How Amazon is leveraging AWS to accelerate its courtship of Madison Avenue

AWS Clean Rooms was announced with several partners ranging from Amazon Ads to third-party ad tech outfits, agency holding groups plus media owners, and pitched as a means of helping companies collaborate over combined datasets.

“With AWS Clean Rooms, customers can create a secure data clean room in minutes and collaborate with any other company in the AWS Cloud to generate unique insights about advertising campaigns,” reads

Amazon’s ascendancy on Madison Avenue has been clear for some time. Still, the extent of its ambitions was laid bare when it started to explicitly state its media revenues last year.

In Q4, Amazon’s ad business generated $11.56 billion , up 23% year on year, and in October 2022 it trumpeted its advertising wares with the unveiling of its Amazon Marketing Could data clean room offering, fronting its Madison Avenue charm offensive.

Although it was later in the year that Amazon’s cloud computing arm played (what some are calling) its trump card with the launch of AWS Clean Rooms, it was an outing that the company hopes will assuage concerns over a “lack of clarity” in the sector.

According to Synergy Research Group, Amazon commands more than a third of the cloud services market, followed by Microsoft’s Azure, which accounts for 21% of the market, and Google Cloud Platform, which has an 11% share. Indeed, some believe AWS’ 34% share of the cloud sector could prove a key unique selling point in accelerating Amazon’s pursuit of advertisers’ budgets.

Taking care of the little things

Presenters at November’s AWS re:Invent event made note of how those collaborating on the platform can “achieve in hours, what used to take days,” as a common web infrastructure can lead to benefits such as a reduction in latency between platforms.

The conference also saw the unveiling of AWS’ advertising and marketing technology team, led by former Xandr and AT&T data chief Tim Barnes. This unit is dedicated to helping AWS clients from the marketing and media vertical build applications on top of its infrastructure and then take the resulting solutions to market.

“The kind of things they’re asking partners is, ‘What are you tired of building and managing? What are the commoditized technologies?’ Basically asking them what they don’t want to do anymore, and need automated,” noted one AWS re:Invent attendee.

The source, who requested anonymity, added, “It’s like, AWS is an open platform for builders and the underlying data sits within their own environment … security and data is already well defined with AWS principles.”

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Speaking recently with Digiday, separate sources noted how just about all of the Big Tech players looking to further market share in the advertising landscape will have to emphasize their cloud computing wares in order …read more

Source:: Digiday