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Discovery

Dec 14
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Amazon’s Ten Most Memorable Moments of 2017

By Discovery, Paid Search No Comments

2017 has no doubt been a year for the record books, from the inauguration of the 45th president to protests like #TakeAKnee and #MeToo and mega storms like Harvey, Irma and Maria and wildfires in both Northern and Southern California.

But 2017 has also seen plenty of headlines from a single company: Amazon.

“There’s not a retail Client we’ve worked with this year that has not had discussions with us regarding Amazon,” said Daniel Olduck, EVP of Global Strategy at Acronym. “Some of those discussions have been in the context of an increasingly important advertising partner and leveraging its new platforms, others as a troublesome competitor encroaching on their activity and marketshare. Often a hybrid of the two. This has demonstrated how huge a 2017 Amazon has had in impacting retail in its advertising solutions, its marketing and its overall user prominence. We’ve had to be increasingly nimble as an agency to react to its growth in the marketplace and have had a big focus on Amazon solutions in 2017 and into 2018.”

Here’s a look back at the ten things we think are most noteworthy about Amazon in 2017:

  1. Soliciting pitches for HQ2.

In September, Amazon announced it was looking for a site in North America for a second headquarters dubbed HQ2.

This request yielded 238 proposals from 54 states, provinces, districts and territories eager to host Amazon, its $5-billion construction project and “as many as 50,000 high-paying jobs,” along with what Amazon expects to also include “tens of thousands of additional jobs and tens of billions of dollars in additional investment in the surrounding community.”

These 54 suitors were eager to flex their muscles – proposals included gimmicks like New York lighting up landmarks like the Empire State Building in orange; Tucson, Arizona sending a cactus (which Amazon could not accept); the mayor of Kansas City, Missouri writing 1000 five-star product reviews; Birmingham, Alabama setting up giant Amazon boxes and Dash buttons throughout town; and Stonecrest, Georgia offering to rename itself Amazon.

The location of HQ2, however, remains to be seen.

  1. Quietly ramping AAP.

Amazon shocked the digital advertising world in March when its Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP) was rated the most-used DSP in its inaugural appearance in a report from analytics firm Advertiser Perceptions, beating out even Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager. And, according to its third quarter earnings report, Amazon’s “other” revenue, which Digiday says is mostly ad sales, grew year-over-year to $1.12 billion.

That may be small potatoes compared to Google and Facebook, but Amazon certainly has growth in its sights. The ecommerce giant made its first appearance at the Search Marketing Expo conference in New York in October, an event that caters specifically to the search marketing community. There, Colleen Aubrey, vice president of performance advertising at Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), used her panel to detail Amazon ad products and tools, as well as tips for using them to maximize ROI.

  1. Coolly dropping $14B for Whole Foods Market.

Another surprise move came in June when Amazon announced it was buying the Whole Food Market brand for nearly $14 billion. The deal closed in August and has since resulted in lower prices “on a selection of best-selling staples,” Amazon Lockers in Whole Food stores, Whole Food product availability via grocery delivery service Amazon Fresh and lower prices on Thanksgiving turkeys for Prime members as Amazon seeks to find synergies between the brands and encourage consumers to not only become Prime members, but also purchase Echo devices.

Meanwhile, platforms like Google, Walmart and Jet.com are banding together to innovate in online grocery themselves, looking to offer perks like voice orders, in-store pickup, drone delivery and high-quality private label products.

  1. Launching a voice-enabled device with a screen.

Amazon rolled out a number of new iterations of its voice-enabled Echo devices this year, including Echo Show, an Echo with a screen so “now Alexa can show you things,” like music lyrics, security cameras, photos, weather forecasts and to-do and shopping lists. Users can also make hands-free calls. And as similar devices from Google, Facebook and Apple are also reportedly coming out with screens – and perhaps even touchscreens – and voice assistants like Alexa are no longer theoretically limited to a single answer, there’s speculation we’re moving even closer to a search experience that flows across devices.

  1. Outselling pretty much everybody on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Amazon has had a very good holiday season so far, calling Cyber Monday 2017 “the single biggest shopping day worldwide in the company’s history” in which customers ordered hundreds of millions of products – including millions of Alexa-enabled devices. Per data from analytics company Slice Intelligence, Amazon accounted for nearly one-third of all online sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as reports say Amazon could control nearly half of all US ecommerce sales in 2017.

Per Adobe’s figures, US customers spent $5.03 billion on Black Friday and $6.59 billion on Cyber Monday 2017. And while that’s nothing to sneeze at, it’s still just a drop in the bucket compared to Alibaba, which sold $25.3 billion overall on Singles Day, prompting questions about whether US retailers should start their holiday promotions even earlier in 2018 to capitalize, too.

  1. Making lots of money for Jeff Bezos.

Thanks to Black Friday, Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’ net worth pushed past $100 billion, meaning it’s been a pretty good holiday season for him, too. His evolution from online bookseller to ecommerce titan was also illustrated in a popular 2017 meme (of sorts).

  1. Winning its first Oscar at the 89th Academy Awards.

While Amazon won only two Emmys in 2017, it nabbed its first Oscars in February as Amazon Studios’ Manchester by the Sea and The Salesman picked up awards.

  1. Wearing rose-colored glasses for Prime Air.

In June, Amazon freaked out the nation when sketches of plans for beehive-like urban drone docking stations emerged, pointing to an all-too-real dystopian future. While Amazon seems to remain optimistic about this so-called Prime Air delivery service, speculation remains about how realistic drone delivery really is in the US.

  1. Rolling out Amazon Key – and letting itself into customers’ homes, too.

Similar to Volvo’s in-car delivery service for the 2015 holiday season, Amazon recently launched Amazon Key, an in-home delivery and access service that allows consumers to get packages delivered directly into their homes and to grant access to people they trust. Some, however – even in the Bezos-owned Washington Post – complain Amazon Key is the “most aggressive effort I’ve seen from a tech giant to connect your home to the Internet in a way that puts itself right at the center.”

  1. Still working on Amazon Go.

Amazon spent much of the year quietly testing Amazon Go, its checkout-less convenience store concept that allows customers to simply pick up what they need and walk out, in Seattle in a beta program open to employees. Amazon says the checkout- and line-free experience is made possible thanks to computer vision, sensor fusion and deep learning.

“Our Just Walk Out Technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart,” Amazon says.

And, reports say, it is “almost ready for prime time.” (Get it?)

  1. Debuting Instant Pickup – and trying to win the hearts and minds of Millennials.

Finally, in August, Amazon debuted Instant Pickup for Prime members in multiple college towns throughout the US, enabling anyone with the munchies to order products like snacks and drinks and pick up those items at specified locations within two minutes.

Nov 02
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Next gen search: listening to the voice of the customer (literally).

By Discovery No Comments

We’re happy to be nominated for a voice driven submission at the OMMA awards. Here’s why.

Yes, the headline features that old chestnut regarding marketers learning more about consumer behavior by actually taking time to listen to the voice of the customer. And yet, never could that age-old little seed of wisdom be more timely for search marketers (and, for sure, search and discovery engines) than it is right now.

As search engines such as Google and Bing, and Baidu and Yandex know very well, almost all roles of the way they manage, index, and retrieve text, can be accomplished in just the same way with voice activated, natural language queries (VAQ). But hold the bus right there. Retrieval accuracy of relevant and useful-in-the-moment content for VAQs and user-system interaction still has a way to go compared to the text-based information retrieval that the major search engines use so successfully today.

The internet and the world wide web (yes, two different things) are seeing a huge shift away from the static, text based processing of information of the early era, into a rapidly emerging new era of multi-modal, multi-media technological advances.

Genetic algorithms (like those used in machine learning and AI), just as in real life, are about the survival of the fittest. And, as we move into this new era of search and search marketing, a new era of search agencies must emerge. The “next generation search agency™” (NGSA™) is a master of the craft of conventional paid search and SEO already, and now must become a veritable athlete in the way it leads the charge towards the new interface paradigm for truly interactive information retrieval based on the ultimate “spoken conversational search system.”

Having just been nominated for a prestigious MediaPost OMMA award for a submission that was all about a beta-test we did for a major retail brand, we (as Farmers Insurance might say) already “know a thing or two” about the ultimate human-machine interface of the very near future. But, being aware of the technological changes and the variations in methodology that need to occur, one thing in our industry never changes. The awards that I just referred to (OMMA – Online Marketing Media and Advertising) have been around since 2004. Look again. They’re about marketing, media and advertising. Not so much about technology. Because the end user (such a horrible metaphor that we use to describe someone interacting with us through a digital medium) is a real human being – online and off.

The very fragmented path to purchase may well be difficult to track because it’s cross-platform, cross device, but It’s still a regular consumer trying to buy stuff. And that’s why the NGSA™ needs to be the partner that can track every pinpoint to the endpoint. And that customer journey (as it’s also often known) most frequently starts with search, and frequently ends with search.

Much of the discipline’s received wisdom is undergoing reconsideration as the nature of marketing is changing. And as the nature of marketing changes, then the structures and systems of organization that were designed before the world wide web and digital marketing generally, must change too.

To be a “next generation search agency™” is to shift the focus of solving latter day barriers to Google indexing for SEO purposes and maintaining static keyword lists for latter day paid search campaigns, to understanding the consumers’ total impact on marketing strategy.

The role of a “next generation search agency™” is being defined by consumer behavior, not by the technology that executes on the delivery of advertising messages. What is commonly known as search marketing on the world wide web, will expand beyond the browser into the app economy where a new type of “suggested discovery” will occur based on digital assistant usage and behavior. As the “digital assistant” becomes the “information provider”, the industry will adapt to include content experience analysis across multiple channels and devices.

The whole field of search as part of our everyday life is so much broader. In the same way that a conventional ad agency is responsible for “creating, planning and handling advertising” then a next gen search agency™ is responsible for “creating, planning and handling search” and, ultimately, the consumer journey as such.