Amazon Ads has announced Sponsored TV, a self-service ad system that will allow brands of all sizes that sell goods on Amazon to reach more customers using Amazon’s streaming TV services.
Sponsored TV is an expansion of Amazon’s Sponsor Ads product, which highlights products in online searches, and will help marketers place ads on Amazon Freevee, Twitch and streaming channels offered through Fire TV apps.
The new offering was announced Wednesday at the Amazon Ads unBoxed conference for advertisers in New York.
Small and medium-sized brands have been a source of revenue growth for TV advertising, with many companies, including The Walt Disney Co. and NBCUniversal, courting smaller firms and setting up self-service mechanisms to make it easy for companies familiar with digital advertising to plan and execute television campaigns.
“TV is an important brand-building strategy and should not be out of reach for any brand of any size,” Ruslana Zbagerska, VP of Amazon Ads, told Broadcasting+Cable.
Sponsored TV was developed to remove barriers companies saw preventing them from advertising on TV. There are no minimum spending levels and no upfront commitment and Amazon will help adapt the creative assets brands have — or help them create new ones if they've never used TV advertising before.
“Sponsored TV is a new streaming TV ad solution that helps brands connect with their audiences on the largest screen in the home. This includes brands that are new to advertising," Zbagerska said. "Sponsored TV campaigns provide efficient reach powered by our machine learning optimization models, enabling brands to benefit from Amazon's first-party shopping and entertainment signals to create relevant ad experiences for viewers.”
Amazon has been growing its TV advertising business with Freevee and Fire TV. Amazon has also announced plans to show ads on Amazon Prime Video, but Zbagerska declined to speculate about whether Prime Video inventory would be available via Sponsored TV in the future.
Marketers would want to put money into streaming TV, rather than linear TV, because viewers are spending more time with connected TV and streamers tend to be more attentive, Zbagerska said, pointing to research that found ads on Freevee generate three times more attention than on linear TV.
Amazon can also boost engagement with its interactive ad formats.
Small and medium-sized brands can often be intimidated by the cost of TV advertising, and don’t have the understanding of how to measure the value to justify the spend, she added. With sponsored TV, Amazon will be providing those tools.
Zbagerska would not say if small self-service advertisers would get the same pricing larger ad buyers get. "We will deliver tons of value, both for our brands and for or viewers," she said.
Also Read: GroupM Sets Up System for Evaluating Ads on Amazon
Amazon is able to produce ads for new TV advertisers using its creative studio and AI tools.
With Sponsored TV, it should not be much more difficult to create a streaming TV campaign than on online campaign for Amazon customers. “The self-service tool is quite simple. In several clicks, you can create a net new campaign,” Zbagerska said.
Sponsored TV campaigns benefit from machine-learning-powered optimization models informed by Amazon’s first-party shopping and entertainment data. Brands can engage with audiences likely to be interested in specific types of content, including cooking and home-improvement programming, and reach audiences interested in products in categories sold in the Amazon store.
Amazon has run beta tests of Sponsored TV with a number of Amazon clients, with successful results. In one case a client saw a forty-times increase in branded searches using streaming TV than it had with web advertising alone.
“TV advertising is no longer just for the big brands,” said Patrick Miller, co-founder of Flywheel, a digital commerce consultant that works with Amazon sellers. “With self-serve buying and closed-loop measurements, Sponsored TV makes streaming TV advertising a cost-efficient option for emerging and enterprise brands that want to connect the entertainment and shopping journey for customers.”
