The Big Story: The A To Z On Amazon

The Big Story is a breezy new podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about the biggest stories from the past week. It is available wherever you subscribe to podcasts.

As Google and Facebook built their castles and moats, Amazon lurked beneath surface. But in recent years, it’s breached. Its walled garden is still significantly smaller than Google’s and Facebook’s – around $2 billion, as of its recent Q2 – but maybe that doesn’t matter.

First, as Amazon continues to mature as an ad buyer’s destination, more dollars will inevitably pour in. Second, Amazon – unlike Facebook and Google – isn’t an ad-supported business. For the longest time, ad revenue was simply a nice-to-have.

In this week’s “The Big Story,” the AdExchanger team scrutinizes the history and future of Amazon as an ad platform – from one decade ago, when it struggled to convince media planners to buy a banner ad, to today, as the owner of some of the most coveted and exclusive data sets.

How does Amazon work with ad buyers today? Where does its platform most need to be improved, and how do advertisers work around its current limitations? And what products will Amazon develop as its ads move beyond performance into areas such as branding and awareness?

Finally, what does the future hold as Amazon penetrates consumer households more deeply with popular automated home assistants like Alexa?

Listen in as AdExchanger editors unpack Amazon’s ad stack like a Prime Day package.