while listening to Amazon Music’s ad-supported tier on an Alexa-enabled device, customers can simply ask Alexa to “Remind me”, “Send me more information” or “Add to Basket” – Alexa will know which product is featured in the ad, and add that item to the cart or set the relevant reminder. The experience is incredibly simple, and creates a frictionless way for customers to engage with audio ads via voice when they want to. This in currently in a limited beta for US advertisers.

Brand Follow

Brand Follow helps foster long-term, loyal connections between Amazon customers and brands they love. Today, there are more than 20 million Follow relationships between shoppers and brands in our store. Brand Follow offers customers another way to tailor their Amazon shopping experience; for example, shoppers can get mobile notifications when a brand is about to stream on Amazon Live. To follow a brand on Amazon, customers simply click the “Follow” button, which we’ve included as an everyday part of the shopping experience – across Stores, Posts and Amazon Live. We’ve recently introduced a new feature through which customers may see deals from brands they follow when they visit the Amazon home page. We’ll continue to surface Brand Follow in places that are useful for customers. Brand Follow is currently available in the US.

Sponsored Display in livestreams on Twitch

Sponsored Display ads are self-service, can be created in minutes, and help brands connect with relevant audiences both within and beyond Amazon’s store. Sponsored Display ads already appear on Twitch browse tab and directory pages. Now they will also be seamlessly integrated with Twitch livestreams, creating another option for brands in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Spain to engage with Twitch’s 30 million average daily visitors in ways that complement their streaming experience.

Relevance

Relevance is a critical input to marketing efficacy, but truly understanding the relationship between relevance and results across your marketing efforts requires holistic analysis. Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) – which is now offered wherever Amazon DSP is available – helps brands plan, measure and optimise using both Amazon advertising events such as impressions and clicks, and their own data sets.

Built on Amazon Web Services, Amazon Marketing Cloud provides brands a secure, privacy-safe environment in which they can innovate and customise analytics based on their needs. For example, Sanofi and its agency Channel Bakers used AMC to analyze the customer journey and conversion rates across their Amazon sponsored ads, display and Streaming TV ads. This helped them quantify the contributions of each in the path to purchase.

We’re continuously enhancing AMC’s capabilities based on user feedback – reducing query times, adding a simple user interface that complements our API, and enabling brands to bring their own data sets into their AMC instance.

Advertiser data sets

Advertisers can upload their own pseudonymised data sets into their AMC instance, and query them alongside event-level data sets from their Amazon Ads campaigns. This enables more holistic analysis and increased visibility into cross-channel marketing efficiency.

New instructional query library

We recently launched an instructional query library that provides templated analytics queries across a range of measurement options. Advertisers can choose to run these queries with just one click, or customise them based on their needs. This library can be easily accessed in the AMC UI. We envision it will also inspire advertisers to experiment with new types of cross-channel insights.

Results

Reaching the right audiences and growing engagement is important, but doing this successfully requires high-fidelity measurement. We’re continually working to help brands be smarter and more successful with their marketing investments, and shared two new measurement solutions with our unBoxed audience today.

Brand Metrics

Brand Metrics is a self-service measurement solution that goes beyond ad-attributed actions to help brands of all sizes quantify and optimise their performance in Amazon’s store, based on shopping engagements that can be predictive of actual sales on Amazon. Brands can use this suite of awareness and consideration metrics to measure the long-term value of brand engagement and evaluate what’s driving growth for their business. Reporting is updated weekly, and includes information such as the total number of shoppers who have considered a brand based on product detail page views or brand searches, and the value of shopping engagements based on sales generated over a 12-month period. Brands can also see awareness and consideration indices that compare their performance to peers in their categories using predictive consideration and sales models. Brand Metrics is in beta and available in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Spain.

Amazon Brand Lift

With Amazon Brand Lift, advertisers can easily launch studies to glean fast, reliable and actionable insights at scale that help them understand the impact of their brand marketing efforts. Brands can quantify impact for six different campaign objectives – such as awareness, preferences and intent – based on survey responses from an opt-in panel of Amazon shoppers. Surveys can be created in just a few minutes using templates in Amazon DSP. Reporting is typically available within two weeks of a survey launch and provides insights such as the percentage of respondents who report being aware of a brand or not, or that are likely to purchase from a brand. We will expand the types of studies available in the coming months, with the goal of providing more insights to more advertisers. Amazon Brand Lift is currently in beta and available in the US.

It’s still early for us, and there’s so much more to invent. We’re excited about the opportunities ahead as we strive to help brands delight customers, create lasting connections and grow their businesses.

To learn more about the products shared at unBoxed today you can visit our Product Announcements page or contact your Amazon Ads representative.