WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell: Amazon keeps me up worrying at night – Business Insider (Mar 3, 2017)
WPP is one of the world’s largest ad agencies, and Martin Sorrell is its CEO. As such, what he says about trends in advertising is worth listening to, and he says he worries more about Amazon than almost anything else. That’s because Amazon’s ad business is both growing fast and has the potential to displace agencies and work directly with advertisers, much as Facebook does. This story is fascinating, because it’s a great reminder that Amazon is building a decent-sized ad business largely under the radar – hardly anyone ever talks about it, but it’s becoming pretty big. This article cites eMarketer forecasts, which are about the only estimates I ever seem to see, and which suggest the ad business is getting pretty big – over a billion dollars in 2016. You may not have thought about it much, but certain searches on Amazon lead to pages literally full of ads. Given how many people now start product searches on Amazon, it’s in an enviable, Google-like position of being able to serve up ads that are directly relevant to what consumers are interested in right now. That combination of relevance and timeliness is rare – almost everyone else can manage relevance, but timeliness is much tougher. Though Amazon isn’t going to rival Google or Facebook’s scale in the near future, it’s arguably got a strong shot at becoming number three in online advertising in the near term.
via Business Insider
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