COLOGNE — While everyone has spent the last year asking “Is Facebook a media company?”, there is one of the big-four tech firms about which you could probably quickly answer that question.
Amazon certainly isn’t just a book store anymore. These days, it has a large offering of ad products to help buyers advertise both on and off its platforms.
But the real secret sauce is in how retailers like Amazon can use both of their key pillars – ecommerce and advertising – to level up at each.
So says Torsten Ahlers, an ad agency executive from Germany. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ahlers, who is MD at Otto Group Media, an ad agency working the connection between retail and media, says:
- “Last quarter, Amazon, [for the] first time, published their number that they make more than $2 billion on their quarter by media.
- “Alibaba is even three times bigger. They announced that they make $6 billion by media.”
“What’s going on is that the retailers have two effects…”
- “First of all, they don’t earn money in their core business, so look, amazon, they earn money with the cloud business and with media business.
- “On the other hand, they have tons of data. The retailers have all the data from the sales. By this retailers are becoming media companies.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
