This past October, I had the opportunity to attend the first Amazon Advertising conference, Amazon AdCon. The event brought together over 400 Amazon advertisers with dozens of Amazon Advertising’s employees. The intensive two-day conference in Seattle where we learned about the present and future of Amazon’s platform.

Amazon Advertising has experienced exponential growth over the past few years. In less than five years, annual revenue from the ad business has grown from less than one billion dollars to over 10 billion dollars. Amazon is now capturing nearly 10% of all U.S. digital advertising spend. To put that into perspective, Amazon is now the third-largest digital advertising business in the U.S. Only Facebook and Google are larger with 22% share and 37% share respectively.

The Future of Amazon Advertising and Amazon Shopping

A recurring theme at the event was Amazon’s focus on moving away from being a product catalog to evolving into a brand shopping experience. The change won’t happen overnight, but Amazon began introducing features that will pave the way for this evolution earlier this year and previewed a couple of new ones at AdCon.

Branded Experiences

Amazon grouped these new and evolving features under a category called Branded Experiences. Five core components are included under this category: Brand Store, Posts, Follow, Amazon Live Streaming, and Sponsored Brand Ads. Many of these features bring a social shopping component to Amazon for the first time that is similar to the functionality found on Instagram.

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