Amazon Wants To Move Further Up The Funnel

Amazon is the ultimate bottom-of-the-funnel play for brands. But the company sees big opportunities to expand into branding.

“I don’t think we do a good enough job of allowing brands to have a recreational and ongoing conversation with consumers,” said Colleen Aubrey, VP of performance advertising at Amazon, at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview in New York City on Wednesday. “We need to open up the experience beyond ‘I need this item today.’”

Amazon has already begun to build products reflecting that sentiment. Amazon Posts, in beta, lets brands curate a shoppable feed of products that link to product detail pages. And Amazon Follow lets customers who have expressed interest in a brand receive updates from them, such as when they’re livestreaming a customer Q+A.

Aubrey alluded to modeling out the interactions that happen with brands that ultimately lead to a purchase and building more branding products around that information.

But Amazon’s transformation into a branding vehicle will play out over the long term, as it balances helping brands move product with building equity over time.

Bring the fire

Amazon is also working on beefing up its capabilities in the living room. Aubrey oversees the IMDb TV team, which is opening up more inventory and creating more products around OTT ad sales.

“It’s a new way for brands to move into the living room,” Aubrey said.

As Amazon builds out its array of branding products, it’s growing the team that works directly with agencies, integrators and brands. While agencies have complained in the past that Amazon’s platform is difficult to use, Aubrey said the features available through Amazon’s API are now “much more complete.”

“Hands-on-keyboard users should expect the full set of features to be available in the API,” Aubrey said. “That will open up a huge amount of innovation.”