Amazon Business’s Inaugural Brand Awareness Campaign
Situational Context: Amazon Business was slated to have its first ever brand awareness campaign in 2020, announcing its presence to the market at large. However, given COVID-19 the launch was delayed until July 2022 after 10 months of strategy, planning, and various shoots.
Role: Creative Director (and occasional Designer)
Team: 3 internal team members (Brand Lead, Campaign Manager, and me), BSSP (first wave creative), Walker Sands (ocial activations), TBD (second wave activations)
Challenge: Launch Amazon Business to the public across physical and digital platforms to shift unaided brand awareness. The secondary goal was to increase click-throughs to the marketing landing page.
Most customers don’t realize that Amazon has a specific organization dedicated to wholesale and B2B-procurement solutions. Amazon Business is under the Amazon Retail umbrella (like Fresh or Launchpad) but specializes in working with various organizations to secure business-only deals on products and offer streamlined procurement software like automated invoicing and ordering. The challenge is two pronged: Identify Amazon as a place for businesses to go to supply their organizations, and then direct them into the Amazon Business funnel.
The main hero image of the campaign featuring Roslyn in the signature photography style.
Process: This project was primarily lead by the Head of Branding with my role to provide creative bar-raising and support. The agency was onboarded and pitched a variety of creative executions, I was brought in later in the process, due to competing other project timelines, and the concept originally chosen had to be tactfully massaged to fit our existing brand standards. Concurrent to this project was my key 2022 initiative to overhaul the entire Amazon Business brand, partly due to the fact that our hero color, Triton blue (a midtone warm blue), couldn’t be used for large-scale media campaigns due to its similarity to Prime blue which would lead to confusion in market.
Solution: Due to overpriced production efforts and lackluster creative concepts I was asked to step in to help right the ship, taking on a variety of the production work myself and overseeing photoshoots and video shoots on the ground to ensure our brand was accurately represented. Summer yellow was chosen for two reasons: we couldn’t use the AB hero blue color at the time for reasons called out above, and secondly because a warm goldenrod yellow wasn’t often used in the competitive landscape meaning it would draw eyes.
We partnered with photographer Tim Tadder to create the striking campaign visuals that featured out models looking aspirational and future-forward, blue was pulled through by using blue gel on the shadows of the models to give the subtle nod back to our brand color. For the video shoots we landed on three whimsical concepts that would feature Amazon Business in a way that uplifts our customers to achieve their dreams. The first ‘Pet Tech’ was shot by award-winning director Andres Nilsson and the second two ‘Positive Vibes’ and ‘Soaring Pizzas’ by Aaron Stoller.
Performance: To date (Nov 22) the campaign is the highest performing across owned social media channels. Interestingly while the campaign did not move Amazon Business unaided awareness, it significantly contributed to overall Amazon awareness as a business supplier. The campaign was featured in publications like Ad Age and others. Overall it contributed to 6.4 million unique visitors to the overall marketing site with 10.6 million overall views. The campaign specific landing page saw campaign landing page saw 1.58 million unique visitors with the CTR of account sign up increasing to 14.75% over the site standard of 9.3%. Overall impressions across social, streaming video, and endemic was 1,347,744,736 billion impressions with 2,416,770 clicks (0.18% CTR). Overall views on youtube for the placements currently at 17,270,000 million views.
8 awards for the 2022 Campaign
1 finalist mention (in progress to awards)American Advertising Federation District = entries from Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Montana and Idaho
Gold ADDY - Buy smarter. Dream bigger. - Amazon Business (032B-445881-11-SEA: Television-Regional/National, Campaign
Silver ADDY - Buy smarter. Dream bigger. - Amazon Business (024B-445947-11-SEA: Web Banner Ad or Website Takeover)
Silver ADDY - Buy smarter. Dream bigger. - Amazon Business (047-445949-11-SEA: Online/Interactive Campaign)
American Advertising Federation – Seattle
Silver ADDY - Category: Cross Platform > Integrated Campaigns > 044 - Integrated Advertising Campaigns > 044B - B-to-B Campaign-Regional/National
Silver ADDY - Category: Film, Video, & Sound > Television Advertising > 032 - Television Advertising – Regional/National > 032B – Campaign
Silver ADDY - Category: Online/Interactive > Advertising & Promotion > 024B – Campaign
Silver ADDY - Category: Cross Platform > Online/Interactive Campaign > 047 - Online/Interactive Campaign
Kantar Retail
Global Winner - Kantar Creative Effectiveness Awards for Print & Outdoor. Top 10 best performing Print & Outdoor ad
