Ad Relevance, the new AI-powered solution in Amazon’s DSP, has been in closed beta testing for two years. It made its public debut this week at Cannes Lions.
The headline is that it doesn’t rely on third-party cookies or identity resolution to target audiences with relevant content in real-time. What it does leverage is Amazon’s vast datasets of consumer behavior (purchase data, intent data, browsing data) to create cohorts and deliver them as ad opportunities. It is not necessary to know the identity of the individuals within the cohorts.
Another big walled garden. In effect, Ad Relevance recasts Amazon as another large walled garden, using its own proprietary data to craft audiences for advertisers.
“(Ad Relevance) uses the latest in AI technology to analyze billions of browsing, buying and streaming signals in conjunction with real-time information about the content being viewed to understand where customers are in their shopping journeys and serve them relevant ads across devices, channels and content types without needing third-party cookies.”
Amazon, “The future of addressability and advertising technology”
Why we care. Google, of course, has spent the last few years trying to thread the needle between deprecating third-party cookies and maintaining the semblance of an advertising ecosystem on the open web. Of course, since Google has control over the Chrome browser, ingests data from Search, YouTube and Gmail, and is selling ad inventory, it has been accused of creating a walled garden anyway.
Amazon has just gone right ahead and done it. It also seems to have trumped Google’s Topics initiative. Google had proposed assigning Chrome users, temporarily, to a very limited number of interest-based Topics, using that as a basis for ad targeting. Amazon, it seems, is using AI to analyze without limits what users are viewing and consuming within Amazon’s own environments, including Prime Video.
Also, Amazon has avoided, thus far at least, getting bogged down with independent advisory panels and regulators telling them that their solution won’t work and doesn’t protect privacy anyway.
Dig deeper: Google’s Privacy Sandbox: What you need to know
