Amazon has been slowly growing their internal advertising network, which allows companies to showcase their products and services on Kindle e-readers and tablets. The company also has the ability to run advertisements on their extended network of websites, such as IMDB. Lately, Amazon has been establishing ties with new companies to advertise in non-conventional ways.
When you buy a new Kindle e-reader or tablet there is the option to pay less money and go with the “Special Offers” edition. These variants display advertising on the screensaver and also on the navigation bar. Companies such as L’Oréal were early adopters and helped the Amazon Media Group grow.
In a world dominated by Google, Amazon has an upward battle to promote their advertising platform. According to eMarketer Amazon only accounts for 0.75% of the digital advertising market, in terms of revenue. In order to facilitate growth, Amazon has reached out to new companies for some very innovative advertising campaigns.
Amazon Media Group’s vice president of global advertising sales Seth Dallaire revealed that they recently did a deal with Land Rover to help distribute an e-book adventure story written for the brand by an established author, on the Kindle platform.
Dallaire said: “We saw very high engagement from customers in terms of reading it. It was not promoted as a pure advertisement, but rather content, and the author that created that content is what brought customers in to engage with it to begin with. It was a great learning for us.”
Elsewhere, in Japan, Amazon worked with Nissan to create e-book brochures for new vehicles. Amazon is working with automakers to measure how many people visited a car dealership or drove away with a new vehicle as a result.
Dallaire said that the campaign worked so well in Japan — a country that has really taken to digital brochures — Amazon may look to extend that type of format to other markets.
“Most people don’t associate Amazon with cars; we don’t sell cars on the platform. But customers trust Amazon to provide objective opinions about a product or a brand … we will work hard to show that there is some attribution to that level of investment that drives business results, even if it doesn’t happen on Amazon,” Dallaire said
In the end, most of the internet population is likely well aware of the Amazon affiliate program, which allows anyone to advertise a product that is sold and earn a small commission. The Amazon Media Group primarily targets businesses to advertise on their e-readers, tablets and network of websites and is not very well known. Hopefully this will change with more personalized relationships and innovative ways to tell a brand story.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.