Macy’s recently became one of the first big names to start rolling out ads on Amazon’s retail ad product launched in beta in January.
Advertisers can buy sponsored product ad placements on Macy’s online store directly through Amazon Ads’s platform. Michael Krans, Macy’s VP of retail media, told Adweek the arrangement is designed to strengthen Macy’s existing adtech stack, which already includes ad platforms like Criteo.
Rather than requiring every brand to work through Macy’s sales representatives or proprietary technology, the Amazon integration allows advertisers to purchase placements in workflows they already use. Krans told Adweek the idea is to meet media buyers in the ad platforms and workflows they prefer.
Amazon’s Retail Ad Service is meant to deliver contextually relevant product placements across a retailer’s search results, category pages, and product detail pages. The service built on AWS makes it easy for Amazon advertisers to discover additional opportunities to scale their reach.
According to Andrew Lipsman, independent analyst at Media, Ads + Commerce, Macy’s may be Amazon Retail Ad Services’s first big win, but the platform’s ability to attract more major retailers remains uncertain.
“Macy’s Media Network is an important first domino to fall for Amazon Retail Ad Service,” Lipsman told Retail Brew in an email, “but it’s still an open question whether Amazon can secure other large retailers and build momentum.”
Lipsman also pointed out that while brands want simpler ways to buy retail media—and this deal helps—many retailers see sharing customer data with a rival as too risky.
“Retailers will ultimately have to balance the need for more advertiser demand with potential risk of giving a competitor visibility into their first-party shopper data—an RMN’s most precious asset,” Lispman said. “For a lot of retailers, this is a nonstarter.”
However, Krans told Adweek that Macy’s will not share any “personally identifiable customer data” with Amazon. Instead, limited transaction data will pass through AWS clean rooms to enable secure sales attribution.
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