The marriage of television advertising and instant commerce has been anticipated for so long that one might be forgiven for assuming it had already happened. It had not, or at least not in the way the industry had imagined.

At Advertising Week New York last week, executives from Amazon and Revlon described a campaign that ran in June using what Amazon calls Interactive Video Ads and Dynamic TV Creative — a system that personalizes streaming advertisements based on what the company knows about a viewer's shopping habits and adjusts the format accordingly.

The results, according to data shared by Amazon, were considerable: a click-through rate 9.8 times higher than non-interactive ads, a branded search rate twice as high, and a return on ad spend 2.6 times the category benchmark. (Whether "category benchmark" is a low bar to clear was not discussed.)

Kelly Solomon, the chief digital marketing officer at Revlon, said the cosmetics company had long valued television for its emotional storytelling but needed a way to move viewers closer to purchase without, as she put it, "taking you out of the experience, whether it's football or whatever you're streaming."

The technical achievement, explained Sean Donahoe, a director of engineering at Amazon Ads, is that advertisers need only upload their creative assets and check a box; Amazon's systems handle the personalization across what he described as "millions and millions of consumers."

Ms. Solomon, for her part, was direct about the appeal. "The harder you make it," she said, "the less likely we are to do it."

The conversation eventually turned to artificial intelligence and the optimization of product pages for what Ms. Solomon called "that super long AI query" — her example being a consumer asking for lipstick recommendations based on age, lip condition, and dress code. This, she suggested, is now part of Revlon's content strategy.

It is a long way from a 15-second spot during a commercial break, though perhaps not as far as it once seemed.

Original story published in Marketing Dive: "How Revlon used Amazon's interactive video ads to drive outcomes"