Amazon unboxes a suite of new media tools at its flagship advertising conference

According to Insider Intelligence, global digital advertising spend will top $600 billion this year in a marketplace led by a triopoly of Alphabet, Meta and Amazon. The latter of this group is the only one to have gained market share in recent months, with the research outfit claiming Amazon Advertising will generate $33.96 billion in U.S. revenue this year.

However, compare this to the $78.86 billion and $51.35 billion in U.S. revenues generated by Alphabet and Meta and the scale of the gap is clear. Albeit, Amazon executives expect the unfurling of its latest offerings, in which its cloud computing offering plays a key role, will go some way toward closing this gap.

Among its announcements are a new clean room service for publishers, and updates to its demand-side platform including cross-channel planning tools to enhance advertisers’ reach using Amazon Marketing Cloud.

Amazon DSP updates

Among the updates to its DSP are Amazon Ads APIs, plus enhancements to Amazon Marketing Cloud, a.k.a. “AMC,” that let advertisers generate more holistic audience insights, as well as advanced campaign planning, activation and optimization controls.

Kelly MacLean, vp of Amazon DSP, told Digiday another key part of the updates to its buy-side tool was the simplification of its user interface. “We’ve heard feedback from our customers that we need to be more simple and we’ve completely reconfigured our user interface,” she said, adding that it was aimed at improving “goal-based workflows and investment.”

This makes it a lot easier for marketers to devise specific campaign KPIs “and then actually deliver against that,” according to MacLean, who further detailed how Amazon Ads wanted to better promote its “full-funnel capabilities” beyond its core reputation as a retail media offering.

Amazon Publisher Cloud

Meanwhile, the e-commerce giant has also unveiled Amazon Publisher Cloud as a means of complementing its DSP offering with several media owners including NBCUniversal and DIRECTV already experimenting with it. Built on AWS Clean Rooms, the latest offering, currently in beta, promises advertisers and media owners alike better privacy assurances enabling deals via its DSP.

In a press statement, Steve Rabuchin, vp of third-party supply at Amazon Ads, said, “We built Amazon Publisher Cloud to ensure that publishers securely maintain control of their first-party signals with the ability to analyze them alongside Amazon Ads insights, create customized and more effective deals, and easily make them available in Amazon DSP.”

Speaking separately, Amazon’s MacLean told Digiday that early experiments with Publisher Cloud have enabled brands to reduce their required audience reach by as much as 67% in certain instances. “This is an industry-first solution with Amazon publisher cloud and … this is just kind of another part of our quest to build more interoperability and simplicity into the industry,” she said.