Kantar examined the online giant’s advertising efforts across various media from July 1 through July 16.
This year Amazon extended its annual Prime Day sale into a two-day event, and by all accounts it was a record-breaking success. To understand how Amazon promoted its Prime Day extravaganza, Kantar examined the online giant’s advertising efforts across various media from July 1 through July 16, the last day of the sale.
Television
Although Prime Day is exclusively an online event, Amazon devoted the majority of its 2019 Prime Day advertising to a traditional medium: television. Out of the $13.2 million Amazon spent on television ads from July 1-16, the company dedicated $8.1 million to commercials promoting Prime Day.
Amazon spent the most on Prime Day commercials running on cable TV—$4.3 million. Interestingly though, the company spent nearly the same amount on Spanish language TV for Prime Day as it did on standard network television ($1.6 million and $1.8 million, respectively), indicating the importance of the Hispanic market for the company.
Accordingly, Amazon created both English and Spanish language versions of its Prime Day TV ad, an animated spot promoting discounts on items such as fashion, electronics and home and kitchen goods.
Display
From July 1 through the 16th, Amazon spent $5.9 million on display advertising according to Kantar data. Although we were unable to sort the Prime Day-themed ads from Amazon’s other display ads, we noted the use of both general Prime Day sale banners as well as banners promoting Prime Day discounts on specific products, including PepsiCo-owned snacks, the DEEBOT 500 vacuum-cleaning robot, and Amope footcare items.
In addition, Kantar found that Amazon devoted significant space on Amazon.com to Prime Day banner promotions, with the estimated value of more than $37 million in ad spend were Amazon to pay itself for the placements. Examples we observed also featured promotions of discounts on specific products, including Britax car seats, Kenmore mixers and Mucinex OTC medicine.
Within paid search advertising, we analyzed Amazon’s U.S. Google desktop search activity on keywords specific to both the general Amazon Prime service and Prime Day. In keeping with previous years, we found the majority of activity was centered on the keyword ‘amazon prime’, with Amazon spending more than $350,000 to sponsor the term during the 16-day period. During this time, the company spent less than a tenth of that amount—$33,000—on keywords specific to Prime Day and related terms like ‘amazon sale’. This fact is not surprising, considering that search advertising is driven by consumer inquiries, and consumers interested in Prime Day sales are more likely to search directly on Amazon.com rather than an outside search engine.
At the same time, however, many of the text ads Amazon ran on pure ‘amazon prime’ keyword searches mentioned Prime Day in the copy:
Lastly, Kantar also found significant Prime Day advertising by Amazon in online video and mobile web, however spend figures for those media during the period studied will not be available in our system until September.
Source: Kantar