At Amazon’s Upfront event this year, there was only one mention of Amazon’s ad tech. Alan Moss proclaimed, “With Amazon Marketing Cloud and your first-party (1P) signals, everyone is an endemic advertiser”. It’s a resounding proclamation which speaks to the extraordinary efforts Amazon has made over the past several years to build onramps for marketers to collaborate their 1P signals with Amazon for improved ad targeting and measurement.
Across the Amazon Ad Tag, Conversion API (CAPI), manual uploads, and CDP integrations, there’s now a range of ways to collaborate within Amazon Marketing Cloud. Yet, these solutions present their own technical challenges, privacy concerns, and signal limitations. At Gigi, we sought to change that. We wanted to build a suite of solutions that eliminate the technical barrier of collaborating 1P signals with Amazon. We sought to do so in the most private and secure way possible. And, we aspire for marketers to bring in as much signal as possible and - perhaps most importantly - build a UI layer that would allow marketers to easily enrich audiences for Streaming TV campaigns with their 1P signals and measure outcomes on 1P sources post STV exposure. This suite of products is the Gigi 1P Platform.
A brand’s 1P signals are generated in so many ways and stored in so many places, with varying degrees of rich metadata across each brand and data source. We asked ourselves: What can we build to allow a brand to collaborate their 1P data with Amazon in whatever manner they choose while incorporating as much metadata as possible to improve ad targeting and measurement? Upon asking that question, we realized that a single product with a single process for collaboration simply would not work. So, we’ve built the Gigi 1P Platform, which is actually a host of data collection and processing frameworks, standardized with extensible data models, APIs and UIs, constructed flexibly based on the priorities of the data infrastructure of each brand.
We highlighted earlier the tools that Amazon has built for data collaboration. All of these present benefits for brands, but they all present their own set of drawbacks. Let’s briefly breakdown each:
The Conversion API (CAPI)
CAPI is beneficial in that it can bring in 100% of a brand's conversions, and (like the ad tag) CAPI signals can be sent to both the DSP and AMC. However, CAPI requires initial and ongoing engineering work to implement it successfully. And more importantly, CAPI is not designed to capture historical (pre-existing) events/signals.
The Amazon Ad Tag
The ad tag is a good product for two reasons: 1) it allows marketers to activate and measure based on non-conversion events (like page views), and 2) it has a substantially lower privacy threshold than 1P uploads into AMC: 2 vs 100. The downsides of the ad tag are: 1) there is an inherent signal loss for consumers who have ad blockers, specific browsers or devices, and browser plugins; 2) it, like CAPI, requires technical skills for implementation; 3) it is also not designed to capture historical (pre-existing) events/signals.
CDP/CRM Integrations
The AMC BD team has built one-click integrations with the leading CDPs/CRMs and Amazon Marketing Cloud. In principle, this would solve a lot of problems. In practice, many of these integrations only scratch the surface of what’s possible with data collaboration with Amazon. CDP (and CRM alike) is designed to focus on “processed/derived” attributes of customers, so they are inherently different from raw 1P events/signals that are critically valuable to marketing campaigns. Take Salesforce as an example: marketers can collaborate with Salesforce Data Cloud signals with Amazon Marketing Cloud, but one cannot collaborate with Salesforce Commerce Cloud signals. So, if a marketer wants to create rich lookalike audiences based on 1P signals and Amazon signals, they wouldn’t be able to do so. If a marketer wants to marry an STV ad exposure to conversions on their 1P channel, they wouldn't be able to do so. Again, in principle, these integrations sound promising, but in practice, they can actually be somewhat underwhelming.
The Gigi 1P Platform
How did we aim to solve these challenges? We built, and are actively building, a host of products that incorporate the following priorities for marketers:
current data stack
source of the richest 1P signals and metadata
privacy concerns and data movement concerns
For simplicity, it would be helpful to bucket these priorities based on the brand's size and chosen data stack. Below, we’ve outlined three core customer segments and how the implementation of the Gigi 1P Platform varies for each.
Gigi 1P Platform for Emerging Brands
At-scale emerging brands with rich 1P signals from transactional e-commerce platforms (e.g. Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud) but limited initial data infrastructure (e.g. lack of a centralized data pipeline and warehouse). These brands care about privacy but also want to act quickly and cost-efficiently based on their existing e-commerce tech stack.
For these customers, the Gigi 1P Platform does the following (as outlined in the chart below):
Allows brands to authorize the Gigi 1P Platform to gain access to their 1P source (e.g. Shopify) in a couple of clicks
Gigi ingests a brand’s 1P signal from the source into a Gigi managed and secured Data Lakehouse, while protecting the privacy and security of the data through enterprise-degree encryption mechanism
Gigi transforms the raw 1P data into a standardized data model and makes it interoperable with data in AMC
Creates and executes a host of queries in AMC that incorporate 1P signals and Amazon signals for audience generation and outcome-based measurement
All of these capabilities are encapsulated under a UI layer where any marketer can leverage 1P signals to create richer audiences and outcome-based measurement on 1P channels.
The Gigi 1P Platform is not limited to a single 1P source (like CAPI) for collaboration. For example, an emerging brand might want to layer its Klayvio signals with its transactional signals in Shopify for improved audience targeting. The Gigi 1P Platform handles signals from both for collaboration with AMC.
Gigi 1P Platform for Enterprise Brands
Every aspect of the Gigi 1P Platform for Emerging Brands is available for enterprise brands. However, Enterprise brands may have two distinctions relative to emerging brands: 1) they likely have existing and comprehensive data infrastructure (e.g. they may be using Snowflake/Databricks for data warehousing and use Simon as CDP), and 2) they would prefer their 1P signals to collaborate with Amazon directly through data clean room.
For these brands, the Gigi 1P Platform will be doing the following:
Transform a brand’s 1P signal into a Gigi-designed data model that enables the 1P data to be interoperable with AMC. This process happens within the enterprise brand’s existing data environment (e.g. Snowflake).
Authorize a data collaboration from a brand’s 1P source directly with AMC
Creates and executes a host of queries in AMC that incorporate 1P signals and Amazon signals for audience generation and performance measurement
Gigi 1P Platform and AWS Clean Rooms
We’re super excited by the recent AWS Clean Rooms and Amazon Marketing Cloud announcements. This partnership's primary - initial benefit - is that it enables data isolation, which means a brand need not even “bring data into” AMC to collaborate with Amazon Ads. Instead, AWS Clean Rooms enable a partner - like Gigi - to query 1P signals without the data leaving a brand’s AWS environment.
The caveat here is that a brand’s 1P data must already be in AWS, and there’s a bit of an operational lift on the brand’s side to enable the collaboration.
It’s super early days for AWS Clean Rooms and AMC. Still, we’ll be investing significant resources into creating as frictionless a collaboration experience as possible while allowing for maximum insights from a brand’s 1P signals.
Hopefully, this helps explain the Gigi 1P Platform and how it compares to incumbent out-of-the-box solutions for collaborating 1P signals with Amazon Ads. If you have any questions or want to chat further about making the most of your 1P signals with Amazon ads, don’t hesitate to reach out.