Amazon is experimenting adverts with personalised video, showing clips featuring images and text about products the US retailer has detected the user has shown interest in.
Previously Amazon showed customised static display ads on third-party sites, but the videos have the potential to be more eye-catching and appear in more places.
The new dynamic video ad unit lets the advertiser create thousands of versions of an ad on the fly, in Amazon’s case by using graphics templates.
Each advert will be different, pulling together subjects based on what Amazon’s algorithms have detected that the user is interested in seeing more of.
Speaking to the BBC, Graeme Smith, managing director of Amazon’s software development centre in Edinburgh, said: “This is something we’ve only experimented with at very small scales. They have been out there in the wild.”
Smith would not say where the video ads had appeared, but said the technology was something Amazon was excited about.
Anil Gandharve, Associate Vice President, Mindtree, commented on the move: “Personalised services have the real potential to shake up the retail sector as we know it. Those retailers such as Amazon that succeed today, will be those that are not constrained by what has always been done, but embrace new technologies that create a seamless service for the customer.
“However- personalisation can go one step further than tailored and bespoke advertising. The retail technology of the future will be one where the very needs of the shopper are predicted in real time, with analytics and algorithms predicting their every sale. Smart, predictive technology will be able to transform the shopping experience and generate sales leads.”