Situational Context: Amazon Business (AB) wanted to evolve its mass awareness campaign beyond year one, growing into a stronger, video-heavy media buy ($64MM) and focusing on finding its unique campaign tone to stand out against other B2B brands.

Role: Creative Director

Team: Two internal team members (new Sr. Campaign Manager and I), Joint London (all video and creative), Walker Sands (social media events).

Goal: The campaign sought to increase unaided brand awareness of both Amazon and Amazon Business as preferred sources for business supplies. The secondary goal was to increase click-throughs to the marketing landing page. In the first year of the campaign, significant progress was made in establishing Amazon Business as a smart business procurement partner; however, opportunities for further growth remained. The primary goal of the campaign was to create a meaningful impact on the awareness and consideration of Amazon Business among large and small businesses, particularly procurement decision-makers, sourcing professionals, and individual users, to encourage their organizations to purchase from Amazon Business.

Process: The former Head of Branding left, and this year, since I was involved in the first year of the campaign, I was asked to take on more responsibility for it creatively and from a branding perspective. We hired a new Senior Campaign Manager, whom I helped onboard regarding mass advertising however who left during the campaign. We shifted from BSSP to work more with AWS's main agency, Joint London, which focuses on engaging video storytelling. This year, we explored video while keeping our digital and out-of-home advertising due to its strong performance.

We emphasized our new category name—smart business buying—to highlight AB's unique value as a B2B supplier and a procure-to-pay digital solution. The category name features in our campaign tagline and other marketing messages, like “AB is your partner for [smart business buying]” and “AB is the leader in [smart business buying].” We replaced our old tagline (buy smarter, dream bigger) to focus on this message. The goal is to demonstrate how AB provides strategic value to procurement partners.

Solution: For digital and out-of-home advertising, we kept the same goldenrod background and aspirational poses from Tim Tadder's photography as in year one. However, we featured a new, diverse group of models for better representation, given our plans to potentially expand the campaign globally. The messaging shifted slightly, emphasizing the strategic value of AB through our 'smart business buying' tagline.

For video, we tested two concepts: the first, "Rome in a Day," used a Roman centurion as a metaphor for building a business quickly with AB. This concept played on a familiar phrase and was applicable to businesses of all sizes. Directed by Scott Lyon, this was our first international shoot in Bulgaria, which helped us save on SAG/union fees, allowing us to invest more in the set and production quality for a three day shoot. The second video, "Bloom," was a musical one-shot showing a small flower shop owner growing her business. This was directed by Dom & Nic and shot in a day and a half at the Volume 360 stage in London using modern visual effects techniques.

We also created organic social content related to both videos, shot alongside the main production with a smaller cast and crew to cut costs. One featured characters from "Rome in a Day" chatting around a water cooler, while the other showed a small business owner and her dog using AB to enhance their business.

Videos

Director’s cut - 60 second ‘Rome in a Day’

Rome Organic Social Videos

30 second - Bloom

Bloom Organic Social Videos

Performance

Our goal with our approach to video was to test which would resonate with our auidence, and whichever performed best is the direction we’d pursue in future years. Creative testing and measurement found that Rome in a Day scored highest through its use of humor, engaging visuals, anachronism, and allowed business owner’s of any size to see them in the ad. While Bloom performed well visually, viewers were overwhelmed with how busy and fast-paced it was and AB was lost in the story and business owners weren’t sure if it was relevant to them.

The campaign ran for 23 weeks, delivering a total of 2.9B impressions across multiple channels (+1B over 2022) - offline (OOH, radio, podcast) and digital (social, streaming video, display). Overall, the impact of the 2023 campaign resulted in improvement of unaided awareness of Amazon as a place to go for business supplies (+180 bps to 34%) and maintained total unaided awareness of Amazon Business YoY at 3%. We also achieved our QBR goal of Consistent, Comparable Measurement (CCM) compliance working with Campaign Measurement & Optimization (CMO) to onboard to the Aggregated Cross-Channel Estimation (ACE) model which shows that for every $1 invested in the campaign, there is a $25 OPS uplift compared to $12 OPS lift for each $1 investment of mass advertising in Consumer and Prime mass advertising campaigns over the same period. Traffic to AB’s marketing content site (MCS), business.amazon.com (b.a.com), saw consistent growth with mass advertising, reaching a total of 7.7M unique visitors and 12.9M page-views. Out of this audience, the campaign landing page (LP) served as the primary page to drive digital media campaigns, reaching 1.7M unique visitors (+200k over 2022).

Awards and Recognition

Given shifting winds on Amazon’s policy on awards - we submitted for less awards in 2023 than the previous year, meaning we won fewer as well.

  • Top Performing TV ad at the Kantar Global Creative Effectiveness Awards

    • From Kantar: Consumers judged your ad to be one of the most creative and effective ads tested in North America in 2023, and it has been selected as one of our Top 15 TV winners! Your ad, Rome in a Day, will be published as part of the Kantar North America Creative Effectiveness Awards and feature in our best performing TV ads.

Press Coverage

Bonus Content - Behind the Scenes of Bloom

Given we were using cutting edge set technology, we compiled a BTS to help tell the story and use for award submissions.

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Amazon Business '24 Mass Advertising Brand Campaign
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