Published on June 17, 2024 | By Michael Bürgi
Omnicom will announce today during Cannes Lions a strategic partnership with Amazon around its Amazon Ads service, Digiday has learned. It’s all part of the holding company’s multi-pronged Cannes approach to strike partnerships and deals with major ad-tech and platform players as it works to adjust its investment efforts for clients to the changing needs and actions of consumers.
The partnership with Amazon Ads, which the holding company described as first-of-its-kind, enables Omnicom’s planning and investment teams in Omnicom Media Group to access Amazon’s proprietary browsing, shopping and streaming insights to directly tie linear and CTV investment to purchases made on Amazon.
Omnicom and Amazon conducted two beta tests, one through an Amazon Publisher Cloud deal with a major TV network, which both companies declined to identify, and a second around an Amazon Prime Video campaign.
Essential to this partnership is Omnicom’s acquisition last year of digital commerce firm Flywheel, because that unit’s product and transactional signals are being paired with audience and viewership data in Omni, the holding company’s open operating system. When melding it with Amazon’s shopper insights, both parties said the result leads to more efficient and effective investment decision-making, because it connects linear and streaming TV investment from customers reached (media metrics) to purchases made (sales metrics).
“We‘ve created an ecosystem that allows us to connect viewership data to audience data to the Amazon sales data, with the addition of Flywheel,” said Clarissa Season, chief experience officer at Omnicom’s Annalect, which helps power Omni. “We’re really able to say this is what they’re watching across a variety of different platforms. Here’s the consumer we want to go after, here’s what they’re watching. And then, what did they buy as a result of being exposed to that ad? It really is kind of full funnel.”
“It’s great to see how Omnicom Group has helped their clients leverage Amazon Marketing Cloud, Amazon Publisher Cloud and Amazon DSP s to achieve greater efficiency across their full funnel marketing campaigns,” said Kelly McLean, vp of Amazon DSP, Amazon Ads. “We look forward to seeing more and more advertisers take advantage of these unique capabilities to achieve their marketing objectives.”
Omnicom client Clorox Co. is already using the pairing power of both agency and platform. “As the customer journey has evolved from the traditional purchase funnel to ‘commerce anywhere’, Clorox is working to better understand how, when and where our consumers are making purchase decisions,” said Eric Schwartz, Clorox CMO. “This collaboration helps unlock how upper funnel media is creating demand, reaching new audiences, and driving sales among our consumers.”
It all adds up to a better ability for the brand to understand the value they’re getting in sales return on investment, and for the TV seller to secure fair value for their ads, said Duncan Painter, CEO of Omnicom’s Flywheel. “This will get us a very long way along the line of genuinely helping customers really understand where their investment has really given them the right return for their product with their consumers,” he said. “And I think that’s the unique bit — it’s down to that granularity. … Going forward, we’ll be able to see all forms of the funnel, the full funnel, in this analysis.”