Brian Tomasette, director of product, Amazon DSP
The amount of change and number of challenges that marketers faced in 2024 was head-spinning. From uncertainty about third-party identifiers to the chaos of ever-changing privacy rules, brands, agencies and technology partners like Amazon have had to rethink, adapt and innovate to reach audiences wherever they are — and now, they are everywhere. Not only has the consumer path-to-purchase expanded — most people use at least 20 touchpoints before making a decision — but their attention spans have shrunk. It’s a double whammy that has led marketers to find new ways to connect with their audience and increase relevancy across the marketing funnel.
Between the fast pace of business, constant technological advances and ongoing privacy changes, it’s becoming more difficult to understand the impact of advertising dollars across channels and devices.
To solve this challenge, marketers who leverage unique customer signals to reach their most relevant audiences at scale can significantly impact campaign outcomes. However, deploying a full-funnel strategy incorporating both has been a challenge.
For ad tech providers like Amazon DSP, it means looking hard at what it takes to deliver a true full-funnel approach. This includes listening carefully to agency and brand partners to understand what is needed to facilitate this and adapting to meet modern challenges head-on while preparing for what’s around the corner in the ever-changing advertising landscape.
Expanding access to premium ad inventory signals
To deliver on marketers’ needs, ad tech providers need to offer access to premium ad inventory signals in a way that’s easily accessible.
For example, all brands can tap into all the unique shopper signals, regardless of their presence on Amazon.com. However, previously, Amazon Ads had primarily focused on selling audiences built from a rich catalog of buy, browse and streaming signals across Amazon-owned properties largely tailored to marketers selling products or services on Amazon.com. This left non-endemic brands without access to tools for planning, activating and measuring campaigns across first- and third-party inventory.
By allowing all brands to access premium ad inventory signals, more marketers can take advantage of additional benefits, such as the 2024 launch of Prime Video ads and the partnerships forged with publishers like Disney, Paramount and NBCU. These agreements enhanced the reach and engagement across ad inventory independent of deterministic ad identifiers and unlocked new upper-funnel marketing opportunities.
Enhancing full-funnel advertising with AI to reflect modern needs
While full-funnel marketing isn’t new, it hasn’t kept pace with how consumers shop. Performance+ from Amazon, for example, adds important enhancements, enabling brands to leverage unique signals to reach their most relevant audiences and bridge consumer behavior and ad formats that are consistently non-linear and always changing. Marketers can use AI to automate campaigns focusing on a particular funnel stage or marketing tactic, such as remarketing, to eliminate complex decisions like audience targeting and bidding controls.
For continuous innovation, ad tech providers are experimenting with single campaign types to simplify and collapse funnel stages to run across all ad formats conditioned for marketing KPIs that drive overall business growth. This can add value and simplicity for advertisers throughout 2025, creating solutions that fit into customers’ understanding of the marketing funnel while simplifying and powering these solutions with deep machine learning and AI to pick up true customer path patterns and drive value for advertisers.
Delivering a simple, smart DSP for efficiency at scale
Supply and campaign optimization is a moot point if a DSP cannot deliver efficiency at scale. By enhancing the user experience with goal-based workflows, updated measurement and reporting services that mirror marketing KPIs such as offsite conversions, app installs and offline server-to-server conversions, providers like Amazon have heavily invested in the user experience. Additional improvements include reducing page load latency and new insight and recommendation cards, enabling traders to monitor performance and delivery directly within their dashboards.
Ad tech partners are helping marketers achieve relevancy at scale through expanded access to premium inventory and AI integration into full-funnel strategies. New innovations enable brands to streamline workflows, optimize campaigns and connect with audiences more effectively. As the advertising landscape evolves, marketers are well-positioned for the new year with scalable, data-driven solutions.
Heading into 2025, the advertising industry will change unimaginably, and working together ensures everyone is ready for whatever may come.
Sponsored by Amazon Ads
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