Amazon streamlines ad products under new Amazon Advertising brand

Amazon announced Wednesday that it is unifying its disparate ad products and systems under one brand, Amazon Advertising.

The company said the Amazon Media Group (AMG) for managed display and video services, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) for seller ads on Amazon and programmatic solution Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP) are all retiring.

The move is welcome news for marketers struggling with acronym overload, but it won’t change things from an operations standpoint yet.

The old brand names will be phased out over the next several months.

Other name changes to note: Headline Search Ads are now called Sponsored Brand ads, and Amazon Advertising Platform is now Amazon DSP.

In a similar vein, earlier this year, Google retired several of its advertising brands — most notably, AdWords and DoubleClick — and unified its offerings under new umbrella brands.

Amazon’s ad services and products evolved over time as the company built out its stack of offerings. This evolution, however unwieldy, has helped Amazon attract a stable of advertisers ranging from small third-party sellers to major brands. SVP of Amazon Advertising Paul Kotas said in the announcement that Amazon now has hundreds of thousands of advertisers:

We’ve unified our product offerings under the name “Amazon Advertising.” This is another step towards our goal of providing advertising solutions that are simple and intuitive for the hundreds of thousands of advertisers who use our products to help grow their business.

That number still pales in comparison with Facebook and Google’s banks of advertisers that number in the millions, but it illustrates just how quickly Amazon has been able to build a fast-growing advertising business in a relatively stealthy manner. Amazon doesn’t break out advertising revenues separately in its earnings reports, but its “other” revenue category largely constitutes advertising. In Q2 2018, the company reported “other” revenues above $2 billion for the second consecutive quarter, more than double the figure for the previous year.

Amazon is also testing an attribution solution to help advertisers get a better sense of how their ads with Amazon perform compared to other channels such as search, display and video.