Amazon has plans to sell digital advertising signage in its bricks-and-mortar stores in its second quarter, documents shared with Business Insider revealed.
The plans also speak of the potential of implementing personalised adverts on the screen of its smart cart, which it calls Dash Carts and also its check-out kiosks.
Smoke screen adverts that appear on the front of glass refrigerator stores are also being considered by the ecommerce giant-cum-physical retailer.
The move is being planned as a way of helping the physical retail stores become more financially self-sufficient, people familiar to the matter told Business Insider.
Since most of Amazon’s physical stores are in the notoriously low-margin grocery business, selling ads could prove to be a meaningful channel of profit for the stores.
“Store lines like Amazon Fresh have business models and expansion plans dependent on advertising meaningfully contributing to their financial profitability,” the document revealed.
Amazon’s physical retail division has not been as successful as first imagined in the US, with the company failing to open more than one cashier less Amazon Fresh grocery store.
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In the UK however, Amazon has opened over 10 locations in London boroughs including Camden, Wandsworth and Ealing.
Amazon’s advertising arm has fast become one of the company’s most important revenue channels, seeing 32% increase in 2021 to $31 billion.
Advertisers are pitched swathes of shopping data by Amazon through its advertising division and they will soon have the chance to purchase the new in-store advert placements through the demand-side platform that Amazon users to sell programmatic ads that appear in connected TV apps and on publishers’ websites.
A large proportion of the company’s ad revenue comes from search ads but Amazon has invested heavily in its demand-side platform to attempt to entice big ad budgets that marketers spend on brand advertising.
“Across all store types … there are opportunities to leverage existing sign types for more engaging ad content,” one of the documents notes.
“There are opportunities to connect to Amazon’s ecosystem of ad formats from Sponsored Products to Store Visit ads or informative content like sponsored recipes.”
“The bigger story is that everybody talks about first-party data. Big brands are never going to have it, but all the retailers are figuring out that they have it,” an executive told Business Insider.