There are two types of Amazon sellers.

The first group of sellers struggle to attract new customers, often failing to influence shoppers to buy their products, and do not have in play a strategy for building loyalty and repeat business.

The second group of sellers consistently dominate their chosen niches.

They have committed themselves to exploring new ways to communicate and engage shoppers. This enables them to magnetically attract relevant audiences, effectively motivate them to purchase, and keeps their brand top of mind when seeking similar items in the future.

With today's short “squirrel!” attention spans, video ads have moved centerstage as one of the most powerful ways for any Amazon seller to draw shoppers to their product listings. Videos are an excellent means for explaining a product's features and value proposition when compared to static images alone. Video ads also provide an immersive shopping experience specifically designed to address the Decision phase of the customer buying cycle.

What Is Amazon Video Creative Builder?

Amazon’s Video Creative Builder enables sellers to make striking video ads easily (even without existing creative assets), or to augment current ones (overlay text, add Amazon co-branding like a logo or a product line image).

The Video Creative Builder is ideal for sellers/brands that don't have the capacity or technical skills to create videos on their own. It can also be used by brands that don’t sell on Amazon* and is free.

*Sellers who don’t sell on Amazon can still use templates to upload their creative assets in order to entice shoppers to their homepages.

The Video Creative Builder provides sellers with a selection of ready-to-use customizable templates and branding elements with which they can:

  1. choose a standard landscape format
  2. use square-shaped video ads (for social media campaigns), without the need to edit the orientation of the ad to make it compatible with a different format,
  3. assemble common Amazon listing features (Prime-eligible badge, product details, current star ratings, etc.)
  4. change elements like the background, description, and images,
  5. add new products and features, or seasonal promotions,
  6. A/B split test multiple versions of videos, experimenting with different messaging to meet brand marketing goals.

Video Builder (beta) Now Available for Sponsored Brands Video Ads

Another video building resource for sellers is the Amazon Sponsored Brands Video Builder, a new self-service tool (currently in beta) that permits sellers and vendors to easily create 15-second video ads for their Sponsored Brands placements. Sellers can utilize a range of customizable templates, rather than having to upload their own assets and provide videos to Amazon.

These video ad templates can be edited by color, product images, uploaded lifestyle images, various music options, fonts and copy from detail pages, to reflect the brand story and the product line’s unique selling proposition.

Sellers should use the Video Builder to showcase their products (within the first 5 seconds) in ways that demonstrate a problem or unfulfilled desire, and clearly communicates to shoppers how their product(s) solves it.

Sponsored Brands video ads should also be optimized for ‘sound-off’ viewing because they auto-play silently, continuously looping when done.

Once published, Sponsored Brands Video Ads can appear within search results on both mobile and desktop, helping to drive brand awareness and discovery among new audiences.

Sponsored Brands Video Now Links to Amazon Stores

The Video Builder is an important tool for Amazon sellers, because the videos that sellers create with it can now be used strategically to increase brand reach, better engage shoppers and lead them to a seller’s Amazon store when shoppers click on their video ads.

Sellers can now connect traffic from their Sponsored Brands video ad format campaigns to their Store on Amazon, enabling shoppers to discover and explore their entire product catalog and brand story without any competitive distractions or offers.

Data released by Amazon indicates that sellers who linked their Sponsored Brands campaigns to their Amazon Store experienced, on average, that shoppers remained twice as long when visiting their Stores, and their product detail page views rose by 55%, while sales increased by 15%.

In the past, existing Sponsored Brand video campaigns leading to a product detail page only served below the fold in shopping results. An additional benefit for sellers who link their video ads to a Store is exclusive access to high-visibility, premium Top of Search placements, that aren’t available to video ads that link to product detail pages.  

Sellers should note that Top of Search placement for video creative is restricted to sellers who have created Store campaigns, giving them more unique opportunities for ad placements, when compared to other static ad formats.

"Creatives" Create Cash

The Video Creative Builder and Video Builder for Sponsored Brands provide the perfect means and opportunity for those sellers who have struggled with video creation in the past, to easily create effective ads with ready-to-use customizable templates.  

Videos carry with them a distinctive power to captivate, engage and persuade shoppers (to click the Buy button), unlike any other form of static advertising. They vividly reveal the backstories of products and the brands behind them.

Entourage: Software to Scale Amazon Ads and Results Driven Management.

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