The Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), which emerged from beta last year, is at the beating heart of Amazon’s advertising ambitions.
Amazon touted the product, which is its answer to a homegrown data clean room, at its Amazon Ads unBoxed conference in New York City on Wednesday.
AMC was built by the Amazon Ads group on Amazon Web Services infrastructure. Brands use it for marketing-specific use cases, primarily attribution and analytics, so that an advertiser’s first-party data can be analyzed alongside Amazon’s own first-party data set. Aside from media and retail property data – including Twitch, Fire TV, Kindle, the Sizmek ad network and the Amazon site and app – the clean room bundles in data from Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods stores.
The plan is to also roll out audience targeting and list-building capabilities later this year, Keerat Sharma, Amazon’s director of AMC and ad tech solutions, told AdExchanger.
One of the main value propositions for AMC is to ingest a company’s own direct-to-consumer web and app sales, as well as in-store sales. This data can be brought into Amazon’s clean room and included in analytics reporting to give advertisers a clearer sense of total sales and which channels are adding incremental new sales, Sharma said.
But what exactly makes a data clean room a data clean room is still an open question.
Even so, most of the large platforms, including Google, Meta and Amazon, have coalesced around a walled garden-centric version of a clean room. To the walled gardens, a clean room is a tool for analyzing user-level information from an advertiser’s CRM and ad server, without allowing user-level data to be exported from the platform.
The reporting and campaign insights are aggregated, with no individual’s info ever appended to the advertiser’s original first-party data set.
No third-party DSPs
In order to do audience activation via the AMC product, advertisers will be required to use the Amazon DSP.
“We created this linkage specifically for the Amazon DSP,” Sharma said in answer to a question about whether Amazon would ever allow a third-party DSP provider to target audiences created using AMC.
It makes sense why AMC isn’t opening up to outside DSPs. If a DSP like The Trade Desk could target programmatic audiences packaged by AMC, it could also create retargetable segments of Amazon customers and potentially reverse engineer useful info about Amazon-owned media.
Ads Data Hub (ADH), Google’s data clean room, first tested audience activation in 2020. Two years later, it still only allows the Google Display & Video 360 DSP.
Silver lining
One important nuance about AMC is that it’s technically part of the Amazon Ads business. Google ADH is bundled into the Google Cloud Platform, as opposed to Google’s ad tech business. That arrangement probably helps Google’s cloud customer numbers. Although practically everyone is a Google advertiser, the Google cloud biz trails AWS and Microsoft.
AWS doesn’t need the help, thank you very much.
According to Sharma, although many AMC customers don’t also use AWS, they can still tap into the solution through the Amazon Ads console or via an intermediary. Amazon Ads has a partner certification program, including a whole category of “Data Connectors.”
But there are advantages when businesses build on AWS and load in their Amazon Ads data directly, Sharma said.
For example, retail and ecommerce companies could plug in workflow data to automate processes and improve how they manage employee time.
(In a non-Amazon example of this dynamic at play, when Macy’s CEO Jeff Gennette discussed the retailer’s nascent media network during its earnings report in March, he called it out not for the ad revenue, but because it helped improve labor costs by consolidating sales within the stores best-equipped to handle ecommerce orders.)
An automotive brand – not your typical Amazon advertiser – used AMC to match audiences that the company targeted using the Amazon DSP and across Amazon-owned media to people who showed up to their auto lots or purchased a new car, Sharma said. The brand was able to segment audiences by “attitudinal type” and see which type led to more potential car buyers.
“It’s features like this that allow our partners to build really interesting products on top of AMC,” Sharma said.
