Amazon last night announced Brand+, a new tool within the Amazon DSP which uses AI to build and optimise audiences across TV and video campaigns. While the product, as the name suggests, is built for brand awareness, the idea seems to be to cut waste and ensure only relevant audiences are targeted, adding a performance edge to brand campaigns. The ecommerce giant said that Brand+ identifies and targets individuals who are in-market for a particular product or service and likely to convert over time, while also meeting the brand’s awareness goals.
Brand+ ingests an advertiser’s own conversion signals, and combines them with data from Amazon’s own ecosystem — namely its shopping, browsing, and streaming signals. Amazon’s AI tools then use this data to model streaming and video audiences across its own properties (Prime Video and Twitch) and partnered publishers, identifying users likely to be in-market, and optimising targeting while campaigns are live.
Amazon gave an example of a travel company looking to drive awareness among potential customers. Amazon has insight into which users have searched for and bought travel products and streamed travel shows. Brand+ can use this data, combined with the brand’s own first-party signals, to spot patterns and predict which individuals are likely to be in-market.
Kelly MacLean, VP of Amazon DSP, said she sees Brand+ as a “significant advancement” from broad demographic reach-based targeting. “With this advanced AI technology, the Amazon DSP enables advertisers and agencies to automatically reach, engage, and nurture potential customers throughout their journey, turning brand awareness into a strategic driver of conversions,” she said.
Proprietary data remains king
Brand+ follows a few other AI-driven products released over the past year. These include Performance+, which uses AI to optimise performance campaigns, and Ad Relevance, a third-party cookie-free targeting tool.
Indeed, businesses across the ad tech ecosystem are building AI tools and figuring out where the technology’s true value lies. A big question is how AI can be used to build a true competitive advantage, given that competitors have similar access to the same core LLMs.
One key point is access to valuable proprietary data. For products like Brand+, it’s not necessarily the AI model itself which is critical. Rather, Amazon’s vast wealth of advertising-relevant data across its shopping and streaming services which it’s able to pour into its model is what gives it an edge.
That’s not to say there won’t be opportunities for ad tech businesses which build their own advertising-specific models, designed to tackle industry pain points in innovative ways. But having access to a big bank of proprietary data, containing unique buy-side or sell-side signals will certainly be a big selling point for the new wave of AI ad-tech tools.