The advertising world has long operated on the theory that if you can see what someone buys, you can sell them something else. Amazon, which already knows what happens inside its own vast marketplace, now wants to know what happens when shoppers walk out the door.
Through an integration with Attain, a data firm that tracks purchase behavior across thousands of merchants, advertisers using Amazon's demand-side platform can now target display and video ads to Amazon users based on what they buy at Walmart, Dollar General, Kroger, Walgreens, Sephora and other retailers. The capability extends across Amazon's inventory, including Prime Video and third-party sites in its network.
Brian Mandelbaum, the chief executive of Attain, said the arrangement is "really bridging the gap between what happens on Amazon to what happens at retailers like Target and Walmart, and local grocery, etc."
(One imagines the local grocery did not specifically request to be bridged.)
The move represents a further blurring of the line between retail media and traditional digital advertising, a line that has been growing fainter since Amazon began selling ads against its own search results more than a decade ago. What began as a way to influence purchases at the point of sale has become something considerably more expansive: a system for following consumers across their entire commercial lives and addressing them wherever video can be served.
For Amazon, which has been building out its advertising business with the determination of a company that noticed how much money Google makes, the integration offers a way to sell advertisers on reach they could not previously achieve through Amazon's own purchase data. For the advertisers, it offers the appealing if slightly unsettling prospect of knowing that the person watching a show on Prime Video bought toothpaste at Walgreens last Tuesday.
The gap, it would seem, has been bridged.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Amazon Advertisers Can Now Target Shoppers That Buy Elsewhere"