As Amazon’s Influence Grows, Marketers Scramble to Tailor Strategies
Martin Sorrell, WPP’s chief executive, said on an earnings call this year
that “Amazon’s penetration in most areas is frightening to some.” He added that the company was his response when people asked him, “What worries you when you get up at night and when you wake up in the morning?”
In an interview in Cannes, France, last month, Mr. Sorrell said his firm wanted to do more with clients and Amazon,
but noted there were major questions around how brands might gain access its customer data and compete on voice search.
That means adding flourishes like recipes and magazine-style images to product pages, coming up with creative ways to get customers to post reviews on Amazon
and plotting how companies can best connect with people who are using devices like the voice-activated Echo.
Seth Dallaire, its head of global ad sales and marketing, has been urging agencies to view product pages and images as “brand marketing vehicles,” noting
that if they are not well maintained it could undermine all the work companies did to get people there in the first place.
“E-commerce is nothing new, it’s been going on for decades, and Amazon is nothing new, it’s been successful for decades —
but now they are becoming much more of a dominant force in brand discovery,” said Sarah Hofstetter, the chief executive of the digital agency 360i.
“Amazon is the new shelf space,” she added, “and if you’re not on it, you may be rendered invisible.”
Mindshare and Possible, two agencies under the ad giant WPP, recently announced a service to help companies spend their advertising dollars across “the
Amazon ecosystem.” (Possible caught the industry’s attention this year when it acquired Marketplace Ignition, an Amazon-focused consulting firm.)
