Amazon announced
Wednesday plans to retire the individual names of its advertising services businesses and combine Amazon Media Group, Amazon Marketing Services and Amazon Ad Platform under one brand, which it will
now call Amazon Advertising.
The name change will certainly make it easier for marketers to find Amazon’s ad services in search results, said Robert Passikoff, founder and president of
branding agency Brand Keys.
"Years ago you would say 'Amazon' and think of the river,” Passikoff said. “Now you say 'Amazon' and think of the marketplace."
Amazon plans to
retire the old brand names during the next several months. Previously, Amazon Media Group managed display and video services, Amazon Marketing Services focused on selling ads on Amazon, and Amazon
Advertising Platform supported programmatic ads.
Other name changes were also made. Headline Search Ads will be called Sponsored Brands, and Amazon Advertising Platform will become the Amazon
DSP to more accurately represent the capabilities of this programmatic ad-buying tool.
CPC Strategy COO Nii Ahene said specifically with the rebranding of the Amazon Ad Platform, also known as
the programmatic product, Amazon will make it easier for agencies to transfer budgets. “It aligns Amazon with alternatives and competitors to its programmatic platforms like Google and The Trade
Desk,” Ahene said.
eMarketer expects Amazon to
surpass $2 billion, up 63.5%, in ad revenue this year and estimates the company will grow its market share from 2.7% in 2018 to 4.5% by 2020. A bit more than one-third of Amazon's ad earnings will
come from mobile this year, which gives it 1.3% share of mobile revenue overall.
Amazon acknowledges that the company created complexities around its ad business. Renaming and consolidating
the brands focuses on providing advertisers with simple and intuitive advertising solutions, wrote Paul Kotas, senior vice president of Amazon Advertising, in a blog post that describes in detail a full list of advertising services.
By no means does the list reflect all of
Amazon’s future ad services. Kotas refers to Amazon’s ad business as in its “very early days” with lots of “opportunity” to branch out into other products and
measurement systems.
The move comes just days after Amazon hit the
trillion-dollar-valuation mark, the second publically traded U.S. company to reach that market value. Apple became the first last month.
Amazon generated $178 billion in revenue last year,
with a profit of $2 billion in the second quarter of 2018.