Amazon Ads Introduces Many New Capabilities at unBoxed Event
Amazon today at the unBoxed 2024 event introduced AI Creative Studio and Audio Generator, a new Amazon DSP experience with enhanced interoperability and simplified full-funnel optimization, and a suite of advertising capabilities that bring together insights from across the marketing funnel.
Amazon Ads' new AI Creative Studio and Audio Generator are generative artificial intelligence tools to help marketers create engaging content across media types and eliminate boundaries across ad formats.
"We're excited to introduce these new AI-powered creative tools, which have the potential to transform how brands connect with Amazon customers," said Jay Richman, vice president of creative experiences for Amazon Ads, in a statement. "By reducing the complexities of working across multiple formats and placements, these innovations empower advertisers to more easily reach their target audiences at every stage of the marketing funnel. They can also easily update creatives seasonally, generate fresh, trend-driven content, and tailor ads to different use cases. This leads to a more dynamic and engaging customer experience, ultimately helping to drive overall campaign performance."
AI Creative Studio brings Amazon Ads' AI-powered image and video generation capabilities within a single experience for advertisers to research, generate, refine, and publish ad creatives produced from a single product shot, product page, or existing ad creative.
Within AI Creative Studio is the AI gallery, a content hub with re-creatable ad formats, concepts, and designs. Companies can also upload their own assets to AI Creative Studio. Advertisers can take existing creative and generate concepts, adjust them to multiple aspect ratios, and refine them by choosing different styles, lighting, camera angles, colors, and tone presets.
"Imagine the impact this can have for businesses of all sizes," Richman said. "Traditionally, investing in multiple ad formats and placements demands significant time, budget, and expertise. Now, with AI Creative Studio, advertisers can easily draw inspiration from custom concepts, select one, and seamlessly create display, video, and eventually audio ads all within a single workflow."
Advertisers can use Amazon Ads' new Audio Generator to develop engaging, interactive audio ad creative. Just like with Image and Video generator, advertisers input their product and Audio generator will automatically create a voiceover script based on the product information. Advertisers can then select the voice and tone, background music, and Audio generator will deliver a 30-second interactive audio ad. Ads also include an interactive element, such as "Alexa, add to cart,"; with more options to come.
"We're really excited to add Audio generator to our growing suite of AI-powered creative tools," Richman said. "From images to video and now audio, we are removing creative barriers for advertisers and unlocking new audiences and opportunities that weren't possible just a year ago. And the invention won't stop here; this is just the beginning."
Amazon Ads' innovations across the Amazon Demand-Side Platform (Amazon DSP) drive full-funnel audience reach with streamlined campaign planning and optimization.
"The digital advertising landscape is rapidly evolving, with streaming TV becoming mainstream and full-funnel, cross-channel reach and measurement taking center stage. We're inventing ad tech that makes it easier for all advertisers to navigate this evolution with precise reach, deeper insights, and direct measurement," said Kelly MacLean, vice president of Amazon DSP, in a statement. "Amazon DSP can uniquely drive top-to-bottom outcomes on Amazon's properties, such as the store and Prime Video, as well as across leading streaming apps and premium publishers. We look forward to seeing advertisers leverage the capabilities announced today to fuel their business growth and engage more customers."
To increase advertiser efficiency, Amazon DSP is launching a new user experience with simplified workflows that bring together desktop, mobile, and app display inventory into a single line item. When advertisers visit their campaign health overview pages, they will now see new insight cards and machine learning recommendations that help them audit their campaign performance and make adjustments.
Amazon DSP enhancements also include frequency cap controls, reporting, and an ads data manager that enables advertisers to securely upload their signals once and use them across Amazon DSP and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC). Through the combination of AMC, Amazon DSP, and Amazon Publisher Cloud, advertisers can create custom audiences tailored to their business goals, then overlay them with signals from Amazon Ads and third-party publishers.
Amazon Ads also enhanced Performance+, the always-on, automated optimization capability within Amazon DSP. Performance+ uses advertiser-provided signals and predictive AI to automate audience relevancy and campaign optimization for lower-funnel goals, like conversion and customer acquisition.
New Performance+ tactics expand advertiser campaign strategies to include remarketing and retention. The entire workflow has been streamlined while still providing flexible optimization controls and transparency. Advertisers choose their campaign goal, such as conversion, awareness, or consideration; choose their KPI, such as cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS); and choose their Performance+ tactic: prospecting, remarketing, or retention.
Amazon Ads also introduced a suite of advertising capabilities that bring together insights from across the marketing funnel to help advertisers optimize their media investments.
"Our mission is to be the most customer-obsessed advertising service by giving all brands the measurement and data-driven, machine learning optimization capabilities they need to drive business growth through simple, easy-to-use tools," said Paula Despins, vice president of ads measurement at Amazon Ads, in a statement. "Today's launches put our most sophisticated full-funnel measurement and optimization capabilities into the hands of all marketers from small businesses to major brands."
New product campaigns are a fully-managed service that help companies introduce new products to customers within the first 90 days of their launch, through advertising placements across Amazon's properties and leading broadcasters and publishers.
Amazon Ads has also added audience bid boosting to re-engage shoppers reached on streaming TV through Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products ads. Advertisers using Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), Amazon Ads secure clean room technology, can now adjust their Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products bids specifically for audiences who have seen their streaming TV ads and also visited their website.
AMC enables advertisers to join their first-party data with Amazon Ads signals to understand the customer journey and build and activate audiences. New AMC solutions introduce no-code capabilities, extending its analytics capabilities to uncover advanced audience and measurement insights and optimize their campaigns.
The first two AMC solutions launching are high-value audience and optimal frequency analyses to see how their customer base is distributed by total spend levels over time. With just a few clicks they can create related audience segments and activate them in future campaigns. With the optimal frequency solution, advertisers can monitor how KPIs like conversion rate and return on ad spend evolve as ad interactions increase, and from there, determine the most efficient frequency caps for their campaign.
Amazon Ads also announced a new multi-touch attribution model that helps advertisers understand how their marketing works to drive conversions. Using advanced machine learning models to analyze trillions of shopping, streaming, and browsing signals, multi-touch attribution determines the relative impact of ad interactions along the path to purchase.
To help advertisers understand the insights from multi-touch attribution, Amazon Ads is launching conversion path reporting to show brands their top-converting paths to purchase from the previous 30-days.