Amazon Ads offers full-funnel advertising solutions to help businesses of all sizes achieve their marketing goals at scale. Amazon Ads connects advertisers to highly relevant audiences through first-party insights; extensive reach across premium content like Prime Video, Twitch, and third-party publishers; the ability to connect and directly measure campaign tactics across awareness, consideration, and conversion; and generative AI to deliver appropriate creative at each step. Amazon Ads helps advertisers reach an average monthly ad-supported audience of more than 300 million in the U.S. across Amazon's owned and operated properties and third-party publishers.  

Marcus Johnson (00:00):

This episode is brought to you by Amazon Ads. Ever wonder if your Amazon Ads drive sales beyond Amazon? Perhaps. Well, if you are, Omnichannel Metrics helps advertisers understand how campaigns drive sales both on and beyond Amazon. Using shopper panel data and third-party signals, brands can track performance from streaming to brick and mortar stores. Discover Amazon Ads Omnichannel Metrics at advertising.amazon.com and search for OCM to learn more.

(00:33):

Hey gang, it's Tuesday, December 16th, and welcome to a special EMARKETER podcast miniseries, A Blueprint to Better Measurement, made possible by Amazon Ads. I'm Marcus. And in episode two of this two-part series, our principal retail analyst, Sky Canaves, speaks with Kolby Capelouto, head of sales for durables at Amazon Ads. All about omnichannel advertising for part one, you can check out last Thursday's December 11th episode. If you have already, then here is part two.

Sky Canaves (01:02):

Hey, Kolby. It's great to see you again.

Kolby Capelouto (01:05):

Hey, Sky. Thanks again for having me.

Sky Canaves (01:06):

So in the first part of our conversation, we discussed how Amazon Ads Omnichannel Metrics has evolved and where it is today at the end of 2025, and today we're going to talk about what's ahead. So my understanding is you've run Omnichannel Metrics now for about two years in beta, and it's now expanded across many categories, including fashion, consumer electronics, home goods, home improvement, toys and games, and so on, and it's moving out of beta and is now being more widely offered. So what insights are you bringing out of beta that are relevant to your advertisers?

Kolby Capelouto (01:48):

I'll share a couple innovations first that I'm really excited about. This used to be very manual on the backend. We would have to check eligibility. We'd have to get campaigns set up. The amazing product team behind this has made this to where, when eligible, all Amazon Ads campaigns through the DSP are automatically enrolled into this. So advertisers don't have to do a thing. Our account teams don't have to do a thing. As soon as there's eligibility, there's auto enrollment.

(02:13):

And this is awesome because it allows for advertisers to get this on an always-on basis. So when they go into the ad console, they can get monthly refreshes of this to start to understand how different product groupings, different audiences, different inventory sources are affecting their omnichannel outcomes, and then they're able to optimize accordingly. So that's been a big unlock for us. That's a major part of the GA.

(02:37):

As we look ahead, our priorities are directly aligned with our advertisers, and what we're hearing from our customers is right now in Omnichannel Metrics it takes a look at a brand halo reporting. We're going to be getting down to a product-level reporting. So the exact ASIN, or products that are being advertised, are going to be able to be broken out in the reporting.

(02:57):

And then a key feature, which we've been testing in beta for the last two years but will be included in this auto-enrollment feature, is going to be retailer-level breakdown. So right now we can do this in a bespoke fashion through our analytics and insights team, but soon in H1 of 2026, we're going to be able to see retailer-level breakout. How did my ad campaign drive sales specifically in Home Depot? How did my ad campaign drive sales specifically in Nordstrom's, et cetera?

(03:22):

So those are two real big innovations that we've been testing on the backend to get right. The science is very difficult on this, but those are features that we're hearing from our customers that will continue to make this even more actionable.

Sky Canaves (03:35):

And does that also cover brands' D2C sites? Because I often hear about brands that sell on Amazon, maybe they don't sell all of their products. They look to focus on their bestsellers or their hero products, but I hear about it driving halo effects to their D2C where they can then establish a relationship with their customers, a more direct relationship that many, especially smaller and direct brands, want to do.

Kolby Capelouto (04:00):

Yeah. So we've had that solution in market for several years now. That's called our Ads Data Manager, and it really compliments what we're doing with Omnichannel Metrics. So with Ads Data Manager, you can append a very simple Amazon Ads tag to your site to look at conversions and audience insights. Our more advanced advertisers are connecting via conversion API, which allows them to see off and online signals on their end and attribute it to media running to the DSP. So that's how we tackle the D2C channel. Omnichannel Metrics is really broadening that scope to see where sales are occurring in signals that maybe advertisers don't even have access to, which is typically from their non-Amazon retail channels.

Sky Canaves (04:43):

And how have you seen the response to this new move so far?

Kolby Capelouto (04:48):

I mean, customers are hyped about it, to be honest. This is something that was the number one piece of voice of customer I heard back in 2022 as I met with our marketing customers all the way up to the C-suite. It's giving them a broader view of the landscape in terms of how their media dollars are being invested in the business outcomes it's driving than ever before.

(05:09):

And complement that with Amazon Marketing Cloud, which is our data clean room. The ability to get a vast and wide perspective of investments to actions and signals and conversions, particularly when they start integrating their own customer signals through that conversion API that I mentioned, it's so vast. So our customers love it because now they can essentially turn on the light in the dark room and understand things they've always known to be true, but really actually start to quantify it, and I think most importantly, start to action on it.

(05:41):

And this is great because depending on promos, depending on seasonality, or if there's just sales objectives that need to be met through any of their sales channels, they can now start to optimize towards that. They can set up specific campaigns in the Amazon DSP to drive towards something like a Home Depot or a Nordstrom's or Lowe's. So it's super beneficial for them. The feedback has been exceptionally positive.

Sky Canaves (06:04):

So that can also help address some of the challenges with where their inventory is and where they need to drive sales, which has been top of mind over the last year or so with how brands are planning to sell across different channels.

Kolby Capelouto (06:21):

You're absolutely right. I mean, if you would've asked me even just a couple years ago, could a advertising customer use Amazon shopping signals to drive a sale and another retailer, to feature it in the creative and feature a click-through, I would've said, you're bonkers. And it just shows the maturation and how we're working backwards from our customers to really focus on we have what we feel is a market-leading DSP, and so they need to be able to do everything they can on any other DSP on it. And so that's just one example of them being able to do just that, where do they need to drive sales that's most beneficial for their business outcomes and for their customers, and we can help them do it.

Sky Canaves (07:03):

So as we're looking ahead into a 2026, right around the corner, I want to ask about what you see as some of the challenges that you're facing in the new year or the brands and customers that you work with.

Kolby Capelouto (07:15):

We view every challenge as an opportunity, and our priorities align directly with our advertisers' challenges. C-suite are consistently focused on two areas, and that's efficiencies and business growth. So efficiency and effectiveness are the number two words that I've heard all year long, doing more with less.

(07:36):

A lot of customers are thinking about how they can use Amazon Marketing Cloud to enable clarity and high-fidelity measurement across all their DSP media. And it also allows for really robust audience insights that allow them to inform product development and make broader business strategic decisions. Business growth always is key, and it's tough to balance efficiencies and growth, but we help them problem solve through data-driven insights and really focusing on these measurable outcomes.

(08:04):

When it comes to Omnichannel Metrics, the challenges that we're going to be trying to tackle next year are how do we tie this into Amazon Marketing Cloud? So right now this lives in the DSP, but you're unable to create audiences off of the Omnichannel Metrics to action on. You can optimize, but you can't actually create audiences like you can in Amazon Marketing Cloud.

(08:25):

So getting it integrated into the Amazon Marketing Cloud is a key focus for us, and then continuing to understand how our customers are using this. With every new product feature, there's new use cases and there's new ways to drive efficient business outcomes. And we stay very, very close with our customers, and we work backwards from what we're hearing from them, and we go and build it.

(08:43):

So it's truly exciting. In my 20-year career, I have always enjoyed building, but to be able to truly invent and innovate something new that's first to market for all these industries has been incredibly exciting, and there's a really broad and smart team behind all this.

Sky Canaves (09:00):

And do you see differences in categories and the challenges that brands in different categories face? We know consumer sentiment has been shifting and there are some that are doing better, others that are not doing better. Amazon is continuously expanding the range of categories it focuses on or that it sells in from grocery, food and beverage, fresh produce to automobiles now. So how do you see that playing out across different categories and in terms of what the challenges that the customers or brands that you work with are doing?

Kolby Capelouto (09:35):

The challenges are pretty uniform across the board. I don't want to distill it too much. The challenges are uniform, and they get back to what I had mentioned. Brands have to do more with less. The pie is shrinking and how do they drive more efficient business outcomes with that, and that's why they're taking a really hard look at their media investments and saying, how can I invest that same dollar and have it be more quantifiable and drive better business outcomes than it was doing in years prior?

(10:00):

When I think about our store, and I can't speak on behalf of our store's business, I'm in the ads business, but one thing that always reigns true is that selection and pricing is going to win the day and customers will choose that any day. So I know our stores team continues to innovate in that area.

(10:15):

In our ad business, and you mentioned this in our last episode, we're really hyper focused on every advertiser being able to drive business outcomes no matter where that may be. So we have a group of advertisers that sell products on Amazon. Those are some of the industries that I represent, also CPG, grocery, and a couple other ones.

(10:35):

But then we service a lot of advertisers that don't even sell a product on Amazon. So this can be in financial services. This can be in quick serve restaurants, in travel. Automotive, we're doing a lot of great work there. You're starting to see that bleed into the Amazon store with what we're doing with Amazon Autos.

(10:51):

But those customers come to us for the exact same reasons that our customers that sell products in the store do. They want to have access to our rich audiences, which we think are bar none. They want to have access to a market-leading DSP that has all the same inventory they can get elsewhere, and then this rich data clean room and Amazon Marketing Cloud that allows them to truly understand what those dollars invested are doing for them.

(11:13):

So that constitutes a large portion of our business today, and we're going to continue to invest and focus across both scopes of advertising sets.

Sky Canaves (11:24):

Now in addition to the challenges, I want to turn to talking a bit about what you're looking forward to or most excited about in the year ahead. I heard a lot of the announcements coming out of Amazon on Box last month, and there were a lot of innovations, and it sounds like a lot of the advertisers were very excited by some of the new initiatives. So what are your big takeaways for what's next for Amazon Ads in 2026, and particularly as it pertains to durables and other emerging categories on Amazon?

Kolby Capelouto (11:54):

When we think about digital marketing, it's really a three-prong approach. You have to have the inventory. You have to have the audiences and understand who you're trying to reach. And then there's a critically, I think, underserved component of that, and that's the third piece, which is in creative. And that's been very challenging for advertisers because, A, it can sometimes be cost-prohibitive. When you think about some of these brands that might sell thousands of different products, they really have to focus on their hero products.

(12:22):

And so what we're really focused on is democratizing access to creative, building and creative assets, and so we're doing that through our creative agent. And this was the thing that I took away from our annual conference a couple weeks ago in Nashville on Box is we've launched Creative Agent where brands can go in, they can create really robust TV-ready video creative. They can create audio creative and display creative using AI. And it's very advanced in terms of getting very descriptive and tailored to those customer needs and how they want to be able to project their brand, but it allows them to have the breadth to start supporting a lot more of their products through the DSP to drive these business outcomes wherever they may occur.

(13:05):

And so for me, that's the most exciting part because I think that the industry, or at least from our perspective, has been really hyper-focused on audiences and inventory, and now making it easier to transact actually free for our advertising customers is going to be a huge unlock, and I'm excited to see what they do with it now that they're able to support all the products that they make for their customers.

Sky Canaves (13:27):

So that would be also offering the opportunity to create new assets or new campaigns for specific audiences in addition to products that can become even closer to personalization of advertising.

Kolby Capelouto (13:44):

That's exactly right. I mean, however deep and broad they want to go, they can. So when we work backwards from our audience insights and what we can learn from Amazon Marketing Cloud, along with information we can get from our analytics and insights team, you're spot on. They can create very specific audiences to go after and have hyper-tailored creative to speak to those customers and set up an array of campaigns to support it across all their products.

(14:08):

So that's also helpful for our end customers, our shopping customers or the advertiser's customers, because now they're going to be spoken to in a way that really resonates with their behaviors and their interest as these brands are trying to get more personalized and speak with them.

Sky Canaves (14:24):

Well, 2026 will certainly be an exciting and interesting year for Amazon Ads and Omnichannel Metrics. And thank you, Kolby, again, for joining me for the second part of our conversation.

Kolby Capelouto (14:36):

Oh, it's been absolutely my pleasure, Sky. Thanks so much.

Marcus Johnson (14:38):

That's it for today's episode. Thank you so much to Sky and Kolby again for the conversation, and thanks, of course, to the whole production crew for putting this together. And thank you to everyone for listening into this special EMARKETER podcast miniseries, A Blueprint to Better Measurement, made possible by Amazon Ads.