Q&A: How Amazon Ads and PMG are unlocking performance with AI-driven programmatic

This moment is significant because advertisers are taking off their training wheels by transitioning from test to execution mode to accelerate AI-driven decision-making across the open internet. At the same time, there is a lot at stake to scale planning, activation and measurement techniques.

At Amazon Ads’ unBoxed 2024 annual conference, a conversation with Amazon Ads partner PMG, a global marketing and technology company, touched on how the organizations are partnering to co-build resilient technology to meet customers’ ever-changing needs. The conversation included PMG’s Sam Bloom, head of partnerships, Chris Alvares, head of technology, and Shlok Khetan, product manager. They shared unique perspectives on how the industry is stepping forward to unleash brand potential with AI-driven programmatic advertising.

How are Amazon DSP and PMG collectively innovating in this space and working together to unlock brand potential?

Sam Bloom: PMG’s formula for success with Amazon DSP is one of the favorite moments of my career because it encapsulates the progress we’ve made over the past few decades of digital marketing. While the fundamentals have not changed much, the heightened speed and accuracy at which we can do things today is game-changing. 

We believe that is grounded in four truths: how well you know your customer; how well you connect the dots between insights; how AI is applied to audience planning and how well you leverage the data to create impact and, finally, how learnings are applied to optimize campaign performance.

Chris Alvares: Yes, it starts with customer data and what you consider to be the most impactful insights and KPIs. For PMG, this means being very specific about the who, where and when — who they are and what they care about; where they spend their time and how their location may affect their lifestyle; and when they change their behavior based on brand influence or a new life stage like getting married.

Given the current state versus the future state of programmatic advertising, how would you describe the difference between strategy and execution in this new era of AI?

Shlok Khetan: Strategy is all about the long-term vision, right? Analyzing market trends, seeing where our consumers are going, and building long-term strategies to focus our efforts. AI helps us analyze those large data sets and create insights more efficiently than before. 

On the execution side of things is where AI shines. It helps us reduce continuous tasks that we have to take on and helps us focus on the art of marketing, taking away the rigorous amount of work that had to go into making sure each campaign was set up properly.

At PMG, are there concerns that AI will replace the agency or specific roles in the agency?

Chris Alvares: This isn’t the first time technological change has created role shifts in American history. In the late 1800s, 2% of all Americans were employed by a single industry – the ice trade. In the early 1900s, the refrigerator was invented. Over 50 years, it changed how people cooked and stored food at their houses. 

The more exciting thing is how the AI industry, like the refrigeration industry, is shifting how we execute. Instead of cutting ice, we are building refrigerators; instead of pouring over spreadsheets, we are using automation to drive optimization.

Marketing is like a puzzle, but at the end of the day, it’s the KPIs that really matter and you’ve got to make the cash register sing. With these changes in AI-driven buying, are there specific KPIs that you think are most impacted or changing the most?

Sam Bloom: AI machine learning does a great job of providing context and we can start to see relationships that we didn’t know existed before. I do think the cash register is still king or queen, depending on your business; but how that occurs is changing because of the increased amount of insights we are getting. 

With Amazon Ads, I feel like a kid in the candy store because I can connect the dots between video consumption, retail consumption and passion points to build new campaigns and new insights. AI is like Tony Stark in the suit: Iron Man. 

I still have a lot of faith in the people who are close to campaigns. But, AI is enabling them to do things faster, better, and smarter and removes the assumptions that we make about things.

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