The old saw about all politics being local may soon apply with equal force to all advertising — or at least to advertising on Amazon.
The company announced this week that it was expanding a location-based video advertising format to Canada, Mexico and Brazil, having introduced the technology in the United States last October. The format allows advertisers to customize elements of video commercials — including store addresses, local offers and clickthrough destinations — based on the viewer's state, province or postal code.
The practical appeal is not difficult to grasp. An automotive dealer or fast-food franchise can now make a single ad buy while showing a viewer in Toronto a Canadian creative and a viewer in São Paulo something featuring a local storefront. (One imagines the viewer in São Paulo will be appropriately grateful for this consideration.)
For advertisers operating across borders, the format addresses what has long been an expensive headache: the need to produce and traffic separate campaigns for different regions, each with its own local details. Amazon characterized the expansion as a way to reduce manual effort and lower production costs, which is the sort of language holding company executives have been using since approximately 1987, though usually in reference to headcount.
There are restrictions. Advertisers who block demographic signals in Amazon's console cannot use the full range of location targeting. And the feature works only with first-party Amazon Studios video creative — advertisements hosted and served through Amazon's own ad servers on Prime Video and related properties.
The announcement came as Amazon disclosed that more than 1.8 million organizations have joined Amazon Business this year, with that sector growing nearly 30 percent globally. The company is scheduled to report second-quarter earnings on July 30.
Whether viewers in four countries will notice that their video ads have become marginally more relevant remains, as always, an open question.
Original story published in MediaPost: "Amazon Expands Location Interactive Video Ads"