Introducing: Perpetua's Sponsored Brands video Creator

Sponsored Brands video: The sleeping giant has awoken.

You can't scroll through your Facebook or Instagram feed for more than 10 seconds these days without seeing an autoplay e-commerce video ad. Amazon has been slow to jump on the video-in-feed bandwagon, and rightfully so - the search result page is sacred real estate that should not be meddled with lightly.

Sponsored Brands video (formerly Video in Search) started out as a mobile-only ad unit that appeared at the bottom of the search result page. Today, we're seeing Amazon's video inventory expand on web, with placements climbing higher and higher on the page as demand rises. This expansion is evidence that a sleeping giant has awoken, and we will see a proliferation of both paid and organic video inventory become available across Amazon.com, and internationally, over the next year.

Video is a powerful and incredibly efficient communication tool for advertisers. However, video content is notoriously difficult to measure, expensive to create, and often only justifiable for a handful of products.

As of today, the game has changed.

We're extremely excited to announce the release of our Sponsored Brands video creation and optimization tool. Now, directly in Perpetua, you can create and optimize scroll-stopping video ads for your entire product portfolio, in minutes.

The importance of Sponsored Brands video

More and more shoppers are turning to Amazon as their search engine of choice when considering and evaluating new purchases. Sponsored Brands video presents a unique opportunity to put a video right in front of potential customers at high-intent moments in the buyer journey - an opportunity that has never been available on other search engines like Google.

70% of Amazon shoppers never click past the first page of search results. This is due in no small part to the platform’s homogenized product listings—title, price, photo, and star rating. It's very difficult for individual products to stand out on competitive search terms, leading to a veritable arms race of optimizing titles, reviews, coupons, badges and anything else that helps a product stand out.

Video gets noticed.

When scrolling through a uniform list of search results, the impact of an autoplay video is palpable. As human beings we are hard-wired to respond to images and motion. (Our species would have died out long ago had we not adapted to quickly respond to that fast-approaching tiger in the corner of our eye). This means shoppers are more likely to stop scrolling and give your product a second look.

Video conveys more information.

There's only so much you can convey about your product on the search result page with a single product image (on white background) and title. A video by contrast can show multiple product images, product features, and even better, actual footage of your product in use.

Early Mover Advantage.

Based on our tests, Sponsored Brands video appears to operate in a different keyword auction from other ad units vying for search result page placement - Sponsored Products and "regular" Sponsored Brands. This means when Amazon is deciding which video ad to show, you are only competing against other advertisers who are also running Sponsored Brands video ads on the same keywords as you. This pool is limited due to the ad unit's beta status, as well as the perceived barrier to entry for video. For our customers, we are observing solid traffic and low CPC on this ad unit.

How it works in Perpetua: Sponsored Brands video at scale.

Sponsored Brands video currently only supports a single ASIN per campaign. If you want to adopt an approach of running video ads on as much of your product catalog as possible, a strategy that we would recommend, you will now need to launch and optimize at least 2x the number of campaigns that you would have previously. This means the burden of finding the right keywords and making daily adjustments to bids and budgets has now doubled.

But even more significant is the fact that you need to come up with a video creative for each product. The video must conform to Amazon's stringent file format and creative requirements - anything from the wrong bitrate, to the aggressive use of visuals to the wrong choice of language can result in your video being rejected during upload or moderation. Put on top of this the fact that video production has a reputation of being notoriously expensive and time-consuming and you can see why so many brands have not yet adopted this ad unit - in spite of its powerful potential.

When we started building our tool for Sponsored Brands video, our goal was simple - any one of our customers should be able to launch a video campaign for any of their ASINs in minutes. We're proud to say that this is now a reality.

Create video content in seconds.

No video content? Perpetua's preset themes are designed to comply with all of Amazon's creative guidelines and can be customized with your brand logo and colors and with the details of any ASIN - product name, bullets and images. You can create a video for any ASIN in literally minutes. Want an even higher level of customization? Our Creative Labs team can design a custom branded theme for you in 10 business days.

Always-on optimization for Sponsored Brands video

Sponsored Brands video ads are an excellent way to capture new-to-brand customers who are shopping beyond top of search. We've made it possible to incorporate video into your Amazon advertising strategy. Once your video is created, you'll select your goal, set your target ACOS and daily budget, and our ad engine goes to work to maximize the performance of your campaigns.

At Perpetua, we recognize the significance of using motion video to capture search intent on Amazon. We're very proud to be the world's first and only always-on optimizer for Sponsored Brands video ads.

You'll need to be enrolled in Amazon's Sponsored Brands video beta to take advantage of these new tools. If you don't have access, let us know.