New York had been abuzz with the talk of Amazon Ads' flagship event, unBoxed 2022 for a while now. And rightly so. The 3-day event promised exciting updates to Amazon's advertising products, aiming to help brands prepare for evolving industry trends. And it delivered on its promise.
There were several key announcements in the unBoxed 2022 event, most of them focusing on helping advertisers run better campaigns and brands reach a wider audience.
We are unwrapping some key announcements from Amazon Ad's flagship events below. Stick around to see what the advertising mastermind has in store for you.
Key Updates and Announcements from unBoxed 2022
The announcements from unBoxed 2022 mostly centered around 4 areas: reach, addressability, creatives, and measurement and optimization.
Amazon Ads introduced important updates to some of its best-performing products, including Sponsored Display, Sponsored Products, and AMC.
Here are some of the announcements we found most powerful as we attended the event:
1. Rewarded Sponsored Display Ads
A survey revealed that 92% of customers are more likely to take action on an ad if they are offered Amazon credit.
Amazon Ads noted this, and this year in unBoxed, the advertising giant announced Rewarded Sponsored Display Ads for US advertisers. Through this product, brands could mention specific rewards on their Sponsored Display creatives to entice people into clicking on the ad and purchasing their product.
Customers will get Amazon credit if they click on the ad and buy the featured product.
2. Sponsored Display Ads for Non-Amazon Brands
Previously, Sponsored Display Ads were only available to Amazon-native sellers. But with the announcements from unBoxed 2022, Amazon has also made their Sponsored Display Ads available to non-Amazon brands.
Sponsored Display for non-Amazon brands will empower service-based businesses like restaurants and hotels to create and run powerful ad campaigns.
This product is currently only available to US-based sellers in closed beta on Twitch.
3. Access to Digital Signage through Amazon DSP
Amazon has digital signages placed across Amazon Fresh and Go stores. Amazon has paired these digital signages with their DSP system to help brands serve ads programmatically across physical stores. Brands can enjoy greater flexibility and decide on ad placement based on store location and position within the store. They can also plan their ad placement by daypart.
Access to digital signage via DSP will be available to advertisers in the US.
4. Updates to Amazon DSP
DSP has been one of Amazon's most complicated advertising products. So, this year, Amazon Ad's flagship event announced several updates to make the tool easier to use.
Campaign Setup: Amazon has introduced improvements to the DSP campaign setup and editing process to reduce the time it takes to create DSP campaigns and streamline editing.
Change History: This provides campaign managers/advertisers with a log to keep track of the changes they have made in their campaigns and how these changes have impacted the delivery and performance of their ads.
Updates to the Bidding System: Amazon DSP's bidding algorithm has received significant updates, allowing the bidding system to process more events and helping advertisers create and run better campaigns.
Improvements to Ad Tags: Amazon has introduced enhancements to ad tags. These enhancements make ad tags easier to deploy, eliminating the need for cookies or ad IDs.
5. New Signals through Amazon Audiences
Amazon Audiences have started taking into account more signals, helping advertisers understand their customers better, run more targeted campaigns, and reach people who have shown interest in what your business offers.
Through Amazon Insights, Amazon empowers advertisers to reach even those customers who do not have advertising identifiers but are likely to contribute to your business, while respecting their privacy.
6. Contextual Targeting
Amazon Ad's contextual targeting goes on and off Amazon, empowering advertisers to promote their brands better.
Paired with Amazon Audiences, contextual targeting has shown excellent potential to yield profound business results.
7. Sponsored Display Video Creative
Customers prefer learning about brands and their products through videos. But developing video creatives has long been a challenge for brands.
This is why Amazon Ads has introduced Sponsored Display video creative to allow big and small sellers to create video campaigns easily.
Using Sponsored Display video creatives, brands can create immersive video ads. Not only that, but you can also measure the performance of these ads through dedicated video metrics.
8. Brand Stores Linked to Sponsored Brand Videos
Sponsored Brand videos will lead to Brand stores. This update will allow sellers to offer an on-brand shopping experience to customers and educate them about their products while they are still early in their journey.
9. Amazon Creatives
Amazon creatives connects advertisers with reliable service providers for policy-compliant and engaging ad creatives.
You can search for service providers based on your requirements and hire them for creative delivery after checking out their reviews and work samples.
The best part is you can manage all of this right from the advertising console.
10. Video Builder
Amazon knows how advertisers struggle with creating videos for their Sponsored Brand Campaigns. And so, they have introduced a video builder for Sponsored Brand video placements.
You can create Sponsored Brand video creatives through ready-to-use customizable video templates. Not only that, but you can also test multiple versions of videos and messaging.
The video builder is also accessible directly through the advertising console.
11. Updates to AMC
Amazon Marketing Cloud has also received several updates, including:
More AMC signals: AMC has increased the number of signals available to users and has included Sponsored Display Signals to help advertisers dive deep into the performance of their Sponsored Display campaigns.
AMC and Sizmek Ad Suite Integration: The integration of AMC with SAS has combined the signals from the two platforms, helping advertisers gain more granular, actionable insights and build better campaigns across media and publishers.
Digital Subscription Events: Advertisers can use AMC to generate combined and anonymized advertising and shopping insights for the products they are advertising through Amazon.
These insights include Amazon shopping insights and Experian vehicle purchase insights. They will also expand to include more features to help advertisers get a firm grip on their multi-channel marketing efforts.
Amazon Shopping Insights with AMC: This allows brands to create flexible insights from the standard reports they get through Amazon Selling Partner APIs. It also combines these reports with Amazon Ads campaign reporting already present in AMC to give brands better control and overview of their campaign planning and optimization.
12. AMC Being Made Easier to Use
AMC is expanding its library of queries to help programmers leverage the vast data sets present within the tool.
13. Making AMC Data More Actionable
AMC bursts with data. But that data is only valuable if you can make it actionable. And to help you with that, Amazon has introduced two updates to make AMC data more actionable.
Firstly, you can manage Audiences from AMC and create an Amazon DSP audience via SQL within your AMC instance.
Secondly, AMC launched its Partner Program to certify the operators who work with advertisers. The certifications these operators get will have Amazon Ads partner Directory recognition.
14. Audience Research
Audience research allows advertisers to better understand their audience with deeper insight into their motivations, preferences, and shopping behavior. It also allows brands to determine the awareness and brand perception among their prospects.
Using Audience Research, you can also compare campaign responses across various demographics and lifestyle categories. This can help you get a more granular understanding of your audience, finetune your audience persona, and streamline your campaigns.
15. Creative Testing
Creative testing will allow advertisers to test their ad creatives to determine which ones perform best, allowing them to optimize their ad campaigns in flight.
16. Amazon Brand Lift
Amazon brand lift is now available in the UK in addition to the US. These metrics help quantify how their ad campaigns are helping them drive brand awareness, preference, and purchase intent.
17. Brand Impression Share Dashboard
Brand Impression Share, a new introduction, gives brands an overview of their share of voice on its brand terms, giving insights to help increase customer engagement.
Brand Impression Share Dashboard currently only supports Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands
18. Omnichannel Metrics
Omnichannel metrics are now Generally Available for DSP users in grocery and consumer packaging goods advertising.
OCM enables advertisers to measure the total impacts of their ad strategies on shopping activities across retail outlets while in-flight.
The measurements are inclusive of ad-attributed performance on and off Amazon.
19. Sponsored Products with Presets
Sponsored Products introduced campaigns with presets through the Amazon Ads console enabling advertisers to launch Sponsored Product campaigns with preset campaign parameters like budget, associated bids, bidding, and targeting strategy.
This feature also provides advertisers with a list of products worth advertising and supplies them with relevant campaign settings for these products.
20. Access Multiple Countries through One Sponsored Ads Account
This update greatly simplifies managing multi-country advertising campaigns. You can easily navigate between countries using the country switcher in the advertising console and save time managing your campaigns.
21. Product Page in Campaign Manager
The product page in the campaign manager allows advertisers to monitor ASIN performance metrics like sales, clicks, impressions, and ROAS. You can also view recommendations to improve listing quality, create new campaigns, or add products to one already in-flight, all in one place.
This update gives advertisers more control of their campaigns at individual ASIN level.
22. Tailored Performance Recommendations
Performance recommendations offer proactive and practical diagnostics with guides on fixing these problems right from the Ads console. This helps advertisers enhance their Sponsored Product campaigns.
23. Amazon Ads API for Reporting
This lets campaign managers and developers access their advertising metrics from a single source. Amazon Ads API for reporting is beneficial for advertisers who have to provide regular reports to multiple stakeholders.
24. Amazon Marketing Stream
Amazon Marketing Stream is a push-based messaging system that delivers hourly campaign metrics to advertisers via Amazon Ads API. unBoxed 2022 announced the expansion of Stream from the US to Global.
AMS currently supports Sponsored Product campaigns and provides near real-time insights to allow effective optimization and efficient campaign creation for better advertising results.
25. Alexa Home Screen Display
Alexa Home Screen Display Ads appear on full-screen and in rotation with other content, like the weather, sports, news, etc., on the Echo Show ambient screen.
These ads are built with voice in mind, helping the customers discover new content and allowing for better customer engagement with the ability to stream video.
26. Integration of AMC and Sizmek Ad Suite
This integration combines information from SAS and AMC, allowing you to understand the performance of your Amazon campaigns and other broader media and creative strategies.
Advertisers can create queries in a privacy-safe ecosystem to help answer your questions about ad creatives, audiences, and the effectiveness of your ad investments.
The comprehensive overview of your media investments allows you to streamline your advertising efforts.
27. Expanded Product Targeting for Sponsored Products
This update allows advertisers to reach more customers as they are in market, shopping for similar products. With expanded product targeting, brands can run more successful Sponsored Product campaigns and multiply their sales.
28. What to Watch
IMDB's What to Watch offers Fire TV users a selection of simple mini-games to help them decide what to watch.
Amazon launched a Quick Draw Challenge game sponsorship within IMDB What to Watch, allowing advertisers to align with gamified show recommendations.
This allows advertisers to reach audiences during crucial decision-making moments, helping drive content discoverability and brand favorability.
Final Thoughts
There you have it—an overview of some of the most exciting announcements from Amazon Ad's flagship unBoxed 2022 event.
These announcements give a sneak peek into the massive development plans Amazon has for its Ad products and set the stage for more futuristic technologies that can help brands align their marketing campaigns according to customer demands and business trends.