New-to-brand success: How geographic insights helps brands expand into underpenetrated markets

Expanding your customer base is crucial for business growth, but finding and engaging new audiences efficiently can be challenging. Many advertisers struggle to identify untapped markets and reach potential customers at scale, especially as digital advertising becomes more complex. How can brands effectively grow their presence in new areas while maintaining a strong return on investment?

Enter Geographic Insights and Activation (GIA), a powerful new feature for Amazon DSP launching this year. GIA empowers advertisers to uncover and act on regional growth opportunities using Amazon's wealth of first-party retail signals. By leveraging these insights, brands can pinpoint high-potential geographic areas and optimize their campaigns to reach new-to-brand customers more effectively. GIA also integrates seamlessly with Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), allowing advertisers to combine online and offline sales data for a truly comprehensive view of their market performance and opportunities. Whether you're looking to break into new territories or strengthen your presence in existing markets, GIA offers the tools to help you expand your reach strategically and drive measurable business growth.

As programmatic advertising has adapted to evolving privacy changes and improved business outcomes with better cost efficiencies, marketers have increasingly leaned on first-party signals and contextual strategies. While these campaign approaches remain table stakes for media buyers, one critical dimension is sometimes overlooked—the geographic factor.

Consumer behavior and brand engagement can vary widely across different regions. A brand might overperform in one area while being relatively unknown in another. Historically, acting on these insights required extensive reporting and complex test-and-learn optimization strategies, often slowing down campaign execution. Today, those dynamics are even more pressing. According to a Forrester study,¹ 78% of marketers cite localized personalization as critical to campaign success, yet only 43% feel equipped with the right tools to act on it.

Geographic Insights and Activation (GIA) helps address these challenges by allowing advertisers to identify high-opportunity areas based on real purchase behavior and act on them quickly, without adding friction to their workflows.

The development of GIA builds on foundational work between Amazon Ads and industry leaders, including WPP Media and Choreograph, during the solution's initial concept phase in 2024. Through this strategic collaboration, Amazon gained valuable insights into advertisers' needs around geographic optimization that helped shape GIA's current capabilities. This early collaboration demonstrates Amazon's commitment to working with the industry to develop solutions that address real advertiser challenges.

"Our clients are constantly looking to derive growth signals from new pools of data, and geographic insights are some of the deepest and richest," says Evan Hanlon, CEO of Choreograph. "Leveraging GIA gives our teams a smarter, faster way to identify those signals. Instead of manually building localization models, our teams can now dynamically optimize campaigns to reach areas with the most potential for new-to-brand growth."

In today’s fragmented media environment, brands can’t rely solely on broad-based strategies. Localized insights powered by purchase behavior are critical for unlocking growth. GIA enables advertisers to leverage sales index visualizations for their brand to better understand where their products over- or under-index relative to the category.

Advertisers can optimize delivery to areas of lower brand penetration, helping reach category buyers unfamiliar with their brand. GIA integrates with custom Sales Index models for advertisers using Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), allowing teams to visualize proprietary geo-segmentation directly within Amazon DSP and activate bespoke strategies.

For instance, a national cereal brand might identify geographic clusters where breakfast food demand is strong but their brand share lags. With GIA, they can dynamically increase investment in those regions—accelerating new-to-brand acquisition without fragmenting campaign delivery. By combining retail intelligence, flexible activation, and seamless data integrations, GIA empowers brands to localize their paid media strategies strategically without operational friction.

Advertisers today face mounting pressure to drive stronger return on investment (ROI) while navigating increased complexity in media buying. Common hurdles include rising acquisition costs, evolving privacy standards, and the challenge of scaling personalized strategies efficiently.

According to a Digiday report,² 28% of brands identified increasing sales and revenue (including improving ROI) as their top priority for the year, underscoring the growing need for tools that can drive measurable, localized growth.

GIA addresses these pressures through three key capabilities. It reduces guesswork by surfacing Amazon's retail signals directly in the location widget, providing actionable insights without third-party cookies. Through the Amazon Sales Index, advertisers can identify where their brand has room to grow compared to the broader category, turning geographic variability into opportunity. Finally, a single-click activation enables teams to apply strategic geo-modifiers quickly, maintaining campaign momentum even during high-demand periods like product launches or peak seasons.

Rather than adding complexity, GIA helps streamline campaign optimization by embedding geographic insights directly into Amazon DSP with a one-click activation workflow, making it easier for advertisers to reach new-to-brand customers and deliver incremental sales growth at scale.

In an environment where every dollar matters and new-to-brand growth is increasingly difficult to find, GIA offers a fresh path forward: efficient, signal-informed geographic audience buying that scales, helping advertisers drive stronger returns while expanding their customer base in untapped markets. This combination of strategic insight and operational efficiency enables brands to transform geographic challenges into opportunities for sustainable business growth.

¹ Forrester, US, May 2024.
² Digiday, US, September 2024.