How does Amazon target ads closely?

Read: What is Amazon doing for poor cities

Amazon is an asset to advertisers for the simple reason that it's already an integral part of how we buy. About half of online shoppers start their product searches on Amazon. But the company also owns Whole Foods, Twitch, Zappos, Audible and IMDb, and sells TVs, tablets, Kindles, Echos – what Helen Lin, head of digital technologies at Publicis Media, calls for going wider. "

In other words, Amazon has a lot of real estate advertising on the Internet, but also information that advertisers use to effectively target ads. He knows, with unprecedented precision and volume, what individual consumers are looking for and buying. He knows where we live because it contains our delivery addresses and can know where our family members live if we use Prime to send gifts. He knows when we write product reviews and what we think about these products. It collects information about what we watch on Amazon Video, what we read on our Kindle, what we listen to on Audible, and what we ask for our Echo speakers. Facebook and Google may know who our friends are, what we read and what we think about politics – but Amazon knows almost exactly where and how we spend our money.

"It's one of Amazon's powers," Olson told me. "They will be able to use more and more data we have on our search history and product purchase history to improve advertisers' return on investment, as well as the experience users." It sends us ads for the products we probably want when we are ready to buy and then allows us to click on these products and, without even having to re-enter our credit card numbers or addresses, ship these products to us. .

It is both disturbing and comforting. We can be marketed all day long (when we read, watch TV, cook a dinner or surf the Internet), but it does not bother us, because the advertisements we see are used to do things we actually do.

Advertisers love this: "This allows a brand to be part of a solution, as opposed to an advertisement," Lin said. But that worries people like Alex Salkever, a futurist, co-author of Your happiness has been hacked, and so-called skeptical consumer of digital advertising. He conducts research on numerous sports equipment and Amazon begins to serve him with advertisements for obscure but attractive sports products. "It was hard not to click," he said. "And that comes from me, I'm used to constantly minimizing my clicks."

Amazon is so convenient and so reliable, and if all overFor example, Amazon invites consumers to sign up for "subscribe and save" offers, in which brands give them a discount on items such as linen. detergent if they agree to get refills of this brand in the future. Amazon has little incentive to use its algorithm to ensure that customers do not get more laundry detergent than their home needs. In addition, there is little incentive for consumers to recommend that consumers leave their phones, computers or tablets and stop looking at the consumer goods they want. As Amazon knows more and more about what we want and need and anticipates our desires, "the system will become more and more capable of pushing our buttons, offering us products and services more and more close desire, "writes Salkever in an essay Fortune.