Amazon Brings its Ad Tech to Other Retailers

Amazon Brings its Ad Tech to Other Retailers

Amazon is launching a new Retail Ad Service that allows other online stores to leverage its ad technology. This expands Amazon’s reach and data pool while offering retailers a powerful new advertising platform.

Amazon’s massive advertising business, which has only been surpassed in the US by Google and Meta, is about to get bigger. In addition to selling ads on its sprawling marketplace, it will now let other retailers use the technology powering its $50 billion business on their websites, as reported earlier by Adweek.

The company’s new Retail Ad Service beta will let other online stores “Deliver contextually relevant ads by leveraging Amazon’s two decades of ad tech expertise, driven by machine learning models trained on trillions of shopping signals” across their product, search, and browsing pages.

It also plugs the retailers into Amazon’s existing advertising customers, as brands already using Amazon’s ad system can choose to place their ads on third-party sites. The setup also allows Amazon to pull more profit from “retail media” (ads you see in stores or while shopping online) even when the shopping isn’t happening on its site. It could also give Amazon access to more data—something the FTC may have questions about.

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The path of this business is similar to the launch of Amazon Web Services, which the company built to keep its online marketplace running and loading quickly 24/7 before selling access to the servers as a backbone for other companies’ operations, as noted by CNBC.