"In a digital economy where some of the Internet's biggest companies and the country's richest people have built their fortunes on the ability to more precisely target ads, one company sits on a trove of data it has barely started to exploit. In Internet advertising-speak, visitors to Amazon.com are further down the purchasing funnel than visitors to Google or Facebook," wrote Marcus Wohlsen in a Wired magazine article headlined "Amazon's Next Big Business Is Selling You."
Wohlsen noted that the online retailer had "kept its advertising ambitions mostly to itself" until Lisa Utzschneider, Amazon v-p of of global sales, recently "made a standing-room-only appearance at Advertising Week."
According to Ad Age, Utzschneider "pulled the wraps off 'Amazon Media Group,' a world of owned sites, devices and a third-party network that can use Amazon's trove of purchase and browsing data." In a subsequent interview, she described the company's advertising business as "two worlds, one world is an Amazon with ads and lower prices. Another world is an Amazon with no ads and higher prices. Which one would we choose?”
But "ads have the potential to do even more for Amazon's bottom line," Wohlsen observed, since its sites are viewed by more than 100 million people in the U.S. every month, ranking the company sixth on the most-visited list behind Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and AOL, according to Comscore. While the Web business models for those companies depends on advertising, Amazon's does not.
Wohlsen suggested Amazon "seems uniquely positioned to alter the terms of the online advertising business depending on how aggressively it pursues its opportunity. If advertisers still can't know what someone's bought on Amazon, they may soon find the next most valuable thing to know is what they've sought."
