Series 2 - Episode 6 - Leveraging Amazon Ads to Grow Globally

Speaker A: Welcome to the E Commerce Made simple podcast. I'm your host, Jerome M. De Guigny. I'm super excited today to have Tariq and Francois from M M19 on the show which we recorded last week at Unboxed in Texas Austin. Um, I'd like to have a couple of questions. Francois, first, what did you think about Unboxed?

Speaker B: Well it was our first uh, Unboxed in the US and it's a uh, great place to meet with many people in person. You have many brands, you have many uh, partners and also it's a great opportunity to meet with Amazon people in person and that has a very high value for us.

Speaker A: Exactly. And Tariq, what did you take uh, back with you from Unboxed?

Speaker C: I love the city, I love the vibe, the weather, the tacos and the food and more. Seriously, there was a lot of uh, good and massive announcement from Amazon, mainly in the DSP and Amazon marketing cloud space. So if you are interested in knowing more, we will share some of the highlights in the uh, podcast that you will be listening to in a couple of minutes. So stay tuned.

Speaker A: Yeah, well enjoy that podcast. We had a lot of fun recording it and it's packed with a lot of insights and learnings from onbox. So good listening. Bye bye. Welcome everyone to the Amazon Ads Partners Content Studio. I'm very happy to be here. I'm Jerome from ecommerce and today I am with Tarik and Francois from M M19. So Tarek and Francois, just give us a bit about you and about M19.

Speaker B: But first Jerome and the Amazon Ads Content Partner Studio. Thank you for having us. Uh, so I'm Francois, I am one of the three co founders of M19. Uh, I am CEO which means roughly that I'm in charge of the business part of M M19. So in a few words I will uh, just introduce M M19. So M19 is an Amazon ads platform powered by uh, AI which means roughly it's a machine learning algorithm feed with uh, uh, advertising data, uh, but also e commerce data uh, in order to increase profitability, scale, time saving, uh, its position as a pure self service platform with a strong focus on agencies. We are based in Paris in Europe and uh, just uh saying that since the beginning of 2024 we have something like close to 500 million uh dollars ad spend that are connected to our platform.

Speaker A: Amazing. Tariq, a bit about you.

Speaker C: Yeah, thanks for the intro Francois. Presenting our software and the company. So I'm the CEO and co founder of M19 and as Francois shared we have a Platform for ads automation that is retail aware and that is mainly to serve agencies and that is um, improving and automating all operation across all ad formats, sponsored ads and DSP as well.

Speaker A: Amazing. So as an Amazon Ads ambassador, I'm super happy to uh, talk about a topic with specialists and it's about going growing internationally, sorry, with the help of Amazon Ads. So that's why you get a lot of French accent today on that podcast. You, you won't hear it really. Uh, but because we're going about to talk about how the Ads Amazon Ad suite can help you go internationally. But today we are at Amazon Unboxed and a lot of things have happened and were announced, uh, this morning. So we have a lot of things to talk about. But the first thing is uh, to you two is like, is it your first unboxed and what do you think of it?

Speaker B: Uh, yes and no. It's not our first unbox because we already attended Unboxed in London and in Paris. So it's more like the first US Inbox, which is maybe the real one. So I would say that's the biggest difference. Uh, everything is bigger here. So you have more people, I would say more announcements as well. Uh, uh, it's more global, even if it's more US centric. And for us it's just a great opportunity to connect with Amazon folks, to partners from Europe and from us because we don't have many opportunities to meet them in person. And I would say maybe the thing that uh, I love the most since uh, I arrived is having great discussions, insightful discussion with direct competitors.

Speaker A: Yes, everyone who counts, uh, I could say is unboxed. And actually Unboxed on tour in Europe is happening in November in Dusseldorf. So it will be the German version, uh, everything in German because it's all about being local and localizing. We'll talk about that in a minute. Um, there was lots of news and lots of things were shared this morning at the keynote, uh, at Amazon Unboxed in Austin. What, what news would have impressed you most and what, which ones you think are really important or you would you have noted on your side? Maybe Tarek.

Speaker C: I would say Nashville because it's getting closer to Europe. So it's happening closer to Europe. The next unlocks, uh, happening there. But seriously, the announcement that I personally loved is here we are in the content studio, but it was the Creative Studio, uh, AI, uh powered capabilities that were announced this morning where even small advertisers will be able to create very advanced content, video and sound Based using these uh studio in a self service manner. So this is pretty impressive to give that much power on the creative side for in a very affordable way which is like $0 to uh all advertisers that are using Amazon advertising.

Speaker A: Amazing. Francois did you.

Speaker B: I would say that it's maybe not the most impressive one but maybe the one that is the most important to me is uh. I'm very focused about saving times and the fact that Amazon is doing hard work to uh simplify the interface for DSP in order to increase by I think it's 75% the time spent on you know uh creating your DSP campaign. I think it's something very important and very important for agencies and overall as

Speaker C: Francois mentioned uh we felt that one of the focus of Amazon is to simplify. So as they shared they heard our feedbacks and agencies feedbacks and advertiser feedbacks of having easier interfaces, easier tools and simplifying tools and we can see that as Francois said in the DSP experience of uh the flow of creation campaigns, managing them etc. Which is really good for DSP operators

Speaker A: and we you as at E commerce we want to make E commerce made simple so that makes us uh smile too uh just to talk about me a bit uh I.

Speaker C: What about you?

Speaker B: What about you?

Speaker A: No but uh for me what I uh noted from today I think it's this uh, this vision that Amazon is bringing and there's announcements at like Amazon Xray onbox then next onbox. Each time there's lots of announcements and we can see Amazon is pivoting as a service provider uh providing more data, uh providing more insights, providing more services on Amazon and off Amazon and becoming this uh like very effective tool to help you grow uh grow your sales on Amazon and off Amazon and your brand awareness. And I, I like, I'm very impressed by the way they're there. They're moving in that uh, in that sense. So let's get into uh expansion and um at Amazon Accelerate which is a big show in Seattle for sellers a lot of announcements were made. One of the big announcements was reviving uh, I would say of the Amazon Multichannel fulfillment feature which uh are integrating now Google and TikTok and multichannel fulfillment means that if you're a seller and you're using FBA for example you can plug that in into your Google Shopping or TikTok shop so that you can use the Amazon services of delivery within other platforms which was already working for Shopify websites. Uh for example how do you see that how do you see that? It's uh, an opportunity. So obviously in terms of sales but also in terms of advertising because that's what we are talking about today.

Speaker C: Um, I agree it was a big announcement because it's getting it easier and easier for not only big brands that have their own logistic capabilities of fulfilling their orders that are happening on their for example own e commerce website or TikTok Shop or whatever. So now you can fulfill using Amazon capabilities, even orders that are happening outside Amazon. And the good thing about it is even the data that is related to this activity, whenever you sell or um, a product that you fulfill from Amazon using Amazon facilities or not all this data, you can now inject it into AMC and use it for your advertising strategy. And yes, so just amc, just to

Speaker A: make sure everyone knows about it. Can you explain what is AMC quickly?

Speaker C: So um, AMC is the data clean room where they provide very advanced data that is at user event level which means anything from the click, the impression, the transaction that is happening on Amazon and off Amazon that they can track, they can report it and give it in uh, a database that we can query and create audiences based on this very, very granular data. And here we are talking about trillions and trillions of data points because it's like user level events. And by leveraging this data we are able to create audiences, cohorts of users based on something that is of interest.

Speaker A: So what you're saying is that by offering like multichannel fulfillment to Google, to TikTok based or Shopify and other websites, basically you're adding audiences or you're adding uh, data points to that you can leverage with AMC to have a better advertising. Is that.

Speaker C: Yeah, a concrete example is now I can, if I inject the right data in my AMC there. By the way, they were very good announcement about the Data Hub management. It's not called Data Hub, I don't remember how it was called within AMC today, but if I inject this data I'm able to create a cohort of users that shopped one of my specific products on TikTok Shop. And this cohort of user I can decide to target it in DSP or to exclude it from some running campaigns. So, so I'm able to be more precise in my advertising thanks to the cohorts that I'm using uh, through uh, amc. Uh, the AMC tool.

Speaker A: Is it Multi Touch attribution. You were talking about the Hub?

Speaker C: Um, no, it's even another thing. And yeah, ah, it's another capability that

Speaker A: trying to be proactive missed. Um, now the second thing, maybe a

Speaker B: question for you is uh, how your customers do react to this kind of announcement. Are they aware of what they can do here? What are the are level of expectation on those topics? Maybe both multi channel and amc.

Speaker A: So we position ourselves as helping uh brands expand globally. Uh so obviously everything which makes it easier to expand is helping a lot. So if a brand is from the US and wanting to go into Europe or vice versa, the idea of saying okay, if you set up your shop first inside Amazon and then you can actually leverage your FBA fulfillment capabilities on other websites and like TikTok is something which has got a lot of uh, uh, like it's very attractive. This is really helpful and a lot of brands are looking very favorably because you say okay, there's no, you don't have to have another partner, logistics partner, uh the cost, you know, the whole, the full cost, uh structure. So that works very well. So for us in terms of simplicity it's helping a lot to open new frontiers let's say in terms of selling. So and thank you Francois for that.

Speaker B: You're very good.

Speaker A: Well, sort question, um, now like a buzzword obviously AI, your tool, your SAS tool. AI is your everyday uh thing. I have got two, two questions around AI. The first one is um, AI, uh powered advertising. One of the announcement was product, uh performance spotlight and optimize ads. Um, and the question is how do you see the AI enhancing the effectiveness of ads, especially for international sellers and specifically also in understanding the local consumer behavior.

Speaker C: So this is a very good use case of AI and machine learning because by definition AI is finding patterns in massive data um amounts. So the idea is when you have, when you are operating in different markets, you have different culture, different cohorts of user, different behaviors. The AI will help you find the patterns, the trend and have specific treatment for these cohorts of users. So for example the enhanced, like the product performance new uh, product that was released by Amazon is leveraging machine learning to localize the effort in each market we are more performant thanks to these machine learning algorithms to target in uh, a more efficient way either cost or conversion based the local users based on how they behave in the local market.

Speaker A: And they were mentioning this morning also about um, uh how AI is going to help more and more learn about the consumers and with all the trillions of data points get predictive about what consumer will want to buy and sort of serve the ads in advance. And I think the example was about uh, ice cream that okay, uh, long, that 10 years ago you were happy that the ads were running for, in summer for, for ice cream and that actually they found out that ice creams didn't sell only on, on, on like hot days, but sometimes in stormy days because people wanted comfort. So this thing about, okay, a lot of information and predictive of like usual behaviors plus your behavior and predicting. Okay, you will want actually to uh, buy this product probably so I'll serve you an ad in advance for me is a bit mind blowing, right? It's like a lot of those AI stuff and I'll jump onto my second uh, uh, question. Like two very big topics is AI and video. Like uh, there's an AI powered video generator which is also a bit mind blowing. So a lot of people are showing what is not working but if you focus on what is working, it's already mind blowing. Um, so how do you think sellers can use this tool to create localized content? We're talking about going global and engaging content for international audience.

Speaker C: Yeah, as I said earlier, this is my favorite announcement of the day because first on the AI side it's impressive how they leverage it to provide it in a self serve manner that is free for users. By the way, today it's still in beta and they shared a QR code for people who want to enroll in this beta. So uh, yeah, if you have access to this QR code, enroll. I think it will be epic. And why I think it's very important because with a couple of clicks you will be able to translate in an effective manner like not only a basic translation of the audio of your video or the subtitles, or you can create a customed content using the language that will fit with the local, for example language that will work with the local culture that is very different from normal translation. For example that you will do a word to word translation with this AI capabilities that is not only voice based or content based but also it is blended with the visuals and images. You will be able to localize your content in different countries without having to pay massive amount of money for agencies that are doing this. I'm um, not against agencies who are doing the creative work but I love when it's affordable to have not as advanced content as the ones that you can get from like professional designers, but at least you have something good enough that you can run on your other

Speaker B: uh, locals and maybe especially for agencies that work in different markets. I think it's maybe something that we are more sensitive to in uh, Europe because for sure you need to have this level of adaptation that is really time consuming and can clearly you know, decrease your profitability as an agency.

Speaker C: But for example for you as an agency creating content, market based content, how do you deal with it? Is it, how, how do you leverage, do you leverage AI into this process or not? What's your thought on the topic?

Speaker A: So for sure the cost implication and is, is a big one in terms of taking a decision to go into, into Europe. For instance the, the fact that you have to pay for translation and good translation and for instance today AI translation is not good enough. If you really want, if you have like high end products and you really want to have like someone local and even sometimes between even different local people you could have. We've had like incredible discussions between locals about okay, this is the right word, the wrong word.

Speaker B: So you have HR problems as well?

Speaker A: No, it's, it's making uh, sure that you talk to the, the people with the right phrasing, uh wording. So translation is already like a uh cost involved and now indeed it's like okay if you have text on your pictures is how you, you make the, you have to translate that content for every country. And uh, like uh, there's five markets. The main markets in Europe like Germany, uh England, France, Spain and Italy. But then you add Belgium, you add uh, the Netherlands, you add Sweden, you add Poland and okay then it becomes very overwhelming. So to your question is. Um, we, we have a, depending on the brands. Some brands have, have really want premium content and have worked on uh designing from beginning a really great content which will be uh, used on packaging on different websites and that so that that's organized. On the others which could be smaller or less organized around content. Then it's a real question and we are looking very favorably on those AI tools because like you said it's uh. One thing which I find amazing with Amazon um, is the fact that they are making, making a lot of things available to very small sellers. And for me from the beginning a small seller had more opportunities on, on Amazon than larger brands because it was so easy to get access to so many things. Where we are uh, larger companies you have, you're um, less agile and today you can do Amazon ads, you can do prime uh video ads. If you're a small, if you're a small brand it's amazing and even I will be able tomorrow to do very simple ads but very effective. So for me I don't see the impact right now because also, also a lot of tools are not completely working in all of the European countries. But for sure. That's a future of enabling even smaller brands to go. Yeah. And um, and also it's about you know, customers accepting maybe a level of quality or level of automated things or not. Uh, and if you know, versus 20 or 30 years ago now launching a new brand is so exciting because with so little means and resources you can create something amazing. I did with uh, Hackathon, uh, with a Prosper show in New York last uh, summer and in three hours within a team we had to build a concept and a product using only AI tools, uh, about having a story, a picture and everything to launch a product in three hours we had a concept that's mind blowing for me, yeah, maybe just to.

Speaker B: I agree with you on the fact that something that is really important to Amazon from a European point of view is the fact that it's clearly a tool that can help small brands, small sellers to learn how to export to go out from your home, uh, country. And I guess that this new uh, video AI system is a good way, an easy way for you to go out of your country easily and be able to, to discuss with the local, uh, local people.

Speaker A: And it's a bit like Amazon Live, uh, for example which you, you put on your phone and it's an app and you, and you film yourself and like larger brands have like it's difficult, like okay, is it only with your phone will it be good quality and so on. So the adoption is very difficult. A small brand will say oh of course I'll do it anytime, you know, I do it on, on my Instagram. And that's uh, for them is, and this new way of looking at things, sometimes when you're a smaller company your adoption will be much higher and the impact is much higher. And you have some brands now which are uh, Amazon specific and grew and started from Amazon and they've been very agile in adopting all those things and we can see in results it's delivering growth. That's what's very exciting uh, for us. And to our topic today, obviously, um, going on to my next question about um, ad formats, uh, one of the things which were introduced in Accelerate also was the introduction of advanced audience segmentation. We talked a lot about audience today, this morning also at the keynote, uh, and about enabling precise targeting. So how do you recommend sellers utilize this feature to reach specific demographics in new international markets?

Speaker C: Yeah, so this feature is very useful when you want really to get control of your advertising in different locals based on the segmentation that Amazon is providing or that you build yourself through uh amc. So one of my recommendations if you are using this type of customer uh user segmentation is just to make sure that you are not overlapping with your existing advertising. For example if you create a specific audience for uh, specific shoppers for example that already bought your product on your website, you just need to make sure that you are intentional about either excluding them from your upper funnel campaigns running on DSP or be intentional by cross selling them by pushing to this specific audience some of your other products. So my main thing regarding the usage of the segmentation is to be intentional about how, when to use them as explicit targeting within your uh, strategy advertising and when to exclude them to make sure that they are not overlapping with your existing advertising strategies and campaigns that are running through mainly dsp.

Speaker A: Yeah and we had the example this morning on a video uh, uh in the keynote of uh, people creating completely different uh audiences and testing like a B tasting and finding out that they had only 3% overlap and actually one was helping the other and uh, they were being activated at different point of the customer journey. And I think the, this battle of audiences, if I could say that for lack uh of better word is is really interesting. Like the ones who will be able to adopt like ARM's marketing cloud, the audiences and, and the insight, sorry and the ability to create the right audiences will be the ones which will be the most effective. And to be fair that's what we see through the examples which are ah, which are shown today.

Speaker C: Yeah, just wants to add here one major announcement that happened this morning that for me it's uh, the first step of Amazon releasing kind of audience based steering in sponsored ads where now you can make boosts based on specific audiences on sponsored products and ah sponsored brands. And I think it's very interesting because it's the first time that we have access to AMC audiences within sponsored product and uh, sponsored brand.

Speaker A: So it's AMC powered sponsored brands, right? It's like all like sponsored products which is sponsored products. Sorry. Yeah and like. And we'll talk in a minute about AMC and adoption of AMC man. Like enabling the use of AMC in a like seamlessly way where people don't really see that it's amc but you're getting the impact is amazing and I'm very excited to see how this boost, like audience uh based boost will, will work. And it's most probably you're going to be live in the US in a few months.

Speaker C: Is it beta or uh, announced it but I didn't record. What's the status?

Speaker A: Uh yeah, well Question mark. Yeah, question mark. So thank you. Very good question.

Speaker B: We need it for um, so I

Speaker A: think we'll, we'll close with ams, uh, Marketing Cloud which is ah, a bit the topic we've been talking a lot in the last uh, two years I would say. Um, I feel that um, a lot of brand aren't really aware of its strengths that there's, there's a bliss, a bit of a glass window out or glass ceiling. Sorry where uh, we like a small group is talking about AMC a lot excited about the insights and say oh look at that. But uh, sometimes I find that this is not like shared with a lot of brands which are am. What, what are you talking about? Uh and like do you feel that it's the same and you know what do you think that brands should learn about that and should use it?

Speaker C: From my personal point of view I think I don't have the figures. I don't think that the adoption is massive as it should be. Uh because as you said it's so powerful that as uh, prior data scientist and machine learning guy I love the data. So I cannot imagine why can't we use this advanced data to uh, do better advertising strategies. So my, my belief is that the adoption is not high enough because it's complex to query and uh, to use because today you need to be able uh, to know how to query using SQL which is a language of querying databases. This is the first uh, problem and second today it's also manual to have an instance created and it's not open for everybody. But this is changing from this unboxed it will be every uh, advertiser will be able to have his AMC instance. By amazing instance it means like just the data, uh, somewhere for him to use or his agency or tool provider. And the most important thing for me that will democratize this tool is the ability now to create these instances directly through an API connection for people who don't know what API is, just the programmatic way to interact and communicate with Amazon ads servers. So today we will be able, so they are just releasing it to programmatically create an instance for the advertiser and query programmatically this instance on behalf of the advertiser. And in my opinion this will boost massively at the adoption because of all the tools that will democratize the use of these valuable data.

Speaker B: Yeah and anyway I think that there is a small problem here that uh, there is a need for uh, uh, Amazon and people like us to teach what you can get, what you can expect. From this data because it's not, it's a question of how you are supposed to handle this data, but also what you're supposed to expect, uh, uh, with this data because I think it's quite complex. I'm curious to know how your customers react when you discuss about amc, uh with them.

Speaker A: So for me this adoption uh, uh, question uh, is a major question and uh, we've decided to uh, offer to all of our customers insights, AMC insights. So every customer working with us will get his, on his reporting, will get uh, the major use cases, uh, and we try to use as much as we can those insights to like uh, improve what we're doing but to have to lead discussions about okay, ad spend, where we should spend everything. So I'm totally with you about like how do we talk? Not specifically that AMC is a how, but it's more about the why. And you know, what is it, why should you use it and what kind of result you can expect from it. And like the glass ceiling is probably to make sure that people are aware of the kind of results uh, that has been generated. But to be fair, this morning the use cases or the case studies we heard on video like ELF or all the others and showing this uh, amount of growth they managed to generate with the utilization of data points, I'm convinced that they will have a gap of the brands using data versus the ones not using that much data. So Amazon is democratizing a lot of things. We're saying you can like even small brands can get access to TV prime, uh, tv, uh, uh, video, uh, ads, uh, can access to a lot of things, uh, and you can get access to AMC if, even if you're a smaller player. So that means if you're agile, if you're wanting to learn, this will be, become a competitive advantage. And for me I always say to brands like it, if you, if you're not going to do it, you take a risk that your competitor does it and you're going to lose. That's for sure.

Speaker C: And by the way, access to it for free. It is free for everybody.

Speaker A: Yeah, but sometimes when it's free people will not think they're afraid something weird.

Speaker B: The same thing should have a price for it. Maybe you will have more adoption.

Speaker C: I would pay for it.

Speaker A: I agree. I would pay for it. So I, how to query?

Speaker B: Yeah, he has the skills.

Speaker A: So I think that we, we, we will finish on that note that uh, I think we would, we would, we would pay for AMC and for what it brings us. We are very happy that it's for free. Not everything is for free, but that is. And thank you for listening. Uh, to us, it was, uh, Tarik, Francois and Jerome from the Amazon ads. Partners content. I. I did it right. Thank you very much. Bye bye.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Bye bye.