Artificial intelligence
Amazon lets AI generate advertising
According to Amazon’s annual report, Germany was the second largest market after the USA in 2023 with sales of almost 37.6 billion dollars, albeit by a considerable margin. Photo
© Hauke-Christian Dittrich/dpa
Successful advertising is expensive, because reputable agencies charge a lot for their services. Will it stay that way? Amazon offers AI-generated advertising on its marketplace.
“We are only at the beginning, but in the short time since the launch of these features, we already have 30,000 sellers here” (in Europe) who are using these offers,” the US manager told dpa during a visit to Munich. According to Mehta, photos of the products in question are now sufficient in many cases for an AI-generated suggestion for an article description.
AI also takes on creative tasks
In addition, according to Mehta, Amazon AI can also take on creative tasks that were previously a human domain: “So many sellers not only create product descriptions, they also want to promote them. And so we create ads for them. The ads we create have an average 40 percent higher click-through rate.” The latter is a key figure that measures the success of online advertising based on the number of clicks. Before a computer-generated ad is activated, Mehta says, it is presented to the sellers and reviewed by them: “In effect, we create a suggestion for the seller.”
The group’s online marketplace now has two million retailers worldwide, 47,500 of them in Germany and 125,000 in the EU. According to the US parent company’s annual report, Germany was the second-largest market after the USA in 2023 with sales of almost 37.6 billion dollars, but by a huge margin: US revenues were more than ten times higher at 395.6 billion dollars. In addition to online trading, these group sales figures also include other Amazon services such as streaming subscriptions and the operation of cloud data centers.
In terms of volume alone, according to Amazon’s German headquarters in Munich, the 47,500 retailers in Germany sold 750 million products last year, 25 million more than in 2022. Last week, Amazon announced further investments in Germany totaling ten billion euros. Of this, 8.8 billion will go into expanding cloud services, the remaining 1.2 billion into logistics, robotics and two new corporate headquarters in Munich and Berlin.