Get your mop and vacuum ready, because the clean room craze is only getting started.
Amazon on Tuesday launched the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), its cloud-based clean room product, from beta. Marketers can now integrate AMC with the Amazon demand-side platform (DSP) for campaign measurement and analytics.
AMC is built on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform, similar to how Google’s Ads Data Hub (ADH) clean room is inextricable from the Google Cloud Platform. Unlike ADH and Google Cloud, Amazon does not require marketers to have an AWS account to use the clean room.
“The data analyst using AMC … may have no cognition that under the hood there’s an instance of AMC running on top of AWS,” said Keerat Sharma, Amazon’s director of advertising engineering.
AdExchanger first reported that Amazon was developing a clean room solution in August 2019, and in the two years since, AMC has onboarded more than 1,000 brand advertisers, Sharma said.
AMC is not a holistic marketing measurement product, however. It’s built to support Amazon’s media and ad tech empire.
For instance, Amazon is moving beyond using AMC for post-campaign measurement and analytics with a pilot solution for audience activation, Sharma said. The pilot uses AMC and merged first-party data sets to target audiences, or can load ad campaign data such as log files to AMC, but only Amazon’s Sizmek ad server and DSP can be used for audience activation.
Amazon also announced an AMC-based attribution tool for in-store Whole Foods sales or Amazon Fresh online grocery orders. Twitch video advertising data was also just added to the platform, Sharma said.
Amazon is testing another new metric, Amazon Brand Lift, which measures upper-funnel priorities such as brand awareness and intent, rather than direct sales. The brand lift beta is only available in the United States, however, because it’s based on data from the US-only Amazon Shopper Panel. Amazon launched the panel last year – it now boasts 200,000 users – and offers up to $10 per month for participants to upload images of store purchase receipts and answer monthly surveys.
One financial services company that linked its first-party site data with AMC gained visibility into off-Amazon sales but only to attribute the role of Amazon advertising in driving those conversions.
“Advertisers are excited about the ability to add their own datasets, because it can quantify how Amazon media contributes to their own direct-to-customer conversions,” Sharma said.
AMC is following closely in ADH’s footsteps. Early this year, Google made ADH the only viable way to use third-party measurement for YouTube campaigns. ADH also launched an audience activation beta last year only for the Google DSP.
