At CES, Omnicom Media Group strikes extended purchase data partnership with Amazon via Flywheel

Via a beta test, Flywheel customers are able to access five years of purchase history to see how consumers’ purchase habits and conversions have evolved or changed in that time, which allows brands to adjust their strategies accordingly.

“This capability, which [Flywheel] has really led the development of [for OMG], is both going to empower our ability within Amazon’s sponsored ads, so essentially Amazon search capability, but also more broadly,” said Megan Pagliuca, Omnicom Media Group’s chief product officer. “There’s a lot of chatter in the market that scale doesn’t bring an advantage in a biddable world. Yes, it does, and this is another example of that.”

Patrick Miller, co-founder of Flywheel, explained that since Covid first affected consumer habits by profoundly increasing their use of e-commerce, Amazon’s become more and more important to brands, including CPG and others not considered endemic to the e-commece giant.

“Within the CPG category, over a four year window we saw 70% of customers bought from one CPG [on Amazon],” said Miller. “But that’s also true in other categories as well — within apparel, 52% of customers purchased multiple times over four years. … And so for brands, it allows them to look over a longer period of time and see those insights to then say, ‘Hey, this is worth it in that investment within search or display.”

“The launch of this optimized capability adds to our suite of full-funnel AMC advertising solutions that enable our customers to execute media plans with deeper insights and accurate measurement,” said Paula Despins, vp of measurement, analytics and data science at Amazon Ads. “Extending a brand’s available lookback window from 13 months of their Amazon purchase signals to five years enables advertisers to more deeply understand key customer journey metrics … by analyzing a broader timeframe based on a product’s lifecycle or their customers’ engagement with their brand portfolio over time.”

One Flywheel client, Haleon, which owns medicine-cabinet brands such as Advil and Flonase, sees this as a “huge unlock,” said Kelly Kavanagh, its senior director of integrated marketing and media. “Our consumers’ long-term value is notoriously hard to quantify,” Kavanagh said. The five-year lookback of AMC data will allow us to measure how consumers interact and mature with Haleon. It allows us to make smarter decisions about where and how we invest today to maximize value for Haleon’s long term strategic growth ambitions.”

Omni once again serves as the conduit for the data flow in the deal with Amazon Ads. “The idea is to integrate [the information] into the full workflow, so not just when we’re looking to purchase commerce-related media, but also to take these insights and to bring them up to the planning process,” said Clarissa Season, chief experience officer at OMG’s Annalect, which essentially runs the Omni platform. “We have this rich set of insights, and we integrate it into the workflow — from what we know about consumers to how we think about activating those consumers. And then we want to measure the impact at the end and then optimize it and make it better for next time around.”