This week on “The Big Story” we start by winding down the epic of Sizmek. The near-final chapter of this saga came last week with Amazon’s acquisition of two of Sizmek’s most coveted assets: its ad server and its dynamic creative optimization (DCO) technology.
Of the two, Sizmek’s ad server has always been the notable component and the AdExchanger team explores what it means now that Amazon has an ad server, and why it’s important to the ecommerce giant’s ad business.
What kind of clients does Amazon inherit? What sort of capabilities will Amazon be able to offer advertisers once the ad server is integrated? And what about the vaunted Amazon data set – will it soon be pumped into the Sizmek ad server, and to what effect?
But an ad server is a huge implementation, so it’s likely advertisers will see more immediate benefits with Amazon’s new DCO piece. As senior editor James Hercher points out, Amazon has never offered advertisers particularly amazing creative capabilities. But with DCO tech, it now has the opportunity to change all of that. It can also provide Amazon’s ad platform with more advanced targeting capabilities related to context, behavior and location.
But do these acquisitions make Amazon a mightier competitor to Google? While it’s easy to pit the two of them against each other, it’s unlikely that Amazon, in acquiring parts of Sizmek, is thinking of any company other than, well, Amazon.
