Mumbai: Amazon is consolidating its global media planning and buying duties with the IPG Mediabrands network, according to three people close to the matter. An internal memo went out to staff this afternoon. The winning team will promote Amazon’s ecommerce hub, assorted tech products and Prime subscription service around the world.
The review’s final round saw a Publicis Media conglomerate face off against a “holistic solution” group consisting of teams drawn from multiple IPG agencies including Initiative.
Initiative beat out WPP’s Mindshare to win the global business in 2013, with MEC retaining digital buying duties in the U.S. A spokesperson for MEC said the agency was not involved in this latest review but declined to elaborate on the larger GroupM organization’s relationship with Amazon, which has also included media work in the Asia-Pacific region.
The news comes as marketers and analysts increasingly see Amazon as the third wing of a new digital media trifecta led by Google and Facebook. Jeff Bezos’ company now brings in approximately $1.12 billion each year in ad sales, which is only a fraction of Google parent Alphabet’s $24 billion total and Facebook’s $9 billion haul. But according to recent research from Merkle, sponsored products ads, which account for approximately 82 percent of Amazon’s total sales, grew more than 50 percent between the second and third quarters of 2017.
According to recent reports of Kantar Media, Amazon spent more than $950 million on measured media in the U.S. in 2016, a number that has nearly doubled over the past four years. Multiple analysts estimate the company’s annual global budget easily exceeds $1 billion.
