• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

Amazon has introduced location-based interactive video advertising to Prime Video, giving advertisers the ability to reach consumers in local and rural areas across the United States. Local communities have been the key to national advertising. 

The ad unit, "Interactive Video Ads" (IVA), enables advertisers to make one national media buy and create messages for specific locations for things including pricing and local business information.

IVA expands Amazon Ads' local advertising capabilities and gives brands a new way to reach audiences with locally relevant streaming campaigns.

Amazon introduced the ad unit Monday at Amazon Unboxed, the company’s annual event to debut new tools and features for advertisers and partners.

With the ad unit, videos are uploaded to Amazon's platform and messages are customized based on the viewer's location. The viewer clicks on the remote, responding to the ad on the television, and receives a one-time link from Amazon in the app or via email.

Viewers also get a push notification to the advertiser's landing page to book an appointment and get a quote or other personalized messages.

Auto dealerships, financial institutions, insurance providers, and restaurants are some of the market segments that are early testers of the location-based ad unit, which enables them to customize streaming messages by geographic location.

Streaming ads are intended to bridge the gap between awareness and action. For example, some interactive location-based functions include “Send to Phone” or “Sign Up Today.” This puts customers in touch on the TV screen with advertisers that have nearby locations, promotions, or brand experiences.

This ad unit is for all types of communities, but small rural communities often feel left behind, and may feel forgotten by national brands. The goal is to provide a more relevant, actionable ad experience for customers and a scalable, measurable solution for brands.

Jenn Donohue, director of Local Ad Sales at Amazon Ads, believes the offering complements Amazon Ads’ broader suite of local advertising solutions, including Geographic Insights and Activation (GIA), a regional offering using Amazon’s first-party retail signals.

Purina used GIA to reach out to consumers to drive customer acquisition. As an early tester of the video ad, the brand achieved more than 300% higher new-to-brand detail page view rates, a greater than 85% reduction in cost per new-to-brand detail page view, and a 4x increase in overall new-to-brand detail page views through optimizing the ads based on geography.

Advertisers have long targeted local communities with specific messages. In August, for example, Yelp announced co-branded ads for companies even without physical locations. The ads were for every company, but especially for consumer packaged goods, financial services, and other location-less companies that wanted to be found in Yelp search results.

Amazon might be feeling some heat. TikTok Shop, according to Baird Capital Markets, is the third-largest ecommerce platform for Health & Beauty products, behind Amazon and Walmart, but ahead of Target, Sephora, and Kroger for online transactions, Baird Capital Markets analysts wrote in a research note published last week.

Amazon’s reach, however, extends to more than 300 million monthly ad-supported viewers in the U.S.

The location-based streaming video ad unit bridges the gap between national reach and local relevance, which was previously not possible for many regional advertisers.