By Seb Joseph

Amazon’s grip on TV advertising <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://Amazon;s grip on TV advertising keeps tightening, and now it's gunning for the industry’s biggest payouts: upfront commitments and scatter market budgets. To do so, it's launching Complete TV, a tool designed to make the notoriously convoluted process of managing those investments as seamless as clicking “Add to Cart”. The pitch is simple: Complete TV gives AI-powered recommendations to help TV buyers optimize their spending across Prime Video and other premium streaming publishers. They do this by inputting their campaign details and target audiences, and, in theory, Amazon’s machine-learning models take care of the rest, allocating spend in real-time across both linear and streaming TV. For marketers, this kind of automation tackles a persistent industry headache: delivering on upfront commitments in full. Historically, shifting audience behavior, inconsistent measurement and last-minute inventory fluctuations have made it difficult for advertisers to spend exactly as planned. So much so, in fact, that they often find themselves scrambling to move money into the scatter market to fill shortfalls — or worse, wasting budget on redundant reach. Amazon is positioning Complete TV as the fix for those inefficiencies. “We don't want to insert ourselves in between the advertiser and the publisher, where they already have that working relationship,” said vp of Amazon Ads Kelly MacLean. “Instead, we want to just make it easy for them [the publisher] to deliver anything that's pre-negotiated. Amazon’s data advantage Unlike most streaming ad platforms, which rely on a limited set of engagement metrics, Amazon has a sweeping view of consumer behaviour, spanning retail purchases, browsing habits and online video viewing. This wealth of first-party data allows Amazon to offer advertisers a granular understanding of where their audiences are, what they’re interested in and when they’re most likely to convert. Complete TV uses that intel to optimize ad placements in a way that few competitors can match, particularly as traditional identifiers like third-party cookies become obsolete. That’s especially important for marketers aiming to maximize reach without bombarding the same audience. If they’ve met their upfront commitments and still have money left for the scatter market, for instance, Complete TV helps ensure those extra dollars find new audiences instead of the same ones. “That’s really where the dashboard is critical to monitoring those forecasted and actual outcomes — not just for incremental reach but also for things like publisher reach overlap, brand, lift, long term sales impact, and commitment pacing,” siad Maclean. Her point touches on a larger challenge in TV advertising: proving real business value beyond vanity metrics. That’s where Amazon sees an opening. By tapping into the Amazon Marketing Cloud, Compete TV promises advertisers deeper analytics, offering them a clearer picture of how their upfront deals and scatter market buys translate into tangible outcomes. “We are agnostic so any measurement partner an advertiser is working with today they’ll be able to continue to do so with …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron