ABOUT

In three years, Amazon's Ads brand has reached many marketing audiences and grown into one of the company's most profitable verticals. But there was one audience Amazon Ads had yet to connect with: small business owners. Code and Theory partnered with Amazon Ads to develop a strategy and campaign that would convince this independent-minded cohort that a so-called corporate competitor could actually be a colossal collaborator.

The objective was easy to say, but challenging to achieve; this campaign had to build awareness against entrenched category competitors, strike up an allyship with a skeptical audience, and convince prudent business owners actually to sign up. It would take a big idea to bring it all home.

For one of the world's biggest brands to reach its smallest businesses, we knew our campaign would have to speak a shared language: hard work.

We dove into the research to discover what small business owners were really saying. Focus groups, social listening, and the latest economic data revealed a community in need of ad solutions that work hard and work fast. Just like them.

99% of businesses nationwide are classified as small, and the average owner works 2x the hours of the average employee. In short, this was a massive audience with little time to waste. We needed a story that could reach broad, land fast, and hit hard.

The answer was 'Ads That Work as Hard as You Do' — a creative platform that promised small business owners Amazon saw them, heard them, and had the ads to help them grow.

The line spoke to both power and partnership, honoring their hard work and promising to match it every step of the way. It all came to life via a visual metaphor focused on the one thing every business owner cares about: customers.

The campaign brought to life a world where hardworking ads bring new customers closer than even small business owners would dare to dream. It was arresting, immediate, and needed no translation. And above all, it positioned Amazon Ads' brand as the faithful ally — and business owners as the indisputable hero.

Amazon Ads' foray into the world of small business advertising helped smash expectations for its Ads unit, with an annual revenue of $49.9 billion dollars. This was an increase of 24% relative to the previous year, helping Amazon Ads crack a mighty new marker of success; in total, Amazon's brand represented over 10% of global digital ad spend worldwide.

The campaign results speak for themselves.
- +66% Unaided brand awareness.
- 700,000 website visits in less than three months (a 108% leap over the benchmark).
- 818m global impressions.
- Reaching across channels, the campaign drove the greatest clickthrough rate on the social network small business owners frequented most: LinkedIn. And the campaign saw success worldwide, with sweeping improvement in our site visits benchmark; we saw markets from the UK to Germany boast rates +254% and +190% over the benchmark, respectively.

Brand manager Mallory Foster said, “Given that this is the first large-scale campaign Amazon Ads ran against a brand new audience, we are excited that so far this campaign has exceeded our expectations in terms of site visitations, video engagement, and brand.”