Amazon’s vision for a full-funnel retail media future

Retail media is no longer confined to the point of purchase. As brands adapt to a more complex customer journey, the focus is shifting to strategies that span awareness, engagement, and conversion.

Ahead of his keynote at Retail Media Pioneers, Rudolf Schneider, Director of EU Account Management at Amazon Advertising, sat down with ClickZ to discuss Amazon’s full-funnel approach, the role of streaming and connected TV, and how emerging technologies are shaping the next phase of retail media.

ClickZ: Amazon has been at the forefront of retail media in Europe. How would you describe your team’s role in helping brands succeed in this space?

Schneider: Our approach to retail media is built on Amazon's strong foundations in this area, and our ability to drive and measure conversion. The role of my team is to focus specifically on helping brands grow through data-driven insights that optimize their retail media strategy and deliver them results.

You can see how this approach has evolved over many years, from the introduction of Sponsored Ads on the Amazon store to the more recent expansion of our full-funnel advertising supply which includes Prime Video ads, third-party supply like Disney+, Fire TV, Twitch and the open web. This evolution reflects our customer obsession at Amazon, where we start with the customer and advertiser, and work backwards, innovating to anticipate and meet their needs. We've spent many years building shopping experiences that customers love and trust, and when done right, advertising can enhance those experiences.

ClickZ: You’ve spoken about a “full-funnel future” for advertising. What does that mean in practice for Amazon Ads?

Schneider: We believe a brand's success in retail media will be determined by reach, relevancy, and measurement, so the future of full-funnel as we see it is a holistic strategy that connects retail media and the open internet.

What sets Amazon Ads apart is our ability to transform interest into purchases by making discovery seamless and engaging. Our full-funnel approach helps advertisers reach customers throughout their entire journey, from building awareness on streaming TV to driving consideration with display ads and ultimately converting interest into action. This approach is for advertisers of all sizes and types - from enterprise to SMB, those that sell in the Amazon store and those that don't.

And the data backs this up. Amazon Ads has conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis of over 3,000 Amazon Brand Lift studies, showing that combining Amazon DSP display ads and video ads drives a 2.2x higher brand awareness lift compared to using video ads alone.

ClickZ: Retail media is often associated with conversion. How are you helping brands extend their strategies into upper-funnel activities like awareness and engagement?

Schneider: We're looking at this in a few ways. First, we're actively expanding retail media beyond just conversion. By leveraging streaming TV offerings, particularly Prime Video ads, we help brands reach engaged audiences through premium content. This enables advertisers to drive marketing and brand goals using our ad tech solutions.

When you combine our scaled audiences and premium content with our trillions of first-party signals across Amazon O&O and 3P supply, we uniquely understand what audiences want to buy, providing immense value for our advertisers.

Second, for building awareness, brands can use the Amazon DSP with our trillions of first-party signals to reach audiences through Prime Video, live sports, premium publishers like Disney+ and Channel 5 in the UK and Twitch. Our ad tech integrates these campaigns across multiple services, creating touchpoints that provide unique insights into audience preferences along the customer journey.

ClickZ: Connected TV, social commerce, and streaming are becoming integral to advertising strategies. How do these fit into your full-funnel approach?

Schneider: Connected TV, social commerce, and streaming partnerships play an important role, and we focus on helping advertisers of all sizes access these channels, whether they sell products on Amazon or not.

Through Prime Video ads, brands can connect with engaged audiences watching premium content like Clarkson's Farm and Champions League, reaching over a third of UK adults monthly.

What makes these channels especially powerful is how they work together. Through our first-party signals across shopping, browsing, and streaming behaviors, we help brands connect with relevant audiences throughout the customer journey – from discovery to purchase.

ClickZ: Measuring success beyond last-click attribution is a challenge for many advertisers. What solutions are Amazon Ads offering to help brands evaluate effectiveness across the funnel?

Schneider: The future of advertising success measurement lies in understanding how every touchpoint contributes from initial awareness to final conversion. Our approach goes beyond traditional ROAS and last-click models.

I'll touch on two key measurement solutions we offer. First, Amazon Marketing Cloud helps brands measure outcomes across the funnel. It lets brands analyze their campaigns across multiple channels by combining their first-party data with Amazon's signals for deeper customer journey insights and custom audience building. Second, our multi-touch attribution quantifies each touchpoint's value, showing a 24% increase in attribution for Sponsored TV compared to last-touch methods.

Both these tools help brands visualize their top-converting paths to purchase by analyzing aggregated interactions and seeing how upper-funnel awareness tactics impact downstream outcomes.

ClickZ: Many brands struggle when putting full-funnel strategies into practice. What common mistakes do you see, and what advice would you share?

Schneider: When implementing full-funnel strategies, it's common to see challenges where marketing and online retail teams need to collaborate closely, especially when they are not accustomed to this.

We often hear that the path from awareness to conversion has never been more complex, and it's true. It's difficult to know where customers are in their journeys, and hard to understand marketing impact on sales. That's why our goal is to make it easier for advertisers to connect and show them how powerful their strategies are when these areas of expertise work toward common goals.

ClickZ: As retail media matures, are you seeing changes in how brands allocate their marketing budgets?

Schneider: We see more brands moving to full funnel planning, which is leading to holistic marketing budgets instead of distinct brand and e-commerce budgets.

There are some good reasons for this: retail media requires full funnel planning and measurement, and new ad formats blur the distinction between brand and performance advertising.

One example is our new interactive ads, where viewers can click an "Add to cart" or "Get email" button with their remote. This sends a push notification or email to the customer that links directly to products or brand stores on Amazon without needing the viewer to leave the stream and has been shown to deliver a 28% lift in Purchase Rate compared to non-interactive ads.

ClickZ: Emerging technologies, particularly AI, are transforming advertising. How is Amazon Ads using these tools to optimize the customer journey?

Schneider: We're really excited about the emerging technologies that are transforming how brands understand and optimize the customer journey.

With every AI tool we build, our goal remains the same: to make the advertising process easier and improve results for brands of every size. We've already built a suite of AI tools that make it easier for brands to plan, onboard, create and optimize campaigns, and over 50K advertisers using them already in the first quarter of this year.

We're also using AI to increase relevancy of advertised products for customers, make sure ads meet their needs, and help them in their buying process with tools like Brand+ and Performance+, which bring predictive AI directly into campaigns and turn real-time behavioral signals into smarter, faster outcomes.

We’ve also introduced contextual keyword targeting which allows brands to use the latest AI models to place ads on Amazon properties and third-party sites with targeted or closely related keywords, such as placing a smartwatch advertisement next to an article on gadgets.

ClickZ: Looking ahead to your keynote at Retail Media Pioneers, what do you hope the audience takes away from your session?

Schneider: The key takeaway is that retail media is evolving beyond just the point of purchase, and brands need to also have a presence on streaming services and the open internet, and they can benefit from thinking, planning and measuring more holistically when it comes to their marketing mix and supply strategy.

We've seen this through the tremendous response to the introduction of Prime Video ads, which comes not only from brands that sell in our store but also from those that don't, such as financial services brands, travel companies, and car manufacturers, and the outcomes they are seeing.