Mark Zuckerberg Wants All of Advertising. Andy Jassy May Have a Stronger Claim.
Highlights from Amazon unBoxed
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made waves in the ad world earlier this year when touting the company’s’ fast-emerging AI capabilities. He essentially urged advertisers to basically ‘give Meta all of their budgets and goals, they’ll do everything, from producing creative to media optimization. Zuck even claimed this would help make ad spending a bigger piece of GDP in the US.
This past week at Amazon’s unBoxed event in Nashville, the ecommerce giant’s executives didn’t exactly make the same broad pitch, but showed off an impressive suite of tools - including a AI video creative platform that is being tested by none other than Procter & Gamble - which could leave advertisers with the same takeaway. Clearly, Amazon’s advertising ambitions are massive, and the tech titan may be better positioned than anyone to disrupt nearly every aspect of the traditional advertising good chain, while potentially even growing the ad pie.
It suddenly feels like its Zuckerberg vs. Jassy for all the ad marbles.
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While Meta boasts of tens of millions of advertisers, and a massive data supply, Amazon boasts of “unmatched supply and signals with the capabilities of AI,” said Paul Kotas, Senior Vice President of Amazon Ads.
Plus, Amazon’s got a strong foothold in both TV and ad tech - which Meta does not.
“This is the most transformative time our industry has ever seen,” said Kelly MacLean VP, Amazon DSP. “The next evolution in advertising technology will address our biggest challenges.”
While McLean was referring mostly to campaign management and optimization tools, she may as well been talking about Amazon’s emerging AI creative abilities, coupled with the introduction of its new AI ad buying Agent. The AI-generated ads - including ones for the P&G brand Dreft that is set to run on TV shortly- are pretty slick. And the different interfaces brands can used to make them and deploy them look dead simple.
Of course, everything looks good during demos at an Amazon conference. Ad few small brands I spoke to at unBoxed said they aren’t even ready to use Amazon’s DSP, let alone carve out TV budget. TV is still seen as too expensive for many.
Still, Amazon has millions of advertisers from which to draw from, and it has killer identity and attribution data that even Meta and Google can’t match. And now the company not only has Prime Video, but the NFL and the NBA.
But beyond that, Amazon has inked deals with the likes of Netflix, Disney, Paramount, Vizio and others, theoretically letting TV brands buy ads using Amazon data all over the CTV landscape.
Indeed, Amazon executives at unBoxed spoke very openly about being able to help brands buy all of streaming TV - claiming to reach 90% of the market. Meanwhile, Meta essentially has no play here.
And while there is a lot of skepticism regarding just how fast millions of small advertisers will come to TV (if they ever do), Amazon execs believe they are poised to make a huge leap here. Their pitch is one-stop shopping - why work with a host of intermediaries when you can use Amazon’s AI to make your ad, ask a chatbot for a smart plan, buy the media, track it and optimize all in one place -and potentially all over the web.
Now, it’s an open question as to how much inventory each of these partners is going to let Amazon have access to - so much of CTV is sold directly, even Amazon executives acknowledge. Still, if these DSP deals bring healthy demand and good prices to streamers, they’ll likely open up more.
Regardless, this push into generative AI ads and buying has be making the slew of AI TV startups promising democratized TV buying nervous.
Also surely nervous, whether they admit to it or not, are the folks at the Trade Desk. In talking about the CTV ad opportunity, Lauren Bernard, Streaming TV Demand Tech Product, Amazon DSP emphasized that Amazon has ‘real’ first party data, while making some not-so-subtle digs at the reliability of logged-in CTV data (which underpins TTD’s UID 2.0 ID) or IP addresses.
“This is about unlocking signal interoperability,” Bernard said. “We now have 80 million authenticated households in the US.”
Besides creative and targeting, Amazon is making a huge pitch toward helping brands manage and measure all of their TV advertising via one magic dashboard. This is something many have tried (One by AOL!), and failed to achieve. Often, brand and agencies don’t want to hand over all of their data and pricing and decision making and operations to any one platform, especially one that sells media space. In fact, Amazon pitched a similar planning tool back in 2023; it’s not clear how much uptake it has.
In fact, I’d ask the same question about Amazon’s adverting AI agent, as well as the one Google just announced this week - while it would be great if a brand or media buyer could just ask a chatbot a few questions about a current campaign, get recommended adjustments, find the perfect budget allocation, and implement all the changes right there via the agent. What are the chances that Google or Amazon or any one company’s AI bot is going to be plugged into, and have control over, everything a brand does online? Is an Amazon or a Google agent going to say to you, “you know what Jason, you might want to move some budget to Walmart’?”
Case in point -the agency Skai - one of the many partners Amazon showcased on stage at unBoxed, boasted about building their agentic AI planning tool that sits on top of everything, including Amazon stuff.
Media planning aside, it’s the ability to play such an integral role for its advertisers that make Amazon well-positioned to expand its offerings to many small to mid-sized, while chipping away at the functions that agencies and brands have traditionally performed. Which is very much along the lines of Zuckerberg’s promise. Except in this case, Amazon is coming (for now) as a friend, versus Zuck’s almost hostility toward ad agencies.
A few caveats however: several ad buyers I spoke to at unBoxed said while they’re impressed with Amazon’s generative video products, there are still lots of hiccups, and they weren’t sure how many big marketers were ready to run wild with this kind of creative.
In addition, let’s not forget the other ginormous ad elephant in the room - YouTube and creators’ massive role in shaping (or maybe deciding) this coming war to ‘own’ every aspect of advertising. Not only is Google pushing incredibly powerful AI creative tools of its own, but more and more brands are seeking to work with creators precisely because their output is ‘real’ and ‘authentic.’
For now, it seems clear that Jassy and Zuckerberg have similar plans - and one may be already out in front.