Amazon ads equals a minus for Google, Meta digital marketing reign

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Google and Meta have enjoyed a duopoly in the digital advertising space in India, with almost a 90% share in what is pegged to be a Rs 70,000-crore market at present. Over the last couple of years though, Amazon Ads seems to be rapidly eating into their share of the digital pie, senior media buying executives told ET. Advertisers, especially in categories such as consumer packaged goods as well as DTC (direct-to-consumer) brands, are moving as much as 15-20% of their advertising budget — previously dedicated to Google and Meta — towards the Seattle-based ecommerce giant’s ad tech suite.

In the US, platforms like Apple and TikTok, along with Amazon and Walmart in retail media, have shrunk Google and Meta’s share of digital ad dollars to less than 50% as of last year. With no TikTok back home and a single-digit percentage proliferation of Apple products to boot, Amazon Ads emerges as the single-biggest challenger to the duopoly in India. In 2020, Amazon launched its global ‘demand-side platform’ (DSP) in India.

Through Amazon DSP, advertisers can buy programmatic ads to reach new and existing audiences on and off Amazon. It combines data points from all its different properties, such as Prime Video, Fire TV, Kindle, Alexa, Audible, etc, to provide sharper audience segmentation. “You can use it to create customer cohorts based on different spending sizes.

Programmatic ads also prove more efficient and cost-effective compared to direct advertising/media-buying,” said Anil Pandit, senior vice-president at Publicis Media Services. Today, five to six of 10 media plans at Publicis Media have some form of Amazon Ads targeting. “In the last year and a half, our clientele’s spending on Amazon Ads has gone up by 8-10x,” Pandit said.