New research from Amazon Ads shows 89% of Indian SMB marketing leaders believe AI will free up time for strategic priorities, even as 60% feel overwhelmed by the number of tools available. So its priority now is to simplify high-quality ad creation for resource-strapped businesses. Kapil Sharma, director, Amazon Ads India, shares deeper insights in a conversation with Geetika Srivastava. Excerpts:
As e-commerce growth shifts to Tier 2/3 India, what new data signals or ad formats is Amazon Ads using to help brands target diverse audiences?
We have seen advertisers using different ad formats to engage with audiences across multiple regions in the country. Be it Tier 1 or 2 cities, our focus has been towards enabling advertisers to use full funnel solutions so that they can engage with audiences across different domains.
They can use highly improvised audience targeting that is available to them through Amazon Ads, which uses trillions of shopping and as well as streaming signals to engage with the relevant cohort of customers. They can use different ad formats, such as sponsored ads, which includes sponsored products, brands, displays and even sponsored TV, launched recently. They can also integrate ads into the Amazon MX player.
Prime Video ads have been live in India for a few months now. What early learnings have emerged around viewer tolerance?
We introduced Prime Video ads in June. Given the experience that we delivered, we have seen that a large chunk of customers have remained within the ad-supported service. From an advertiser’s perspective, we have been encouraged by the positive agency and advertiser feedback on the differentiated value we offer across our content reach signals and ad tech.
But it’s not just Prime Video ads. When we look at video ad solutions, we have ads on Amazon MX player and we also have streaming TV ads, which are being enjoyed by brands of all sizes. On the Amazon MX player, many of our advertisers can campaign and reach out to more than 300 million plus consumers. Similarly, our streaming TV ad solutions are democratising video advertising for SMBs.
How are small and medium businesses (SMBs) approaching online advertising in the age of AI, and what has Amazon Ads done to help with their creatives?
SMBs are a vital part of the global economy and mostly operate with small team sizes and tighter resources. Indian SMBs are not looking at AI as something that is going to be a future trend, but as a growth accelerator today.
Our research shows that 89% of SMB marketing leaders believe that AI will unlock more time for strategic priorities and has potential to save nearly 30 working days a year. But on the flip side, some of them are feeling overwhelmed and are unclear on where to start. Amazon Ads has been working on making tools simple and intuitive, so that they can be used effectively. To achieve this, we have recently launched some tools such as the Creative Studio, Image Generator and Video Generator. This removes complexity when it comes to ad copy creation, and reduces costs drastically.
With the Video Generator now expanding to India at no additional cost, what specific impact do you expect it to have on Indian SMBs’ ability to compete in video-led advertising?
Video advertising was largely a play of large brands because of the multiple steps and resources that you had to allocate in order to have a compelling video ad copy.
With the video generator, the process is becoming simple. In just a few minutes and at no additional cost, SMBs can come up with a compelling ad copy and creative that they can use across multiple ad formats. This is going to be a game-changer for those who are advertising on Amazon Businesses as they just have to use a single product image that can turn into a full campaign. Even larger brands can use the same tool to efficiently reformat, resize, create seasonal variation of video assets or develop a trend-relevant version of a creative.
Based on your findings, what gaps still remain for SMBs in leveraging AI for advertising?
Based on our research, we understand that almost 60% of SMB marketing leaders feel overwhelmed by the volume of AI advertising tools that are available right now. Almost 55% of them say that they are excited about these AI tools but are not sure where to begin. We want to enable SMBs to use these advertising tools confidently. There is a three-pronged approach that we have adopted to achieve that.
First, we are simplifying solutions as much as possible. Some of our tools are simplifying work to a degree where you don’t require complex understanding of the technology.
The second is educating. We conduct a lot of workshops and have free videos teaching SMBs to leverage these tools effectively. We also have workshops through which we help them understand how these tools can be beneficial and drive growth.Finally, we enable them to measure the impact. We have tools for this, such as Amazon Pi or Amazon Marketing Cloud, which enable SMBs to get access to data for campaigns and creatives that they have been running. They can use that data and embed it into their campaign structure to optimise it.
