This week is Amazon’s big unBoxed conference, and the Amazon Ads group is announcing several big updates to the company’s DSP. Amazon says the goal of the updates is to give advertisers better audience targeting and to simplify campaign setup and management.
Here’s the full rundown:
Revamped User Interface: Amazon DSP now features a new UI that allows advertisers to create campaigns in just a few clicks to improve efficiency.
Consolidated Display Line-Item: The platform merges desktop, mobile, and app display inventory into a single line item, cutting down on campaign setup time.
Machine Learning Recommendations: New insight cards on the campaign health overview page give users automated performance audits and optimization suggestions for quicker adjustments.
Better Frequency Cap Controls: Advertisers can now holistically manage ad frequency across campaigns, channels, and devices using frequency groups to avoid duplicate impressions and support efficiency.
Launch of Ads Data Manager: A new ads data manager allows advertisers to securely upload their first-party data once and use it across Amazon DSP and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC).
Better Interoperability with AMC and Amazon Publisher Cloud: Advertisers can create custom audiences enriched with signals from Amazon Ads and third-party publishers.
Performance+ Enhancements: The AI-driven optimization tool in Amazon DSP now includes remarketing and retention options, expanding beyond prospecting, to help advertisers deliver on other KPIs. (Available in open beta.)
Why This Matters:
Amazon’s overall ads business, which includes the DSP, is booming. In the second quarter of this year, the company reported that its ads business brought in $12.77 billion, marking a 20% year-over-year increase.
The DSP’s growth is being driven by several factors. Amazon has a wealth of first-party data that supports ad buying. The DSP also lets advertisers reach audiences on and off Amazon, and Amazon’s inventory—from its e-commerce media network to its streaming content—is impressive.
Clearly, with the success it’s seeing, the DSP is a major growth area, and the unBoxed conference shows Amazon is investing in UI and AI for users. To compete with DV360 and The Trade Desk, and to fend off competition from Yahoo DSP, this is important.
Experts React:
Programmatic 101, who has used Amazon DSP, shared a great thread on the platform’s strengths and weaknesses a few days ago:
Interestingly, Programmatic 101 criticized the user interface, calling it “the worst part of it.” Amazon addresses that head-on with this week’s update. P101 also praised Amazon DSP’s audience data capabilities and Performance+, while noting that the open web inventory needs a lot of quality control to make sure advertisers aren’t wasting money on low-quality, non-viewable, or made-for-advertising (MFA) inventory.
Our Take:
This is a good launch by Amazon that addresses a few core issues. Unrelated to Amazon, however, a broader industry question arises: are advertisers feeling overwhelmed by the flood of AI announcements, many of which seem to blur together?
While there have been a number of AI announcements going into and during Advertising Week, few seem truly game-changing or differentiated. That might be OK as long as performance and efficiency are there. But it raises concerns about terms like “AI-infused” and “AI-powered” becoming meaningless buzzwords. Or are we already there?
