Clients are very aware that of the big publisher groups, Amazon has more granular and verified data than anyone. This is especially true if you’re selling on their platform.
Advertisers have always been keen to get their hands on this information about their consumers and advertising performance but due to strict privacy and customer-centric concerns, Amazon has been reluctant to share any such detailed information.
However, to meet the needs of advertisers, in Q4 2019 Amazon quietly launched the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) which coincided with many job ads posted for Amazon and also by Deloitte, Omnicom and Publicis.
Ad Exchanger wrote one of the first articles about Amazon’s new “clean room” in August 2019 followed by articles across publishers including Retail Dive. AMC would reportedly enable advertisers to analyze Amazon’s vast advertising and retail data at the most granular level – but they’re not permitted to export this sensitive consumer data.
While AMC has been operational since late 2019 with select advertisers, there still remains scant little information about it publicly; indeed, a Google search for “Amazon Marketing Cloud” brings up mention of the competitor Salesforce Cloud, and only a couple of articles discuss AMC directly.
This blog post is not sourced from any official or confidential information but as many clients are interested to learn more, we have compiled what has been reported and are sharing this understanding and our hopes for what AMC can provide clients.
AMC can simplistically be seen as Amazon’s version of the Google Ads Data Hub, which Google describes as follows:
“With Ads Data Hub, you can upload your first-party data into BigQuery and join it with Google’s event-level ad campaign data. Combining your data with Google’s event data can unlock insights, improve advertising efficiency, help you achieve data-driven business goals, and yield more effective campaign optimization. Results from Ads Data Hub are aggregated over a group of users, which allows Google to provide more complete data and still maintain end-user privacy.”
In a nutshell, AMC is a similar “clean room” environment where clients can contribute their own data (for example website visitation, CRM program, social channel interaction and search data) and analyze this alongside log-level Amazon data that could be derived from any of their properties. Remember that Amazon is much more than Amazon.com, it’s Prime Video, Prime Music, Kindle, Fire Tablet, FireTV, Ring, Zappos, Whole Foods Market, GoodReads, Go Stores and many others. When aggregated, that’s a lot of customer data. And because of the single sign-on across their properties, Amazon is able to tie all of the user behaviors and information back to a known individual.
AMC is Amazon’s way of giving clients access to more granular data upon which they can perform analysis aimed at improving a brand’s performance and insight. Importantly, all analysis is carried out in a secure and privacy compliant environment. And in a world where cookies will soon disappear, Ad Exchanger wrote that AMC will play a big role in brand’s leveraging 1st party audiences.
Uniquely, with the plethora of assets Amazon owns and the verified shopping data and retail operations, we believe Amazon clients ccould derive insights beyond just media/advertising and impact the breadth of their marketing activities.
It’s important to note that AMC isn’t a ready made dashboard or a drop-and-drag visual interface. You can’t just get access to every insight at the touch of a button. Think of it like a massive data dump from multiple sources, and you need experts to analyze, interpret and visualize the findings.
AMC is entirely API-driven and users need familiarity with APIs, querying languages, JSON, and AWS services as well as sophisticated analytics tools.
Amazon is apparently waiving fees for selected advertisers. Podean is working with some of the most accomplished data scientists in the marketing field to develop AMC solutions to clients, ranging from the development of use cases through to setup, analysis, interpretation and application of the findings. More detail about Podean’s capabilities can be found HERE, and please get in CONTACT if we can assist you.