Good Monday Morning Dear MMS Reader, “I don’t need computer scientists in India, I need cowboys,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is said to have famously told his fledgling India team when they were starting out in 2012. The message was—go big, take risks. Nine years later, the group driving Amazon’s advertising business, led by another “shadow” executive in India, is thinking alike. India is not the guinea pig that Mexico was for Amazon in 2015. The e-tailer, tired of spending $3-4 billion every year on Google search ads, decided to launch its Mexico business without paid Google search. Amazon wanted to see if the advertising it did “was worth it”. After a few quarters of losing 20% of the potential traffic, Amazon ended the experiment in Mexico. These nuggets from the book Amazon Unbound may seem like they're from another era, given how Amazon’s ad business has nearly exploded. Incubated in India in the same year as the Mexico experiment, Amazon is steadily eating into the market share of digital ad champions Google and Facebook. According to estimates sources MMS, Amazon would command 20% of the digital ad market by the end of the current financial year ending March 2022.
Amazon is currently the third most visited website in India behind Google and YouTube, even ahead of Facebook. It saw about 528 million visitors in June 2021 itself, nearly twice that of its biggest competitor Flipkart. Each user spent more than 12 mins on average on the platform.
The cowboys are at work. Handholding Indian sellers around Amazon’s “self-serve” style in advertising; pursuing an aggressive strategy, giving out free ad credits to offline retailers; pitching the perks of advertising to sellers and brands. They’ve even onboarded a new breed of sellers—kiranas.
In trying to close the gap between it and its rivals, Amazon now runs ads for brands that are not selling on its platform, such as automobiles and credit cards. In this fresh-off-the-marketplace blogs, Yusuf Bhandarkar says Amazon is hiring aggressively, experimenting boldly. The $500 million ad revenue mark next March may be just the beginning #yusufbhandarkar #digitalmarketingagency www.multimediastudio.net
