[00:00:00] Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age. Hello everyone, Lauren Leeback-Gilbert here from the Digital Shelf Institute. I am live at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity where there's a huge focus on commerce and retail media this year.
[00:00:27] We're surrounded by brands, retailers and thought leaders from all over the world and I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff Cohen, principal evangelist at Amazon ads. Jeff dies into the Amazon canvas, how brands should be approaching the suite of options
[00:00:43] and some of the new and exciting things coming. Hi Jeff! Hey! How's it going? Good morning! Good morning! Yeah happy cans! Happy cans! Yeah we're in the south of France live with Unpacking the Digital Shelf with Jeff Cohen, principal evangelist at Amazon ads. So thank you so much
[00:01:01] for chatting with me at 8 a.m. in the morning and after a long day. Appreciate it! Yeah well this is you know what we do at Cannes. People think they see all the things that happen and all
[00:01:11] the photos to get posted and all the parties that are attended but we also wake up early and start business meetings and talk about the industry and chart new ventures so you know
[00:01:23] that's part of the show as well. Yeah the behind the scenes where you're in a podcast studio on the Riviera right by the ocean so really excited to dive into some great content for
[00:01:32] our brand stay. So there's so much to talk about when it comes to Amazon ads. We have a lot of different topics that we can dive into but what I'd love to start with is what's happening now
[00:01:43] versus two years ago and what should brands really focus on around? Yeah so when I think of Amazon ads two years ago I think of us being really locked into metrics like tacos
[00:01:58] and roas and acost all terms that have kind of been invented by the creation of Amazon ads but they're all based on last touch attribution and that was really I'd say how we thought of Amazon and we thought of Amazon really is like a destination specifically for shopping
[00:02:21] and we thought of it really for like conversion focused type of activities and I think one of the big evolutions that has occurred over the last two years has been the growth of what we
[00:02:33] internally call the Amazon canvas which is how the different properties of Amazon come together to provide brand building opportunities to reach new audiences to expand and allow brands to take the signals that they have from both shopping or from Thursday night football and
[00:02:57] streaming or from Ring cameras or from Alexa and use those to identify potential new audiences to expose their brand to and that's kind of moved us into new metrics like new to brand
[00:03:12] or measuring video success and if we look at the growth over those two years of the new metrics that have become available to brands through search query reports or any of the other
[00:03:27] ad metrics as well as the ability to measure all of that through a tool like AMC we've had a pretty great growth over those two years that's allowing brands to think about Amazon as a brand building
[00:03:42] activity and not just a performance based activity and so internally you know externally and internally we call it going from commerce to content so how do we go from the shopping activities to driving to the content of your brand and if you think about Amazon and their
[00:04:03] growth we now have ad units for brands who don't sell on Amazon. We have the ability to send ads to your external sites and all of these things are part of that growth that are allowing
[00:04:17] these brands to have this expansion. And the canvas is coming at a perfect time when Omni Channel is the main focus for brands right? You have to be on every channel you have to
[00:04:26] have a more cohesive story and you talked about measurement I feel like that is a hot topic across retail media so old metrics new metrics. In your opinion what is the sweet spot or
[00:04:37] combo of metrics that maybe you should think about as a brand who's trying to navigate what success looks like in retail media? Yeah if I was to wear a t-shirt it would say it depends because most ways in commerce right because every question is asked of you it's
[00:04:52] depends what are you trying to do? Right and I think what's amazing is that we can now answer a lot more of those questions and so we used to be able to say well it depends oh we can't measure that or
[00:05:03] it depends and we can get signals that point us in the right direction but today we've gotten to the it depends and the it depends leads you to a more specific type of
[00:05:16] measurement activity so depending on you know I have this kind of theory not this theory but we've been talking in this industry for a while about how the path to purchase is no longer linear
[00:05:29] it is not I like to call it the squiggle the squiggle right and everybody's kind of agreed that the path isn't isn't linear but in the same regard of talking about the path not being
[00:05:38] linear we still talk about a funnel all the time all the time and so it's like it's like right the funnel so I don't you know I don't want to really like upset any like great marketers of of our time
[00:05:51] that the funnel has shifted right you know I mean I don't need Peter Drucker coming after me by trying to disrupt any of his things but I think the funnel has shifted and I think
[00:06:01] what I've been sharing with brands is that they need to shift their thinking of the funnel to almost the way they've thought about things in store right and so the easiest way to describe
[00:06:12] it is that if I'm going to a store and I'm gonna buy you know a board game for my kids I can walk into the store I know my store I know where the board games are I can walk right back to the
[00:06:24] back of the store and I can look at a wall and pick out the brand of the board game that I was looking for but if I don't know what board game I want then I'm in the general search
[00:06:34] of board games and I'm looking at the whole wall looking left to right to pick what I want but if I don't know that I want a board game I just want a gift for a 12 to 13 year old
[00:06:43] I'm now walking around the whole toy section but I could also venture off into sports and outdoors but I could also be at the store and I could be looking at shopping for a 12 to 13 year old
[00:06:57] birthday party and I could walk past an in-cap and I could see a board game and think oh I bet the kids would really be excited to play that game and so that's all shopping strategies that we're familiar with right you're either in market you're in category
[00:07:16] or right seasonality you're in your brand shopping so that's the way we need to start thinking about the funnel as opposed to thinking about conversion and awareness and consideration and then depending on what we're trying to drive there are different ad units that will help to drive
[00:07:36] those different types of metrics and so video for instance right we know about the rise of video it's been talked about for a long time you know the general stats that are out there indicate
[00:07:47] that video creates a better engagement with your customer it helps them understand your products and at that time we were just saying like okay we're going to use video well today we can actually
[00:07:59] see like our video creating you know a stronger in-market audience for us and we can look at things like how long do they look at the video what action are they taking afterwards and we can
[00:08:11] actually start to optimize end to say oh this video isn't working let's try another video right layer on top of it AI which can help us to scale that video production and now all
[00:08:22] of a sudden we have solutions to look for new audiences reach new audiences and then measure the you know effectiveness of those new audiences we're finally in an age where I think we're getting an
[00:08:34] insight from the data that we can actually live put into the strategy to your point yeah I think for a while the data was giving us insights and we were looking at the data but now we can turn
[00:08:45] those insights into actions and I think the the best practice brands right the ones that we want to model ourselves after are really finding ways to look at these signals and then
[00:08:56] identify new audiences based on the signals and you can use tools like AMC and you can use like audience builder tools to automate some of these processes and what it's allowing you to do is
[00:09:07] identify the new audience and then scale to reach that audience and then measure the action you're looking for that audience to take as opposed to just looking at everything holistically and
[00:09:18] just saying like what's my row as right and you said the most famous two-letter word AI so I have to dive in and ask a question so let's think about the occasions you were talking about like the
[00:09:28] board game or something like I need a Valentine's Day gift for my husband right with AI how do you see search changing for occasions like that where maybe you're searching for a Valentine's Day gift for your husband and what comes up are chocolates and teddy bears and different
[00:09:43] categories pulled together how do you see that shifting I think we're in the early early days of that and I heard somebody actually say this on stage yesterday which was like you know she was saying something to the effect that she had looked back at her predictions
[00:09:58] for another another thing five years ago and she realized how many of those predictions were wrong and it's so hard for us to really understand how something like AI will be used three five
[00:10:10] years from now so all the pundits are trying to make recommendations and I guess the analogy that I use is that you know we all have cell phones and we all carry cell phones in our pocket
[00:10:19] but 30 years ago if you had told me you would have this cell phone in your pocket you would have and it was so powerful and it could do all the things that it could do you'd be looked at
[00:10:28] like you were crazy so I think we have a long way to go now with that being said I think companies like Amazon are you know really on the forefront of what some of this looks like
[00:10:39] you can see like what we're doing in retail with Rufus yeah and how Rufus is starting to kind of test that shopper experience by offering the ability to give common search and the ability to
[00:10:53] or maybe natural language search for somebody that's asking and use things like reviews or FAQs to try to help to bring that shopper experience but I think we have a long way to go and then
[00:11:07] I don't think that means that anyone's ahead or anyone's behind I just think that at Amazon we're going to continue to consider the customer first and really work backwards from that shopping experience and ensure that the customer is getting to their path to purchase in the most
[00:11:26] frictionless way right because we've spent so many years working on frictionless commerce the last thing we want to do is add friction to commerce and I think that you know what it means for
[00:11:38] brands I like to keep it really basic um before I joined Amazon and I ran a tech company I would always be kind of baffled by how many brands didn't fill out their catalog correctly oh my goodness
[00:11:54] yes right so taxonomy content right yes so it's like the I mean your company is like was built off of this concept right and and that is still the basics today I agree because that's what
[00:12:08] ultimately is going to feed the engine to make the decisions of what's coming up and so we can talk about all the ucg user generated content that's out there and that's being created and I do believe
[00:12:19] that's gonna have an impact in this because it's it's valuable content but you as a brand still have the ability to own a big piece of this channel and again I'm shocked at how many brands
[00:12:34] don't own this channel correctly they're not ensuring that all of your fields are filled out that you can fill out and there's class content right imagery descriptions titles yeah
[00:12:46] right and I think what I think what AI is leading us to is that your images can become more valuable to the search because you know AI can actually identify what's in the image and then they can say
[00:12:57] okay well this is you know something sporty because they're showing images of sports somebody in this picture sweating so this is a product that's used when sweating and those all become additional data points it's not anything you've actually entered in
[00:13:12] and I am not an expert in AI so I'm not like trying to explain how this stuff works but I just think of things logically and so as a brand the first thing that I want to do is I
[00:13:22] want to ensure that all of my catalog fields are filled out that they're correct that they're accurate and that that goes across my whole catalog of products 100 then I want to look back at like
[00:13:34] my hero products and I want to be hyper focused on their PDP pages their a plus content and then I want to look at my more category type pages in my stores and I want to be using my
[00:13:46] stores as my way to tell my brand's story because what we're seeing with a lot of shopper behavior is that you know you see sponsored brands you can now click into the store you go into the store you
[00:13:57] can do product discovery within product discovery you're driving additional sales the lines are blurring yeah and I think it's really cool that Amazon has created this like safe space for your
[00:14:09] brand that you can own and you can manage and and brands need to put that as part of their mix and they need to be thinking about their stores in a way where they can be delivering the content
[00:14:23] based on the season or the micro season that that that you were talking about before and that's I guess how it all kind of comes back into a circle that will ultimately feed the algorithms and the
[00:14:37] databases that that run those searches that you know that will evolve over time. So let's talk about brands so we specifically we've kind of shifted from more of a performance marketing to more of a brand marketing approach it was all about the numbers and now we're
[00:14:54] remembering that we need to build brands and it's really important because I feel like AI will bring brands to baseline right everybody can get that content have accurate data but then how do you differentiate yourself so can you talk a little bit about that shift
[00:15:07] from performance marketing to brand and the balance between the two. Yeah I don't think there's I think there's a shift maybe on Amazon and the thinking of using Amazon as a brand
[00:15:16] building tool but I think most of the brands you know most CPG brands most you know most digitally native brands have always thought of brand building as part of their activity
[00:15:26] and I think now they can think of Amazon as part of that journey to build that brand so I don't think we're introducing anything new we're just entering in a new vehicle for them to be
[00:15:36] using in that same kind of vein I think that part of what you need to be thinking about is like learn to blur or maybe unblur the line that there's this hard line between brand building activity and performance based activity and understand that there's a correlation between
[00:15:59] the activities that happen on both sides and I think like very true that if we go way to the right and we go very traditional of like brand building in like linear TV it was about
[00:16:10] like reach and exposure right and and that's all it was measured was how much reach did I have how much exposure that happened then if you go all the way to the left and I don't know maybe the
[00:16:21] right and left or flipped whatever scale you'd like right you go all the way to the left and you've got conversion based activity and it's like really hardcore like ACOS tacos type of
[00:16:32] metrics well brands now need to sit somewhere in the middle and that means that you will have activities that will be very conversion focused and you will have activities that will be very brand focused but ultimately the brands have this opportunity to build this engagement with an
[00:16:50] audience and I think when we talked about the Amazon canvas at the beginning Amazon offers this unique set of offerings that you know whether it's content through Prime Video whether it's you know the unique experience through Fire TV or any of the other properties that are owned and
[00:17:08] operated by Amazon and then you can actually layer in our third party supply and our third party supply is the same content that you'll get from from other third party supply companies
[00:17:22] but the difference is is you can use and overlay your Amazon audiences into that third party supply and you can bring it into your frequency measurement and you can bring it back to your
[00:17:33] measurement and those all become really powerful ways for brands to start to understand what their impact both on and off Amazon are and what that return on investment ultimately looks like
[00:17:47] because even though we want to push away from a ROAS we know that ultimately it's part of the numbers that everybody comes back to look at and if we go back to your it depends
[00:17:58] the thing that I've been hearing as a theme across CAN so far day one is focusing on the jobs to be done and focusing on what are you're trying to achieve first rather than just
[00:18:08] saying hey I want to use AI or I want to use AMC and I think that's a perfect example what you just shared about you can use all that data to inform your decision better understand your consumer
[00:18:18] and have more of a targeted approach rather than this broad brush stroke to say hey I think I might be doing this yeah and the the thing with AI is that and even AMC they both are the
[00:18:30] you have to know the question you want to ask right and and so you know one of the questions asked to me yesterday was how much I use AI and and you know I was talking about how
[00:18:41] I've gotten really engaged with people to learn more about prompting within AI because AI is all about the question you ask is the answer you get and so the more sophisticated you can ask a question
[00:18:57] the more direct you can get an answer right and then you can train AI to answer in a certain way and so you're starting to see things like you know we just released a we just released
[00:19:09] an we just released a partnership with Canva and within that partnership with Canva you can use the Canva tool to they have an enterprise version of their tool and within that you can like set brand
[00:19:24] guidelines for your brand so that your team is using the right colors the right logo stands like that but then you can also tie it into like your Amazon content and then you can
[00:19:36] use their their AI to resize images you can use their AI to generate new images all based on the rules that you've set within the Canva tool runs through pre-moderation and then spits back into
[00:19:51] the Amazon creative asset library and like that's I think where we're finding efficiency and effectiveness of AI starting to drive some of the things that we're doing and then Amazon has their own tools built into the ad council for AI generation to create additional images for you
[00:20:10] and change those images seasonally and it's developing some new technology around resizing and things as well and so that's where we're starting to kind of see this where AI will start
[00:20:22] to do some of the activities that that we need done to allow us to play in you know in fields that we've haven't played before but when you get into like the the natural language search and even
[00:20:35] AMC then it becomes okay great do I know what I want to do with it do I know how I want to use it do I know what outputs I'm looking for it and the suggestion I typically give brands around that is
[00:20:48] that's what you have to start with when you start the conversation and so when you're looking at something like Prime Day is coming up right it's a great example I have to start my planning for Prime
[00:20:59] Day by understanding what my output goals are that I want for Prime Day and how I'm going to measure the success of that and so part of that goal might be sales it probably should be sales
[00:21:12] but part of that also might be building audiences for me to grow for a new product launch that's coming up after Prime Day or I'm also really big and back to school and so how do you
[00:21:26] pull it forward right and so we always talked about like lead in you know tentpole and lead out type of campaigns but we can actually start to think of okay great I'm going to use this
[00:21:40] campaign to set up and launch the next campaign and if you go back to again like brand building and traditional brand building that's how brand building worked right you you go out and you create
[00:21:50] a big audience and then that audience eventually funnels down to to make the acquisition and so I don't know if I answered your question or if I've kind of rambled on here you did no you
[00:22:00] definitely got you and I love the camp example because that's a very tangible example of how you can use AI for scale and efficiency and I think it unlocks a lot of creativity one from a scale
[00:22:11] perspective but also it frees up time right like to do the creative element of it rather than more of the remedial tasks that we just don't have time to yeah or or you just you literally don't
[00:22:21] have the staff to be able to do it and you're not going to have that many resources right like teams aren't going to be able to add 15 20 people correct or your and what that's allowing
[00:22:30] you to do is it's allowing you to have content for 15 events in a year versus five events in a year right you were already scaled for five but now you can scale for 15 and that just makes
[00:22:43] the experience better for everybody and like that's that's what we want to do right we want to make the shopping experience better by making our content more relevant which will you know I guess
[00:22:56] potentially I don't want to guarantee anything but make our ads more effective right and putting the consumer at the center yes always and I think that is a challenge for brands internally
[00:23:05] sometimes because you get stuck in your silos of your teams and you're focused on your specific goals but making sure the shopper at the end of the day is your focus correct well center everything
[00:23:15] yes in every way yeah and it's it's I mean I know you hear about it come out of Amazon a lot right it's it's at the forefront of almost every presentation any of our leadership ever give
[00:23:27] but once you come to Amazon and you and you're here you actually see how it's applied every day and it really is truly applied in a more unique way than what I've seen at any of the companies I
[00:23:39] worked at before and it really is grounded in what's best for the customer and like how do we drive to make that customer experience the first and foremost that's on our mind in
[00:23:54] every decision that we're making let's jump back to AMC for a second so are there any elements of AMC that maybe are underutilized that brands should be thinking about as they're
[00:24:04] starting to adopt it yeah so AMC let's just kind of go back to the basics for the people who maybe are like wait what's AMC another acronym in e-commerce so AMC is Amazon Marketing Cloud
[00:24:16] it was created several years back really to kind of solve this problem of how do we start to create a center measurement solution that's privacy safe and so it sits in a it sits in what's
[00:24:30] called a clean room again I'm not a clean room expert but a clean room is allowing you to bring your content your data in your data signals in and create an a place for aggregated reports
[00:24:44] that doesn't have any customer information and so you can't ever go into AMC and be like who are my customers in this zip code that buy this product where's Lauren in New York right I want none of that
[00:24:54] information will spit out of AMC but what you can see is you can see these aggregated signals that are happening that allow you to determine patterns and the first I'd say like iteration
[00:25:06] that a lot of brands were doing was path to purchase right and so path to purchase was kind of this unlock that a lot of brands were looking for to understand how many ads was somebody seen
[00:25:18] and then what was the impact of that so when somebody saw just a sponsored product ad the conversion rate was X but when they saw sponsored products sponsored brand and sponsored display conversion was Y and there's quite a few articles that have been posted by many of our
[00:25:32] partners on LinkedIn showing that you can find some of these like not unique but some of these patterns that say wow when I run you know XY versus XYZ my return on investment is 3X and
[00:25:48] it's allowing brands to then double down on the paths that are working I'd say that was kind of like the table stakes that people should be kind of using AMC for today really is a strong measurement tool pulling out these aggregated data as understanding the path to purchase
[00:26:08] a lot of these are canned reports that you can either get through our through our report query library or through any of our tech providers that provide this and they have you know their series of reports when we take that to the next level that's when you
[00:26:27] start getting into how do you use these audiences to find new audiences how do you take these insights and turn them into actions how do you build new DSP campaigns to find the audience that
[00:26:41] matches like your peak performance audiences and then how do you measure the efficiency of things like streaming television or prime video as you bring that back into the mix which used to be very upper funnel activity you can now see when somebody sees streaming TV
[00:27:02] and they also see a DSP ad they need to see three DSP ads before they are more likely to take a purchase and you can then set your frequency rates and so that insight into action I think is
[00:27:15] is where the more advanced brands are going today with AMC and there's still a lot of additional opportunity that's out there and I think we're just starting to like scratch the
[00:27:26] surface of like what AMC can do for brands and it's so so exciting to hear from brands what they're doing and how they're using it to really expand their business and in a world where profitability
[00:27:37] is such a big focus for retailers and for brands those kind of insights make your dollars work better faster longer in in your perspective of your strategy overall so I feel like it's a first mover advantage for brands who are using AMC to really fundamentally understand their consumer
[00:27:53] and how things are working together yeah it's funny when I before I came to Amazon I would be like okay well this is table stakes and here's where you're at and here's where you're falling behind
[00:28:01] and I've tried to not do that when I've come here because for one reason like we have such a large range of of brands that we work with that do so many different things but when it comes
[00:28:11] down to it like I think there's a it depends um gotta get these t-shirts right I'm gonna do it there's different times that things work for your business right and um an AMC may have been
[00:28:24] something that you peaked at um a year or two ago and you didn't do it it's not too late to get in right there's even things like Amazon posts that maybe you've ignored and I'd say man like you
[00:28:35] should like raise that up on your list and you know sponsor brand video ads um all these stains Amazon has so many different properties and opportunities for you to expand and you just
[00:28:47] have to kind of figure out when they work for your brand properly because each brand sits at a different point in their lifecycle or digital maturity category right then you take that
[00:28:57] down to the product level right and because each product could could sit within that and I think what's awesome is that that all just means opportunity for your brand and so if you're
[00:29:08] like listening to this and you're a little bit lost on what does this mean and and and how do I use it for my particular brand your action item I love giving people action items I love it takeaways that
[00:29:20] like your action items should be to talk to your service provider right whether it be your A.E. or your AM at Amazon and ask them like hey what can Amazon marketing cloud do for me or whether
[00:29:30] it be the tech provider or the agency that you're working with really push them to help you get some of that information and as I always say if all else fails come and talk to me on LinkedIn
[00:29:41] I love it I love it and you mentioned Amazon post yeah there's prime video can you talk about maybe some of the underutilized pieces of Amazon that brands might not know about you said
[00:29:50] we should elevate Amazon posts I'd love to hear more about that so yeah I think we've covered a lot of this I think we've covered a lot of this um throughout this whole podcast so I'll
[00:29:59] maybe just kind of recap perfect um PDP pages content content content right I don't know why I'm telling you this I sleep and breathe this every day guys pioneer this um Amazon stores I think are
[00:30:15] you know there are you should look through your category and see how stores are being used within your category within your competitors and maybe like what types of changes you should be making peak at those stores during different events again the events that impact you and your business
[00:30:34] then I think post I think you know post lead to follows post are free I always say they're free free free free free free um and so there's another t-shirt maybe right so you know play with it
[00:30:48] experiment with it bring in your user use your user generated content bring that into your post um if your post are working for you you can now boost your post which turn your post that I want
[00:31:02] to be very clear you still have posts and the posts are still free but you can convert your high performing post into sponsor brand ads video or images that allow you to then use that imagery
[00:31:14] to um to expand and to you know basically buy into more audiences that it could be working for then after that so you've got stores you've got posts then you got like sponsor brand video
[00:31:30] and how those are all working for you to tell your story you can be using your video for free on your product detail page and your a plus content you can be using your um your video
[00:31:42] within your posts right so there's so much value in content creation today of where you can start to place these things and then there's the whole measurement side of things and really kind of
[00:31:56] understanding how your brand is using AMC what metrics are most important to you and your brand and you know using those to build out your you know weekly business reports or your monthly business reports or your quarterly business reports or however you look at your different
[00:32:12] KPI metrics um and then not to overwhelm you um but I also love to remind people of like you know the the overall can't Amazon canvas and think about how your consumers what is a day in the life of
[00:32:25] your consumer look like and what are they interacting with um they're not you know they're they're spending a lot of time on on devices they're spending a lot of time on digital media
[00:32:37] so where are they and how are they doing that and where are they shopping and how can you best create a media mix that ties in with them to drive the actions that you want for your brand putting
[00:32:50] your consumer hat on on the end of the day I love it Jeff I feel like we could talk for hours but we have to finish up so thank you so much for all this great insight for the great
[00:32:58] takeaways for brands uh for any brands who are interested in connecting with you they connect with you on LinkedIn yep you have awesome articles and blogs that come out so I encourage
[00:33:06] everyone to follow you but thank you so much for doing this podcast live in can right we're here we're here don't you see the Riviera behind us yes you can do if you were watching the video check
[00:33:15] out all the beautiful views uh but thank you so much we really appreciate it thank you thanks again to Jeff for giving us an inside look at the Amazon canvas and some great things for brands
[00:33:25] to look into for more great interviews and content be sure to sign up to be a member of the digital shelf institute thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of our community