Amazon is not just a huge emerging advertising player — it is also spending boatloads on its own ads

REUTERS/Rex Curry

• Amazon is the largest programmatic ad spender,
  according to a recent study by MediaRadar.
• Amazon accounts for more than 10% of the spend of
  the top 50 programmatic advertisers alone, and spends 1.5 times
  more than the next biggest programmatic spender,
  Microsoft.

Amazon isn’t
just raking in ad revenue, it’s also spending considerable ad
dollars itself.

The e-commerce giant is the biggest programmatic ad buyer,
according to data crunched by MediaRadar, a New York-based
advertising intelligence company. Amazon accounts for more
than 10% of the spend of the top 50 programmatic advertisers
alone, and spends 1.5 times more than the next biggest
programmatic spender, Microsoft.

Specifically, Amazon ran digital ads across more than 1,300
different sites in the first quarter of 2018. In that time,
Amazon advertised over 100 different products and services
digitally and ran display, video, native, and mobile ads.

“Amazon is pouring billions into marketing, and a big piece of
that pie is dedicated to programmatic,” said Todd Krizelman,
CEO & Co-founder at MediaRadar, declining to give more
specifics about Amazon’s ad spending.

Despite pitfalls, major brands are pumping lots of money into
automated digital ads

Programmatic advertising is the automated way marketers buy ads
across thousands of websites online, relying on algorithms that
determine the best possible pricing and the best time to run a
campaign.

MediaRadar used its sales intelligence platform to examine over
76,000 brands placing ads programmatically, scrubbing through
data across across ad exchanges like AppNexus and OpenX,
programmatic exchanges like Nativo and Sharethrough as well
as ad buying platforms such as Google’s DoubleClick, MediaMath
and DataXu.

The firm also compared the spending of brands in the first
quarter of 2018 with the first quarter of 2017 to determine any
year-over-year changes. According to this data:

• 94% of the top 50 programmatic spenders in Q1 2017, like
  Walmart and Verizon, were running programmatic placements again
  in Q1 2018.
• Further, three-quarters or 75% of all brands tracked
  placed digital ads programmatically in Q1 2018.

“Despite concerns over transparency, advertisers continue to
invest in programmatic,” said Krizelman. “It is the preferred
method for transacting media for many advertisers and it doesn’t
appear to be changing.”

He isn’t wrong. More than $46 billion will be spent on
programmatic advertising in the US this year, according to

eMarketer and 86.2% of all digital display ads will be bought
via automated channels by 2020.

Here are the the top 10 programmatic advertisers, according to
MediaRadar’s data:

1. Amazon
2. Microsoft
3. Wayfair
4. TaxAct
5. Charles Schwab
6. Weight Watchers
7. Sprint  
8. Coors Light
9. Geico
10. Dell