Our Amerge UK crew were present at the inaugural London Amazon unBoxed event this week. We successfully attended the majority of the sessions and had the opportunity to interact with both familiar and new faces in the breakout hubs. In case you missed the morning keynote or wish to refresh Amazon’s key takeaways, we’ve taken some notes for your convenience:

We were thrilled by the inspiring kick-off presented by Vice President of Amazon Ads Europe Piers Heaton-Armstrong. Here are some highlights we noted:

• Amazon are becoming market leaders in entertainment services (wondery, twitch, live sports on prime video, freevee) with various ways to access customers throughout each platform.
• Prime Video will be the largest premium ad supported premium service in market with 15m viewers per month in the UK.
• Prime Video will have the lowest ad load rate, meaning fewer ads for customers, giving higher engagement.
• Benedict Evans (Independent Analyst) was brought on stage to give his perspective on measurement and AI, a few callouts:
  
  When describing what AI is to the audience, he quotes: “AI is everything that doesn’t work yet” – which makes the mind wander…
  
  
  • “Generative AI is the focus now” – which is basically AI capable of generating text, images or other models.
  • “It’s more important than ever that brands understand their customers and turn insights into actions”.
    

Following this, we saw an innovative presentation from the Director of Amazon Ads Nidhi Ghai who used cricket as an analogy when explaining the intricacies of Amazon Ads and measurement. She mentioned how important audience research is to better understand your customer, leaning into tools such as ‘Amazon Ad Surveys’, ‘Shopper Panels’ and ‘Brand Lift Studies’.

Later, Daniel Knapp who is Chief Economist for IAB and representing Omnicom, delivered an insightful talk about various topics including:

• Discussions on AI are ramping up, ranging from utopian to dystopian endings! Regarding advertising though, it really is less catastrophic and comes down to there being 143 million ways of running a campaign and AI allows us to explore every possibility.
  
• Instead of Artificial Intelligence (AI) we should be focusing on Intelligence Augmentation (IA) which we thought was a nice play on words…He quotes “Advertising stands at the intersection of art, craft, and science – AI approaches should reflect that and augment instead of replace human intelligence.”
  
• Overall, human psychology isn’t changing but how we reach them is changing. We should use AI to test, learn, and adapt.
  
• An Amazon Automotive case study was discussed, referencing the ability of brands using data from Amazon garage to target car owners of specific makes and models (we’re proud to say Amerge have been using this tool since 2020).
  
• How do brands keep ahead of the curve? Advertisers should be overcoming fragmentation and focus on harmonisation and subject matter expertise when working with brands.
  

Piers closed the keynotes with the following focus areas:

• Utilise the new platforms and advanced tech Amazon has and stay ahead.
• Work with the right tools to allow interaction with relevant audiences.
• Focus on long-term planning and building integrated mechanisms.
• Be versatile.
• Stay customer-obsessed.

Staying updated about the latest trends is essential in the ever-evolving Amazon industry. Thank you Amazon Ads for organizing this event, we look forward to seeing unBoxed develop over the coming years!