The Future of Marketing is a monthly content series by Amazon Ads exploring martech, shopper insights and consumer trends.

At Connected Worlds Canada, Amazon Ads and Twitch showed advertisers how to better reach consumers in a crowded multiplatform world.

Wayne Gretzky famously said that the key to his scoring success was skating to where the puck was going to be. It’s the same for brands. If advertisers want to resonate, they have to be in the right place at the right time with the right message. But that’s getting harder to do.

Consider that, as of 2022, 70% of Canadians aged 18 to 44 either no longer subscribed to linear TV, had reduced services or planned to cut the cord. And this year, adults in Canada will spend an average of 10 hours and five minutes on media per day – including five and a half hours on digital media and an hour and 50 minutes on digital video. 

There is so much content across so many different sites and services. And it all translates into fewer single paths to success when it comes to brands looking to connect.

Enter the first-ever Connected Worlds Canada event, hosted May 10 by Amazon Ads, which provided an opportunity for brands to hear how they can connect with audiences via Amazon Ads solutions, including Twitch through quality content, better audience engagement and innovative ad solutions. In his keynote, Uri Gorodzinsky (pictured below), managing director for Amazon Ads Canada, mapped out some of the capabilities offered via the company’s suite of offerings – especially those tied to its video capabilities.

“In the end,” says Gorodzinsky, “what brands want is to reach audiences with their engaging messages where they are. And the reality is that right now, that means everywhere. This makes it more challenging for advertisers to know where their customers are in their purchasing journey and measure their interaction across the experience. At Amazon Ads, we want to make it simpler and seamless for you to reach customers across the journey. With this event, we wanted to give our customers an understanding of our ‘connected’ world of solutions.”

Amazon’s video advertising solutions combine first-party insights, measurement capabilities, exclusive inventory and priority access to third-party content through Amazon Publisher Direct (APD) and third-party exchanges. Amazon’s Streaming TV ads serve consumers full-screen, non-skippable ads in streaming TV shows and movies, while online video ads feature instream and outstream video ads on websites across desktop and mobile – offering brands easy access to Amazon platforms including movie and TV info site IMDB and Twitch.

Another connected TV ad solution comes in the form of Fire TV. Advertisers can take advantage of high-impact placements on the largest screen in the home via the Feature Rotator or Inline Banner, capturing viewers’ attention while they search for the next movie or series to binge.

One of Amazon Ads’ most innovative solutions comes in virtual product placement (VPP). While product placement has been around for at least a century, Amazon Ads VPP allows advertisers to insert a digitally rendered product, billboard or logo into a movie or TV series after it has been filmed. It’s a turn-key, scalable way for brands to secure in-content exposure via participating streaming titles on Prime Video.

Meanwhile, at Twitch, nearly 70% of viewers are between 18 and 34, so it’s a service that can help brands reach young adult audiences. Combining Twitch with other Amazon Ads solutions also gives brands incremental reach and unique audiences, while also leveraging innovative ad experiences and formats – though, as Gorodzinsky pointed out, that’s true of all Amazon Ads solutions. 

“Our internal research shows combining display advertising with Fire TV and Streaming TV ads, for example, offers an average increase in incremental reach of 55%, with a unique overlap of only 1%”, he offers. “And when you combine display ads with streaming TV ads and online video ads, advertisers get an average 70% increase in incremental reach with a unique overlap of 0.2%. As we say, ‘better together’ for reach as well as impact”.

So, brands take heart. The landscape might be fragmenting due to all the media options available to consumers, but the right partners can still help you connect.

For more information on how Amazon Ads solutions helps with advertising and marketing, visit its website.