Amazon begins ‘exclusive’ ads partnership with Wavemaker
Wavemaker has begun working with Amazon Advertising in an exclusive arrangement in which Amazon data and insights can be directly fed into the media agency’s plans and campaigns.
The WPP agency has been given access to Amazon Advertising’s Overlapping Audiences API, which can help marketers understand the relationships between a brand’s audience and other audiences on Amazon.
It is the first time that Amazon, the world’s pre-eminent online shopping site, has entered into such an arrangement.
Mudi Jaju, Wavemaker’s global head of ecommerce, told Mediatel News that this collaboration with Amazon has come about after months of planning behind the scenes with engineers.
He explained: “We are one of the largest buyers of Amazon in the world and scale is important when have exclusive access to this. But they also chose us because we built an ecommerce practice in 2012 when I was hired – we’re not jumping on an ecommerce bandwagon.
“When they bring us into things like this it’s a huge leap of faith – to let their Crown Jewels be used by someone else – but it’s because they know how we have brought together performance, insight and consumer analytics to build a powerful offer in this space.”
Two major use cases
The collaboration should allow Wavemaker to create strong audience strategies and realise clients’ digital maturity plans via its Provocative Planning tool
For example, for endemic brands (those who advertise on Amazon), data from the Amazon demand-side platform should enable Wavemaker to see, for example, if there is an overlap with people searching for printers and people who are also in the market for DIY products like power drills.
“If I see there is a significant overlap with the DIY enthuasiast, I can target in a more sophisticated way rather than go super broad, which is often what you’re forced to do in ecommerce because targeting can get very expensive,” Jaju explained.
“We scale up by identifying audiences without taking on unnecessary cost and having a reasonably good idea that “printer” and “power drills” overlap, but not in market for USB cables, for example.”
Although Amazon does not publish its monthly user figures, monthly active user estimates are huge and vary between 300 million to 600 million, including over 90% of people in the US and the UK.
Because Amazon is such a huge online retailer, the other main use case of this collaboration is to build up a better picture of consumers’ online shopping habits more generally that can be used for activation on other ecommerce platforms.
However, this can also inform media planning on different channels, Jaju added: “If we establish a link between printers and drills, we can talk to Home & Gardens magazine about a content partnership, or change our Facebook targeting.
“That’s what has got people really excited. The challenge we’ve got is a client’s growth audiences are younger people… but I don’t think many 22-year-old women are filling out TWI [market research] surveys. Having rich behavioural data, as a counterpoint to research based methodology, is really important.”
The partnership is active in selected countries, including Europe’s five biggest markets (the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain), as well as the Netherlands, India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Mexico and Brazil.
Toby Jenner, Wavemaker’s CEO, added: “I’m very proud of this announcement. Through a strong alliance with Amazon Advertising we can offer our teams and clients a bar raising level of audience planning. I see this collaboration as another way we fulfil Wavemaker’s promise to find the best path for growth for clients.”