Prime Day is more than just discounts as Amazon shows off its advertising cred

Amazon isn’t just using Prime Day to promote shopping in July but to wring more ad dollars out of skeptical marketers. For all the hype around Amazon’s ads, many advertisers are still on the fence about the commerce giant, and Prime Day is a chance to show them how well its ads work. To that end, Amazon is sharing details with media buyers like the fact that Prime Day generated around $1 billion in revenue for the retailer, per JP Morgan Chase, and Prime Day was Amazon’s biggest sales day in the U.K., with impressions that day increasing by around 130 percent year-over-year. It’s too early to know if brands will buy more ads during this year’s Prime Day  budgets tend to be adjusted on the fly due to increased competition during the short window but advertisers are using Amazon’s ad products more than last year to influence shoppers at every stage of purchase, according to the five media buyers interviewed for this article. Still, there’s caution. Ad space on Amazon is more valuable for the short period where shoppers are literally rushing to the site, so agencies are seeing ads fluctuate in price on an hourly basis.