Amazon Unboxed 2022 – Ads Announcements

As you might expect one of the biggest events held by Amazon is Unboxed and with that comes a whole host of new features.

We were lucky enough to be able to sponsor Amazon Unboxed 2022 and also get a heads-up on what is being announced today. This includes a wide range of new advertising features which bring a host of opportunities for Amazon Sellers.

These new features often get better reach than their older counterparts especially during their launch period so it’s well worth keeping up with this latest news and information. So without further ado what’s new?

Amazon Ads announces new Sponsored Display, physical store advertising, and campaign optimization capabilities

• Amazon Ads introduces Rewarded Sponsored Display, a new capability that customers say inspires them to act
• Amazon Ads announces Digital Signage Ads in Amazon DSP
• Amazon Ads also introduces solutions that help advertisers move faster, optimize in the moment, and increase efficiency of ad spends

Here’s a bit more about each of these features:

Rewarded Sponsored Display

Rewarded Sponsored Display is coming soon to U.S. advertisers in closed beta. Brands will be able to add an Amazon shopping credit directly into the Sponsored Display creative, and customers receive the reward by clicking on the ad and purchasing the featured product.

In a 2021 Amazon Ads survey of U.S. adult Amazon shoppers, 92% of respondents said they were more likely to take an action if offered an Amazon shopping credit, demonstrating the value and utility of this type of experience.

This is an expansion of the rewarded ads already available across a broad range of placements, including Twitch and Fire TV, where customers can receive Amazon shopping or entertainment credits by taking the indicated action, such as watching a streamer on Twitch or signing up for a newsletter.

Sponsored Display for brands that don’t sell on Amazon

Amazon Ads is introducing Sponsored Display for brands that do not sell in Amazon’s store. This is currently offered to U.S. advertisers in closed beta on Twitch. Previously, sponsored ads had only been available for brands that sell products on Amazon. Now, businesses that sell products and services in verticals not available on Amazon, like restaurants and hotels, can use Sponsored Display to reach the highly engaged Twitch audience.

Sponsored Display video creative

According to a third-party study conducted by Wyzowl, 73% of consumers say they prefer video ads to learn about products and services, and 88% say video ads have convinced them to make a purchase.2 However, developing video creative can be cost-intensive. Sponsored Display video creative, now generally available worldwide, empowers advertisers of all sizes, particularly small and emerging brands, to easily create video campaigns that showcase their products and stories to millions of customers on Amazon and elsewhere online. Advertisers can deliver immersive video ads, such as tutorials, demos, unboxing, and testimonials, and measure campaign performance with new video metrics.

Digital Signage Ads in Amazon DSP

Digital Signage Ads in Amazon DSP, which will be available in November to eligible U.S. advertisers via managed service, make it easier for brands to advertise within Amazon Fresh stores. With Digital Signage Ads in Amazon DSP, brands can now purchase ads programmatically, giving them more flexibility and control over where their ads are featured. Campaigns can be scheduled based on store location, by daypart, or by location of the digital signage within the store. This creates more opportunities for brand discovery and will enhance the customer shopping experience by creating a wider variety of in-store ads.

Optimisation Announcements

Sponsored Products campaigns with presets

Sponsored Products campaigns with presets, available to U.S. advertisers, are now automatically featured in the ads console for new products. With Sponsored Products campaigns with presets, Amazon Ads recommends campaign settings, including daily budgets and bidding strategies, that look to remove the ambiguity of starting a new campaign or launching a new product on Amazon. When advertisers log in to the ads console, they’ll see recommendations on how to set up performant, ready- to-launch campaigns—saving time and helping to drive results from the onset. Amazon Ads found that campaigns launched with presets observed a 77% increase in clicks, and a 29% increase in conversions compared to campaigns that did not utilize presets.3

Performance recommendations

Amazon Ads unveiled performance recommendations, which will be generally available in 10 countries in November. Performance recommendations are in-console, actionable best practices for Sponsored Products campaigns. As advertisers utilize the ads console, performance recommendations works in the background, constantly looking for Sponsored Products campaign tips that can be adopted with one- click, such as new keywords to prioritize or bid suggestions—giving advertisers in-the-moment feedback to improve campaign performance based on rigorously tested and validated best practices.

Amazon Ads showcases new products to help brands engage and delight customers through video and streaming ads

• Sponsored Display now supports video for self-service ad campaigns on and off Amazon
• Video Builder makes it easy for advertisers to create videos in less than 10 minutes at no additional cost
• Amazon creative services empower brands to discover, compare, and directly book with trusted service providers to create impactful videos and other creative assets
• Streaming TV Ads now include incremental household reach to help advertisers measure the unique, incremental reach of Streaming TV campaigns, above and beyond their linear TV campaigns

Sponsored Display Video Support

At unBoxed 2022, Amazon Ads announced it is bringing video to its self-service Sponsored Display solution. The new Sponsored Display video creative, generally available worldwide now, empowers advertisers of all sizes, particularly small and emerging brands, to easily create video campaigns to showcase their products and stories to millions of customers on Amazon and elsewhere online. Brands can deliver immersive video ads, such as tutorials, demos, unboxing, and testimonials, and measure campaign performance with standard Sponsored Display metrics.

Video Builder

Amazon Ads also announced an expanded public beta program for Video Builder, which makes it easy for brands to create videos for their Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display campaigns through ready-to-use customizable templates. Using available product and lifestyle images to create more engaging ad content, advertisers can easily build video creatives in less than 10 minutes at no additional cost. They can also expand their use of video campaigns and quickly experiment with creative variations to maximize engagement.

Amazon Creative Services

Amazon creative services, which is now available in eight countries, is a new offering that helps advertisers discover, compare, and directly book with trusted service providers for the creation of impactful Sponsored Brands, Streaming TV, and Sponsored Display videos, as well as other creative assets.

Brands can search and filter services based on their requirements, browse reviews and samples, and directly connect with providers for end-to-end creative delivery, all within the Amazon ads console. Creative services simplify the creative production process for advertisers and enables more multi- channel or upper-funnel marketing.

The service is free to use and there are no minimum commitments required to book. All services provide a “moderation guarantee” ensuring compliance with Amazon Ads policy.

Measuring the incremental reach of Streaming TV ads

At unBoxed, Amazon Ads also introduced Amazon Streaming TV incremental household reach (beta), a new enhancement to its Streaming TV ads solution. Amazon Streaming TV reaches an unduplicated potential monthly U.S. audience of more than 135 million, including Twitch.4 Streaming TV incremental household reach is a post-campaign reporting solution that helps brands measure the unique, incremental audience reached through Amazon Streaming TV Ads campaigns, above and beyond their linear TV campaigns. The solution ensures accurate, aggregated results by combining first-party and third-party signals, augmented by machine leaning-based-projections. With in-flight reporting, brands can stay informed and make optimizations during campaigns.

Innovating for customer success

Amazon Ads also demonstrated a range of other innovations at unBoxed 2022 focused on providing brands with simple but powerful ways to engage the right audience with compelling video advertising. For example:

• Thursday Night Football, streaming exclusively on Prime Video and Twitch, delivers exciting new experiences to a younger adult and more engaged audience, and Amazon first-party insights provide advertisers with new opportunities to reengage fans across Amazon properties after the last whistle.
• The IMDb What to Watch app offers Fire TV customers in the U.S. a series of fun, interactive mini-games and quizzes to help fans decide what to stream. And with in-app sponsorships such as Quick Draw game sponsorship (beta), brands can be front and center as viewers discover great content.
• The new customer experience for interactive video ads features multiple customer call-to-action (CTA) options, including single actions like “Add to cart” and “Add to list,” multi-action experiences such as “Buy this” and “Shop now,” and for brands not selling on Amazon, “Send me more” information via email or through a QR code.
• More than 25 series are now participating in Amazon’s Virtual Product Placement (beta),
  including Sprung, Cosmic Love, Reacher, Love Accidentally, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Bosch: Legacy, Making the Cut, and Leverage: Redemption. Virtual product placement helps brands show up within streaming TV content and reach the right audiences, while allowing Amazon content creators to focus on telling great stories.
• The Amazon Freevee Welcome Screen (beta) provides advertisers with a unique opportunity to showcase their brands in a full-screen, seven-second experience as customers launch the Freevee app on Fire TV.

Amazon Ads highlights new ad tech capabilities for more agile planning, measurement, and optimization

Amazon Marketing Cloud

Brands and agencies continue to find increasing utility from AMC, with the number of active AMC customers quadrupling in the past year. Based on direct feedback from these customers, Amazon Ads has focused on building out AMC capabilities across four areas—signal coverage, ease of use, actionable insights, and Partner programs:

• Signal coverage: The addition of Sponsored Display and digital subscription events offers advertisers greater visibility into the total and incremental impact of different Amazon Ads formats, more comprehensive cross-media attribution, and a deeper understanding of the customer journey. Through an integration with Sizmek Ad Suite (beta), advertisers can build queries to analyze bidding efficacy, cross-publisher attribution, and total reach. Sponsored Brands signals will be added in early 2023.
• Ease of Use: Instructional Queries serve as simple playbooks that help advertisers get started with AMC. In the last year, AMC’s Instructional Query library has increased from 10 pre-built queries to more than 50. Improvements in the library make it even easier to use AMC with just one click. These queries can also be customized.
• Actionable Insights: Amazon Ads will begin rolling out the ability for brands to manage their Amazon DSP audiences within AMC later this year. This will enable audience creation via a SQL statement, allowing for increased customization based on campaign goals and the ease of pushing these audiences directly into Amazon DSP for campaign activation.
• Partner Programs: Amazon Ads has begun rolling out AMC partner certifications across agencies, tool providers, system integrators, and software vendors. Certified partners are part of the Amazon Ads Partner Network and included in the partner directory, which makes it easy for advertisers to find potential partners based on their business needs.

Collectively, these efforts will further empower both brands and agencies as they leverage AMC’s functionality to guide decision-making and achieve their marketing goals. For example, ad tech agency Perpetua was able to use AMC to analyze campaign performance across media for “Into the AM”, an apparel brand. Perpetua observed that audiences reached by both Sponsored Products and Amazon DSP ads were 16 times more likely to make a purchase. Ultimately, Perpetua used these insights to create new campaigns for “Into the AM” that helped drive a 200% new-to-brand sales increase and a 49% increase in branded searches in the Amazon store.

And that’s a wrap for this year! 

If that was too much for you to digest in one go don’t worry we will also be covering these topics on our blog in our podcasts and on our YouTube channel over the next few months in more detail. Remember to subscribe to each of these for regular updates. And if you are looking for someone to manage your Amazon ads for you then look no further. We’d be happy to help. Just click that Book a Call link and we’ll be happy to see if we are a good fit for you.