Amazon’s enterprise self-serve ads platform, designed for agencies and brands, is intended as a programmatic complement rather than a replacement for direct-sold inventory.
Publicis agency VivaKi is the first and only agency Amazon Media Group is working with at present for the self-serve platform rollout.
Over the last three years, Amazon has spoken with agency holding companies to diversify access to its ecommerce-centric supply, according to a report that ran last week. Like Google and Twitter, Amazon is courting advertisers who don’t necessarily want to commit to a managed service (although there is the option to do a hybrid of both).
“It’s about giving agencies control over their Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP) campaigns, which in turn helps improve performance and better end-customer experience,” said Seth Dallaire, VP of North American sales at Amazon Media Group (AMG). “Adding an enterprise self-service component means agencies can create and manage their AAP campaigns directly, optimizing at their own frequency, without the aid of managed service.”
A couple of factors drive Amazon’s agency dealings. As AdExchanger reported, brands that use Amazon as a media partner want greater insight into data and campaign attribution.
“We want to stand behind the products and services we offer to clients and this will [allow us to give] brand advertisers the reassurance that their message will reach the right consumer with premium content whether in video, mobile or display,” said Domenic Venuto, global president of data and technology at VivaKi.
“True to a self-serve platform, we get access to AMG and the functionality and creativity they provide, which doesn’t preclude us working hand in hand with them,” Venuto said. “It’s just much tighter.”
Right now VivaKi is undergoing a platform training process with its team and evaluating which advertiser campaigns could benefit from self-serve functionality.
“The goal is we’d move any and all of our Amazon programmatic business through the self-serve tool and there’s no reason not to,” he added. “That’s a rich treasure trove of inventory in reaching (244 million) consumers. We’re excited because it’s applicable to our cross-section of advertisers (like) telco or CPG.”
VivaKi, which operates both the trading desk VivaKi Audience On Demand (AOD) and vets all programmatic media, data and tech partners through a 300-point VivaKi Verified evaluation process, “has the benefit of learnings across a wide range of clients and services, and can now (apply that) on top of our tools and technology to drive increased value for their clients,” said Amazon’s Dallaire.
VivaKi augments all vendor partner platforms including Amazon’s self-serve tool with an open source dashboard that aggregates information, such as attributable value, from campaigns running on AOD and VivaKi’s data platform SkyScraper. It is designed to harness data to inform future cross-channel buys.
“Based on our clients’ objectives, we can choose which platform we want to run, put those plans in place, the client approves them and we apply the ‘thin layer’ to make sure there is (proper) budgeting cross-platform and use the platform to do individual customization,” Venuto said. “Fundamentally, the functionality (of AAP) is the same…but how it gets executed, how we look at that data… and that speed is now available directly to us and we’re excited about that.”
