No one is better suited to serve as an Amazon Ads evangelist than my friend, Jeff Cohen. 

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Jeff is a founding member of Seller Labs and has been keynoting, exhibiting, and attending Amazon events for the last decade. If you've been to an Amazon event, you've probably seen him! Now he's serving as the official Amazon Ads Tech Evangelist.

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I wanted Jeff to join the podcast to talk about what's new and trending with Amazon Ads. This is important information even if you're not selling on Amazon. Amazon is now the 3rd largest digital ad platform behind Google and Facebook, and it's growing rapidly.

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Here's a look at what we cover:

• How vertical videos are improving shopping experiences and making ad performance better.
• What the new integration with Facebook means for shoppers.
• How Sponsored TV ads are democratizing TV advertising and utilizing Amazon's rich buyer signals.
• Prime Video Ads and what they could mean for your brand (and when to consider running them).
• Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC): what it is, and how and when to use it to unlock new actionable insights about your business and advertising effectiveness.
• Plus more!

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Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(06:18) The Rise of AI in Advertising

(14:14) Understanding Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)

(18:50) Leveraging Audience Insights for Targeted Advertising

(22:48) Brand Building in the Amazon Ecosystem

(28:18) Understanding Incrementality in Marketing

(35:38) The Role of Data in Marketing Decisions

(37:11) Innovations in Amazon DSP

(46:20) The Future of Brand Building

(49:43) Conclusion

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Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/

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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

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Transcript:

Jeff:

So this is another, I'd say step forward with Amazon and using our AI intelligence and our large language learning models that have always been applied to some of the core principles of our advertising to make the DSP easier to use, more accessible and more perform better for advertisers.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking about what's new with Amazon Ads, the latest, the greatest, the betas, the new things, stuff that marketers are salivating over, stuff that maybe we're excited about but a little bit unclear about. And so we're going to hopely clear things up today. My guest is a returning guest, Mr. Jeff Cohen, the principal evangelist of Amazon Ads, longtime Amazon guy, former VP at Seller Labs. You walk with this guy in the halls of an Amazon event and it's like you're walking with a celebrity. Everybody knows him. Everybody loves him with that. Jeff Cohen. What's up man? And welcome back to the show.

Jeff:

Yeah, thanks for having me and super excited to talk about this. And I think you really hit it on the head. It's not about the announcement, it's about how the announcements are going to be applied and what do we do with this, what do we do with it? And even more importantly, what new, and this is just starting to happen. What are the new strategies that are coming because of these announcements, right? We hear these announcements and then as tech providers, as agencies, we have to then go and apply them to our different partners, our advertisers, see what's working, what's not, how it works, and then you start to scale it across your full book of business. So it's still the early days, but I'm really excited about a lot of the announcements. I think a lot of our advertisers are excited about the announcements.

Brett:

Yeah, I'm very excited and very well said. It's like, Hey, we've been given all these new tools and some of them are AI powered tools, magical tools, but then it's like, all right, well, just having tools in your hand doesn't do anything, right? It's the application, the skillful application and the strategy that you use these to help use to deploy these. And so we're going to dive into that and really excited about it. It's one of those things too where Amazon is squarely, and this is not coming from you, this is coming from me researching, so I'm not sure how much you can talk about this, but it's like the third biggest advertising platform online just behind Google and Facebook. It's shocking how much Amazon ads have grown over the years. And in the beginning, I mean it was basically just search ads, just basic good old keyword focused, search term focused search ads. And that's great, but it's become so much more than that. And I think it's kind evolved

Jeff:

As sellers. We've covered this a little bit in our last podcast. Amazon has really become a brand building location as opposed to just a conversion focused activity. And so it's only been a year, right? It was a year ago right around now that Amazon announced that Prime video was going to start having advertising. And those only released in January, so not even a year. And if you think about what Amazon's done with a lot of the live sports properties, they're still seeing massive growth in year over year audiences around Thursday night football, they saw amazing growth from WNBA. They're launching National Women's Soccer. 2025 is going to have NBA and it's going to have nascar. So Amazon's creating more properties that are built around brand building as well as a lot of the original series. And then tying together all the different types of products that you have. There's a really cool one that launched literally like yesterday. If you haven't done it, I'm going to look it up. It's something like, it has something to do with Wicked, and it's a way to cast a spell on Amazon that's tied to the movie coming out.

But it just goes to show you how Amazon's a brand building site, and it's an ability, if you're a Prime member, you can see the movie early, there's early dates only for Prime members. There's ways to buy all of the Wicked Merch then to just buy tickets to go see the movie. And so Amazon is a brand building tool and is a tool to reach audiences at mass or at scale that it wasn't several years back.

Brett:

Yeah, I totally agree with that. And things are just coming together to make that possible, right? Amazon has always been a great place to transact and a great place to make sales, but that's only part of it. I do believe it's becoming the ultimate platform to build and further your brand if you do it the right way. And so there's several new things that I'm very excited to talk about. Of course, the new AI creative suite, new AI creative tools. So maybe we'll start there in a second. Also really excited about a MC Amazon Marketing Cloud. And one thing that we've all known for a long time is that Amazon has more behavioral shopping data than anyone. Of course, Google's got all kinds of search data, but no one knows what you buy better than Amazon. And so now we can harness that data even more using A MC and applying that to all of Amazon ads. And a MC for everyone is, I picture Oprah saying, you get to use AMC

Jeff:

And you get AMC and you get amc. We should have done that. I'm going to have to go back to the Speechwriters.

Brett:

Yeah, that's how we should have announced it. So those are cool. Some new DSP announcements, which I'm super excited about. We've been a big DSP agency for years and years now. And so yeah, and let's maybe just dive in. You want to start with AI and AI tools or you are the evangelist here. What are you most excited about? And we can start there.

Jeff:

Yeah, listen, I'm excited for all of it and I know that for you who've known me, I mean, we've known each other for quite a number of years now. You know that I'm not just saying that because of my job. I actually found the announcements this year. I don't know how you felt, but I felt like the product keynote the morning at Unboxed was, there was a different level of excitement as these announcements were made and as they built upon each other. And it's not just about a MC, but it's about how A MC is now impacting DSP and how you can measure the DSP back with the tools and measurement technology that Amazon has. The AI definitely always gets the cool factor, if you will.

And I think the easiest way to describe Amazon's AI capabilities with creative is that with the announcement of the AI Creative Studio, a brand can solve the Cold Start problem, meaning that the brand has no images whatsoever. You come and you enter in your asin, Amazon creates your product, your lifestyle images, things that you need for your ads, things that you need for your store. It can make micro seasons to add pumpkins for Halloween, but then change those to have turkeys for Thanksgiving or to change 'em again to have lights for the holidays. And you can scale from zero to nothing on the other side. If you are a larger brand and you already have content within the same content studio, you can bring in your existing content and it can kind of pull it apart to create the pieces that you need based on the DSP sizes at Amazon and all the different placements.

And it can literally read your video and create ads for you or take your still ads and create new ads for you. And so it's pretty cool because it's taking you from the SMB up to the enterprise and then from the enterprise down to the SMB, it's creating everything from still images to video to now audio ads. And the AI just keeps getting better and it keeps learning. And you're starting to see some really cool applications from brands who are applying this into their regular activity that they're doing, whether it be their ads or their stores or their product detail pages.

Brett:

Yeah, there's really, it's solving a lot of the, first of all, we're just getting started with this, so we're beginning to see the possibilities, but we're still very, very early in this game. But yeah, some of the very basic stuff, how can I take this one asset and chop it into a bunch? Or how can I retool the background of this image or chop up different sizes, stuff that would normally just take a lot of busy work, a lot of hours that really graphic designers don't enjoy. Nobody enjoys some of that stuff. The AI can now handle almost all of that and listen to be everywhere you need to be build your brand to attract new customers, to create product discovery on Amazon, you need these assets.

Jeff:

And the thing is, you might have a four by four, but you need a six by four. Well, the AI can now take your four by four, make it a six by four and fill it in. And so there's the simplistic part of it, which is like, oh, I want to take my image and put it on a beach. But then there's this little bit more complicated piece of it, which is like, now I need to size it for different types of ads. I want to add motion, so I don't want to just have my cup of coffee at the beach. I want the waves to be crashing. That creates a little bit more engagement, creates a little bit more connection to your audience. And then when it starts to use the ai, the AI isn't just doing this, the AI is also understanding your product, it's understanding your reviews and it's making recommendations. And one of the examples that our VP used that I actually thought was a great one was that he ran the system through for a blender, and when it was doing images for the blender, it started showing face mask and he was so confused. He's like, but it's a blender. It makes sense for it to have juices and things like that. But if you go into social media, you'll find that a lot of people are using blenders to do homemade face mask. And so the AI was able to pick up on these social,

Brett:

I did not know. I had not seen this trend. That's

Jeff:

Why. Yeah, so it's like even if you think back to the early days when we talked about keyword research, we were like, well, you have to figure out, well, what are they going to call this? Is it a casserole dish? Is it a Pyrex dish? And we as marketers won't always know everything we need to do. AI can make up for some of that.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, really interesting. So just because interested now, so people are blending up fibers and stuff like that, organic materials to

Jeff:

Yeah, I don't know. Or it's the chemicals that you put on and then you make a chemical. I don't know. Do I look like I use, yeah, if anybody knows, let Brett and I know, and then we'll try it on the next video.

Brett:

We got to blend up our own masks here. We'll wear masks. The next podcast.

Jeff:

I'm more into the can you blend it where you just drop random stuff into the blender and

Brett:

See if it can, dude, those were epic, man. The BlendTech blenders. But I mean, if you think about it though, that was content that built that brand. How are you going to stand out Sea of other blenders?

Jeff:

I'm going to, IM put a baseball on this blender and show that it can blend it and then still make your smoothie.

Brett:

I'm going to put an iPad in there. Back when iPads were kind of, and people were like, what? You're blending an iPad, it's sacrilege or whatever. But yeah, totally agree. The announcements that have made this year, I think they've been very substantial. There's a lot of substance there, a lot of stuff we can really use to just become better marketers and better brand builders.

Jeff:

Yeah, the AI is a great example of where that starts. And it's also like you had kind of mentioned, it's a challenge that a lot of brands have because they don't have budget or they don't have internal skills or they don't have enough to be able to scale with their agency to all the things the agency wants to do. It's making it more accessible. I think that's the beauty of ai, at least that's what I tell my kids who I feel need to embrace it. They're in high school and college, and I think you and I both agree, the next generation, you need to figure out AI because it's going to be cell phones. When I was growing up, you had to learn to live with them, and now today they're a fabric of society.

Brett:

Yeah, AI is going to be your superpowered research assistant, your marketing assistant, your copywriting assistant. It's going to give you superpowers. And so yeah, it should be attached to you at all times, almost like your cell phone is now. I think that's a good description for sure. So what of the AI Creative Suite is available now and what pieces of that are coming soon?

Jeff:

So most of the pieces, the ability to create video, to create audio and to create ads are all available within the Creative Asset library. The content studio is in beta, but I'll share the link with you that we shared at unboxed and whoever wants to sign up can sign up for it. And as they're rolling that out, you would get access to that full library.

Brett:

Cool. So we'll put that in the show notes link to the beta there for the AI Creative Studio. So yeah, it sounds amazing. Let's pivot a little bit and let's talk about A MC and kind of this A MC for all idea. First of all, quick background, what is A MC for those that don't know, and then how is this a MC for all going to change things?

Jeff:

Yeah, so three, four years ago we were starting to describe what's a Amazon marketing cloud. It sits in a clean room. If I break it down to its simplest format, there's lots of videos and articles you can read if you want to dive into this deeper. But A MC allows you to pull aggregated privacy, save data across your account to understand how things like your path to purchase are being influenced by advertising, and then use that to identify signals that you can then either market to from creating new audiences or you can use it to tweak your campaigns because you're identifying what's working. As you get more sophisticated with a tool like a MC, you can start to bring in what's called first party data. So I know a lot of your listeners are D two C companies.

Brett:

This is omnichannel.

Jeff:

Yeah. This is allowing you to connect what's happening on your store and your website with what's happening with your Amazon ads. And so especially if you're using tools like Buy With Prime, but even if you're not, you can start to see when I run these ads, what type of boost does that drive to my website or is it bleeding from my website? Because ultimately we want to know this idea of incrementality. And a lot of times what our data is finding, and of course this isn't true for everyone, is that you're not pulling away from your website. And so that as an advertiser starts to give you the confidence that you need that by marketing on Amazon, you're bringing in net new customers that you wouldn't have gained otherwise. And so A MC really starts to become this measurement tool for your brand that helps you answer these questions that you've had for a long time.

Now, a MC for everyone means that before you had to be on the DSP to be able to access A MC. Now a MC is available for only sponsored ads, which means anybody can now access a MC and one of the cool features. So it's like, okay, cool. Now what do I do with this? Right? One of the cool features I think at the beginning is just using some of our query libraries to understand path to purchase and understand how frequency of your ads, things that you would typically do within the DSP that you aren't thinking about in sponsored ads. You want to understand, well, how often does somebody need to see my ad before they make a purchase? What is the downstream impact of a sponsored brand or a sponsored display ad to my sponsored product ads? You can start to see how many people bought but saw multiple of your different ad types, and that's going to start to give you some confidence into the types of advertising that you're doing and where you want to make your investments.

One of the announcements that they made was the ability to create audiences within a MC and then to boost those audiences within sponsored ads. And so if you think about sponsored ads, you've always had the ability to create a boost for top of page or other types of placements. Now you can actually create this audience within a MC. Let's use a simple example. The audience is add to cart but didn't buy, right? You want to find all the people that have added to the cart but haven't purchased. And if they come back to Amazon and they search for a particular keyword that's in the campaign that you associate that to, then you're saying, I want to boost my bid for my ad in that particular case. And so as a marketer, I think we can start to see how that becomes, and as a hands-on keyboard operator of Amazon ads, that's where I start to ask my question, okay, so how does this start to change how I build ads? Do I bid for top of page? Do I bid based on audience? Do I bid based on both? And that's where I think some of the shifting of our strategies will start to come over time.

Brett:

So I want to dive into this audience piece for just a minute. The example you gave there makes a ton of sense. People that have added to carpet have not purchased, let's put a little bit more for them. We realize and understand, hey, they're probably likely to purchase this time around or getting close. Let's bit a little bit more how creative can we get there? So as an example, it's pretty frequent that we'll talk to brands that are a little more premium. So they're selling a product that is not low price, so they're not going to compete well on price, but it's a great product and it's more about the brand and the experience. And I think some people have this idea that, oh, will people only buy on Amazon for price? That is not the truth. If you look at the average prime household, you're talking about some affluent households and I promise you there's a lot of affluent households that don't want to just buy cheap stuff. So can you also look at like, Hey, if I was selling baby bags and we've even looked at this like high-end baby bags, diaper bags type of thing, could I target diaper bag keywords I can normally do with my sponsored ads layer in ads of people that I know are kind of higher end based on other things they've purchased? Possibly.

Jeff:

So at its core are a MC can aggregate once you get over a certain amount of data points because it's pseudonymized meaning that it's not at the individual level. And so you have to have enough data points to be able to create that audience to say that there's enough people demonstrating this and therefore it's an audience that I want to go in target. And where a lot of brands are finding success is by bringing in their first party data, mirroring that with in a privacy safe way with the Amazon data and creating audiences that could be a lookalike audience.

Brett:

Nice.

Jeff:

So this is the audience that I believe looks like people who have a propensity, this

Brett:

Is my core customer, build me a list if people like them.

Jeff:

So you could do that and then you could boost your keywords or you attach it to a campaign, you attach it to the campaign and you boost based off of the lookalike. So I would say that the simple answer is any audience you can build in A MC, you can then boost against,

I'll say the constraints are that you can only boost against a single audience. So you have to kind of decide do you want that audience to be very narrow or do you want that audience to be very broad by its nature sponsored products is a more conversion focused type of activity. Therefore, I would assume just from my own background of doing this, I would assume that I want an audience that is maybe a little bit further down the funnel that has the propensity to buy based on the activities that I'm trying to boost towards. Other types of audiences you build in A MC may be used to run more display ads or DSP ads where you're trying to build more of that awareness and consideration. And I think what's cool, and I think this was one of the big themes that took place at the show was that Amazon is full funnel advertising for everyone.

And that's I think the big power is that something that wasn't available to you in the past is now available to you and it allows you to be a little bit more sophisticated to make these business decisions of what's best for your business. And you and I both know it's really hard in a podcast to sit there and talk about what's the right way to do it because every brand and every SKU and every brand is going to have a slightly different answer. And so this is where having a test and learn mentality around your advertising really suits you to be able to build and scale to reach new audiences.

Brett:

And I think a lot of people have the mindset of, Hey, I'm just a smaller brand, even if I'm doing multiple seven figures or whatever and I can't do full funnel ads. And well, maybe that's just because historically you've had to spend a whole lot of money that's on top of funnel type ads to be able to have the tools like we're talking about here, for that to be focused enough to work. But now you've really got the tools and the technology, even if you've got a small top of funnel budget, and it can help because we don't want to all just slug it out with our competition only on sponsored product ads at the bottom of the funnel. Let's go up funnel a little bit and compete there and give our brand a bit of an edge.

Jeff:

If you're looking to brand build, and I always even equate it to the local hotdog stand down the street from me. I live in Chicago, so I have to go with the hotdog stand.

Brett:

One thing I love about Chicago hot dog stands is they do not serve ketchup at most of them. Ketchup. They're mustard only. And I really resonate with that. Kudos to you in Chicago.

Jeff:

Big debate, but that's

Brett:

Mustard only. No ketchup's no good.

Jeff:

The piece of this that I think is important is that brand building is about exposing your product and your family of products to a larger audience. That is the concept of brand building. If you're only focused on conversion based activities, there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not knocking that in any way, shape or form. The level that which you can grow your brand is going to be limited when you start to look at brand building activities. And I'll give you an example. I met a brand at another conference Accelerate, which was a couple of weeks before Unbox.

Brett:

Great one. Yep, yep. I was there as well. Great event.

Jeff:

They're in the pickleball space and pickleball is hot. And I was talking to him about his advertising and he was telling me how great his advertising was doing and all these things. And I said, well, what are you doing with streaming television? Are you running ads? And he goes, no, I'm not running any ads. And I said, why not? And he's like, well, we do really well with our sponsor brands and sponsor display and we run some DSP around remarketing and retargeting. And I said, awesome. I go, did you know that Amazon has a channel called Pickleball TV that runs on Fire TV and Amazon Prime video? And he's like, no. And I go, well, if somebody's watching one of those channels, and you could target them with an ad based on that signal, and he stops me and he goes, that would be my customer. And I was like, okay, well, that's the example right there. That brand can now use the video generator to create the ad. They can use tools like sponsored television to come in with no budget and start to test across the different audiences, and they can use a MC to measure the impact and the result of how those are doing. When you start to look at a brand that like Poppy, so one of the brands we featured at Unboxed was Poppy.

Brett:

Poppy's Poppy, like the probiotic soda, healthy soda,

Jeff:

The prebiotic.

Brett:

Prebiotic, yes.

Jeff:

And what they see, I worked on that session, so I knew that their brand, and this is I think really important for people to understand their brand is four years old. Well maybe come in close to five. It was concocted in her kitchen in 2020. It's only 2024. So the brand is four years old. They had done some OTT advertising in 2023, but they really only started streaming TV and larger TV plays towards the end of 2023 and into 2024. So now mind you, they did a Super Bowl ad, they did A-W-N-B-A sponsorship, but they were able to build and scale this using streaming television, using sponsorships and using the measurement tools primarily of Amazon, but not exclusively to drive the results for their brand. And so whether you're looking at the pickleball company or whether you're looking at the Poppy, it's easy to look at them and go, but I'm not Poppy. Well, poppy wasn't Poppy four years

Brett:

Ago. Totally, totally

Jeff:

Right. And you and I go back to the days with, I'll bring up an old brand Death Wish Coffee. We knew the owner. I mean, I still know the owner of Death Wish I've known him for eight, nine years. And it's the same thing. He was able to build a brand, gain market share on Amazon in a highly competitive category and expand his brand to other channels and be very successful. That's brand building and that's the tools that are available to you that weren't as available to you before that make you look at Amazon in a brand building capacity where that investment is necessary.

Brett:

Necessary

Jeff:

Isn't the right word, that investment is an opportunity for you.

Brett:

Yeah, I like that. Let's talk about incrementality because I think this is the newer concept in marketing that really is what people newer, it's not new, but it's newer in that I think it's becoming top of mind for a lot of people and it's sort of solving the Ah, yes, that's what I want my marketing to do. And at its simplest form, incrementality is like, what would've happened if we hadn't run these ads? And what happened because we ran these ads? So are my ads actually creating a difference? So I want lay out a scenario for you and get your perspective on how A MC can help now versus maybe how MC may help in the future. So we work with a lot of Omni-channel brands. So brands that are selling D two C through Shopify or Magento, BigCommerce, whatever they're selling in store, they're selling marketplaces on Amazon as well.

So I run YouTube ads, so I'm a bigger brand. One of our brands is Arctic, their Yeti competitor. We're doing a case study, Google's one, a case study on them. So we had this big YouTube campaign that went really well. But what we know is that if we run a YouTube ad and we direct people to the website, so many people that see that and think, yeah, I'd rather just buy it on Amazon, which is fine by us. We just want to sell products, but we want to be able to see it. Right? So will you be able to connect the dots there as well? If you're sharing audiences from your site with a MC, are you going to be able to connect those dots, so to speak?

Jeff:

Yeah. So listen, omnichannel, incrementality does become difficult, right?

Brett:

It gets hard, yeah.

Jeff:

If you want to look

Brett:

At see in store. Yeah,

Jeff:

Exactly. And if you want to really look at how do you solve that, you start getting into mixed model media, you start getting into doing omni shopper panel shopper panels, and those require larger

Brett:

Holdout tests like incrementality tests and geo hold. That's which we've done those. Yeah,

Jeff:

Correct. And those were great for the brands who have the scale and have the budget to be able to do 'em, right? So then the question becomes like, then what can I do if I don't have the scale and I don't have the budget? That's when you have to start looking at things. And when I like to say directionally, how are things working? And so you're not going to have the holy grail of being able to completely track a Google ad to a website to Amazon, right? Exactly. Cookies are going away and privacy is

Brett:

Critical. Keeps kicking that can down the road. But yeah, eventually.

Jeff:

So it creates a lot of challenges for brands. But you can start to directionally see by looking at first party data and looking at a MC data, what that incrementality starts to look like and are the shoppers buying on your site and also buying on Amazon, and you start to get to a relative signal around incrementality to show you whether it's positive or negative. So I've never been a believer that incrementality is an absolute number, but I also, I

Brett:

Totally agree.

Jeff:

I also don't believe ROAS is right. So tell me the difference between a 3.5 and a 3.7 roas. And I understand it's 0.2, but what did that really mean? Well, it means directionally this campaign is performing better than that campaign. I think that's ultimately what you're trying to do and where a MC can start to help. The other data points that I think become critical is understanding new to brand audiences who has a bigger propensity to lead to a subscribe and save, which wouldn't work with an Arctic Cup. I don't think people subscribe to buy those, but people might buy more than one of them. They might be, it

Brett:

Feels like we've done that at my house. We have so many of them and it feels like that, but they're just all one-off purchases.

Jeff:

But you can start to look to see what is the 12 month, 13 month lifecycle of That's a new data point that Amazon is now valuable sharing is what is the 12, 13 month lifetime value of a customer. And so Amazon is creating so many more of these data signals that are available to you as marketers that you're able to have a more sophisticated look into that. I'll say there's always the absolute person who's, it's never going to be enough for them, but that's also the person who probably doesn't want to really spend the money to do the types of, I'm going to say this wrong, causation testing that you truly need to understand how incrementality works. And so incrementality, if you really go and read academic papers on it, is a very scientifically based data set that uses testing as a way to understand how incrementality works. And so a lot of the tools that are out there today that are offering an incremental ROAS or such are giving you directional signals to it, but you'd have to dive into their science to understand how it works. I mean, at Amazon, we have a new product that was released called Multi-Touch Attribution. It's going to be rolling out in 2025.

Brett:

Well, that'd be a part of a MC or where will your multi-touch attribution? I

Jeff:

Don't know where it's going to sit within a MC right now. Right now it's kind of its own data set for brands are accessing it through the beta, but it's all based on this scientific methodology. But that's not taking into account what's happening off of Amazon. And so that's I think, the challenge that brands have. But that's no different than the challenge that brands have always had when they've ran advertising. And so we have to use the best data that we have today to make the best decision that we can make. And as that data changes, we need to alter the decisions that we've made. And what you as a brand ultimately want to know is that if I'm spending this money, how much is this driving within my ads on Amazon and how much is this driving within ads on my website? And how much of that is crossover and that you can do with a MC, you can start to see that and you can see what that picture looks like to understand where and how that investment is working for

Brett:

You. Yeah, the goal is not to get 100% accurate data because that's not possible, but the goal is to get actionable data and clearer actionable insights. And one of the things I love about EMC is just the ability to see what is driving first time purchases versus repeat purchases and then being able to chart that and create graphs for that.

Jeff:

Well, your audience might, you can

Brett:

See this is what's driving new customers.

Jeff:

Your audience might be different. So different campaigns that you run that have a tendency to drive first time customers, you're willing to invest in them if you know that your lifetime value is higher.

But if it's bringing in repeat customers, then you're going to have a different ROAS or spend that you're looking to make for those acquisitions. So it really does add to being a more sophisticated marketer. But the one thing that I'll add and then we can move on to whatever else you want talk about is that, and I've seen this throughout my career, is that if you don't believe the data, then you're almost, I'm probably wrong to say, but you're almost wasting your time. And what I see marketers do, and correct me if you think I'm wrong, but it's the data will show them something, but they're like, yeah, but I know influencers play a bigger role, so I'm going to keep investing in them.

And you need to let the data tell you the story for the decisions you want to make. When you start to put your own assumptions into it, that's where you start to skew based on biases that you have and not based on what the data is telling you. And so if you're running influencer campaigns, there's ways to see how keywords are performing, there's ways to see how traffic from those campaigns are converting to sales and to understand the power that influencers have. And a MC can help you do that too. One of the suggestions I make to people for influencer is create dedicated landing pages in your stores. It allows you to capture them in right into your store. It allows you to put the influencer there so it's top of mind and make the connection from the off-brand to that store, and it allows you to start to see what the sales are coming from from that page.

Brett:

Let's transition to Amazon DSP for just a minute. And so obviously A MC was exclusively available to DSP clients and now it's available to all, but there's some new things coming to DSP as well. So talk about some of the new iterations, new tools, new opportunities within Amazon DSP.

Jeff:

Yeah, so the two biggest announcements around the DSP that I was most excited about was that we've changed the DSP workflow, which can be cumbersome at times and was lacking some of the features and functionalities that some of the other DSPs have within the market. Now, the beauty of this is that when you look at Amazon and our DSP, our DSP is always been known for what we called our owned and operated properties. So that's the ability to have your ads show up on Fire TV IMDB, Twitch Prime Video. But the DSP now also has quite a few publishers that allow you to be in third party websites. So your ads are broadcast across both Amazon, Amazon owned properties as well as the third party sites, bringing all of that measurement into one single place, which allows you to manage things like your frequency cap or your budgets.

And I think that's really super exciting to one, have an easier product to use, is always a big win. Two, that the product is not just more competitive with the market, but almost better than the market. I guess I will state that it's better than the market, but I guess maybe that's debatable. And then three, to be able to measure all of the insights back to understand not just how it's doing on Amazon, but how it's doing on your own channel or other channels that you're working with through a third party dataset that you would bring into a MC. So I think one of the really exciting pieces, I think the other exciting piece was that Amazon stepping forward in the world of AI has created a tool called Performance Plus, which allows you to create an A SD campaign within I think three to four clicks.

Brett:

What's a SD,

Jeff:

I'm sorry. An Amazon DSP campaign. Too many, too many acronyms. Too

Brett:

Many acronyms, man and Amazon team marketers in the military. Nobody's got more acronyms than us,

Jeff:

So I'll start back over with Amazon Performance Plus, you can create an Amazon DSP campaign in three to four clicks. And what you're doing is you're allowing the Amazon intelligence to be able to apply to get you the best outcomes for the types of campaigns that you're trying to design. So you have the ability to create full funnel campaigns that you want to and go in and tweak all the little pieces of it that you want, or you can come in and you can let Amazon's intelligence run on your behalf to see how they perform. And brands are even running these kind of against each other to say, how's Amazon do no different than how you would test another ai? Is it giving me results that are better than what I had before? So this is another, I'd say step forward with Amazon and using our AI intelligence in our large language learning models that have always been applied to some of the core principles of our advertising to make the DSP easier to use, more accessible and more perform better for advertisers. And the best way, I've always believed the best way to get a larger investment into advertising is to show better performance.

Brett:

Totally. Are you seeing any early data on how those new campaigns AI driven campaigns are performing versus standard DSP campaigns?

Jeff:

I don't know any of them off the top of my head. It's brand new, but I could probably find a case study or two to throw on for somebody that wants to dive into that deeper.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, really cool. One thing just anecdotally, and I'm curious if you've got a perspective, we've got an echo show in our kitchen, one of the, that's an 11 or 15 inch, I'm not sure, but it's great. Listen to music on it occasional I'll turn on YouTube TV while I'm cooking and watch a game or something, but I've been noticing more ads pop up when I've got the home screen that usually has our calendar, family calendar and some other things there. Then I'll see some ads on the left hand side. And it's been a variety of things. I've seen some ads for this creamer, this healthy clean creamer that we buy and it's like, oh, this is like a reorder ad. But then I've seen other things, that's not stuff that I've purchased, but I'm like, okay, Amazon is suggesting products here. What is likely, what is the campaign type driving those ads?

Jeff:

I don't know specifically the campaign type that drives it, but I think the intelligence that drives it is just that all of them are logged into your same Amazon account, which is I think one of the big powers of Amazon and their advertising campaign is that for lack of a better term, we don't need cookies to be able to understand what your signals are, but it's also triangulating the signals that you have for advertisers who are not advertising on Amazon. So if you continue to watch it, you're probably starting to see other advertisers come up where it's not necessarily about go to Amazon and buy this product. It might be about going to get some ice cream down the street. And I think that's another area

Brett:

Where some cars, some new cars place ads there as well, which is kind of interesting.

Jeff:

And you can push a button and schedule a test drive, right? And so you're probably creating some kind of signal from what you're watching on Prime video to the type of music that you're listening to, the types of products that you're buying that are saying that car may be more in line with something you would buy versus something else. I mean, for me, if you looked at my signals, you would see quite a few things that are around, I just bought a new outdoor lighting system that's all built into my ring system. So that would indicate that I'm maybe a little bit more smart

Brett:

Home type

Jeff:

Smart home. So then I might get more ads that are smart home type based because I'm showing the signals that I like a smart home technology. And I think that just goes to show what I was kind of talking about at the beginning, which is that the Amazon customer, the people who's engaging with Amazon is doing it in their car, in their kitchen, on their couch, and there's so many ways for advertisers to engage with them. And that's I think where the tagline, full funnel advertising at scale for everyone, because it's not just for people who are selling on Amazon anymore. You could be selling on your own website and you can run DSP ads that send the traffic to your website. So Amazon has really greatly expanded who can actually access this to create those ads, which I think is exciting for brands as well.

Brett:

It is because being able to target someone based on their behavior on Amazon or based on what Amazon knows about that shopper, very, very powerful because not only does Amazon have more behavioral shopper data, what you like to purchase when you like to purchase, things like that, but also what media you like to consume, what do you like to watch? All kinds of data points that Amazon has that are extremely valuable. And yeah, just this small example, but these ads on the Alexa device, I mean, choose the creamer example. Again, there've been several times where I'm like, oh, shoot. Yeah, I actually do need to reorder that. And I'll either, if I'm across the kitchen, I'll just speak and say, Alexa reorder, or you go over there and you tap it and you do your thing. But either way, the tools that Amazon is opening up, it's allowing, you don't have to be Hyundai or Toyota to use those tools.

Jeff:

And I think one of the things you just said there is really important, which is that advertising works best when it fits naturally into somebody's life. And that's the bar that Amazon has to continue to reach. Because if advertising, if it becomes irrelevant or if it becomes too much, then that's when people turn it off. Totally. And so we have to kind of keep that balance between keeping everybody privacy safe, being able to serve relevant ads based on signals and indicators, and then being able to drive the results back to the advertiser to understand how their ads are doing that really sets Amazon apart from everybody else in the space today. And I mean, I don't know, let's just kind of geek out and say, just think about where we were five years ago when we were talking about Amazon advertising and when we think to the future of the what's next? I think what excites me as well, right?

Brett:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Just getting started, and yeah, I say this all the time. I say this every year when I'm speaking in front of groups, but it's true, and it just becomes better. But there's never been a better time to build a brand you want to create and build your own brand. There's never been a better time, and it'll be even more true next year.

Jeff:

But I think the thing that I always like to kind of caution or remind people of is that brand building requires a good product. We all go back to the idea it has to be a good product, and then you have to be able to make the right investments to build the audience, to identify your product. And there's lots of different ways to do that. And Amazon has just created more tools for brands to be able to do it easier, to be able to access the creative that they need to be able to do it and to reach more audience if that's what their goal is to do.

Brett:

And let me kind of put some caveats around my statement. There may be some people listening, they're like, wait a minute. Yes, there were easier times maybe to put a product on Amazon and it goes to the moon. I know that the heydays of Amazon selling in like 20 14, 20 15, okay, it's not as easy as it was then. And yes, there may have been some times when there was less competition or you just turn on a TV ad and you go wild. But I still believe there are more tools available. And so for the savvy marketer, for the great brand with a great product, you got more tools, more opportunities to grow.

Jeff:

Yeah, I heard a podcast the other day that was actually really interesting, and it was talking about the types of businesses that are successful today and what they were based off of versus

Brett:

20

Jeff:

Years ago and what they were based off of. And if you look at when I was in college, people were running yellow page ads, not to overly date myself, it was only 30

Brett:

Years. Those were search ads, those were the demand capture ads back in the day, yellow page ads.

Jeff:

And so it's easy to always look backwards and say, well, it was easier to do something. But again, like you said, when you look back today, five years from now, you'll say that it was easier to do it today than it will be five years from now. And so you do have to continue to get more sophisticated. You have to build a product that actually differentiates itself in the market. That's not a bad thing for the consumer. I understand that maybe you were able to make money easier, but if you think about what leads to a good brand it creates, I always say, what is a brand? A brand creates an emotional response. When you say the word Dyson, you have a certain expectation of what that type of product is going to have. Sleep,

Brett:

Design, quality, solving a real problem, something I want to display on my house.

Jeff:

It was a vacuum cleaner. You know what I mean? So they built a better product and they created a brand that creates an emotional response. And so whether you're trying to do this on any social channel or whether you're trying to do this on a commerce channel, or whether you're trying to do this in brick and mortar, all of these components are still the same, and Amazon is just trying to make it easier for those that are doing it on our channel to access all these things.

Brett:

Yeah, love it. Well, Jeff, this has been fantastic. I'm super excited about the new tools and capabilities of Amazon ads. Our clients are investing more and more into Amazon ads because we're seeing the return, because we're seeing it drive incrementality. And so we'll continue to do so for those that are listening or watching and they're like, man, I need to pay attention to what Jeff Cohen has to say or need to see new announcements. How can they follow you and how can they stay in the know on what's new and what's next?

Jeff:

Yeah, so I'd say to follow me, just go to LinkedIn and type in Jeff Cohen, Amazon, and I should come up. I used to come up for Jeff Amazon, but that other guy that's bald, he beats me. Now,

Brett:

There's another famous Jeff, if I'm not mistaken at Amazon, may have you beat a little bit there by a few years.

Jeff:

Yeah, I do most of my posting on LinkedIn. And again, we talked about high level, a lot of these things. There are deep dive podcasts that other people have done on some of these products. So if you're looking to figure out how to implement these specifically for your brand, maybe go back and say, oh, Amazon a MC for sponsored ads, and there's lots of content out there. One of the things that I thought was really cool about unboxed was how many thought leaders in our space were diving into the content and sharing it on LinkedIn and other channels after the event Two years ago, I think I was one of a handful of people that were doing it, and now so many people are doing it. So there's lots of great content out there. You can always go to the Amazon ads website to get the official announcements and official releases. That's always a great place to start as well.

Brett:

Yep. Got to follow Jeff on LinkedIn. He posts awesome content, so recommend that. I'll link to your socials in the show notes as well for those that visit the show notes. And Jeff Cohen, ladies and gentlemen, Jeff, appreciate it, man. Fun as always. And I'm already looking forward to next time.

Jeff:

Yeah, appreciate having me on again and love the partnership that your company and our company has and what you guys are doing for advertisers. So keep sharing with everybody. I think it's awesome and people are learning from what you share, so thank you.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And OMG commerce proud Amazon ad partners, and so we're doing our share and staying connected and helping brands grow. So with that, that'll wrap it up for today. As always, we would love to hear from you. So would you like to hear more of on the show? If you haven't left us that review, that would make our day. We'd appreciate that. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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