September 24, 2025

'Humble and hardworking': Amazon pitches to be Oz ad ecosystem's full funnel friend

31 minutes

Welcome to a midweek update from Unmade, dropping a little later than usual to accommodate the reporting embargo around this afternoon’s Amazon’s Upfronts.

Further down, Vinyl Group shares sink to a 12 month low.

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‘We are ready now’: Willie Pang on Amazon’s entry into the Australian advertising environment

What was most notable about this afternoon’s Upfront with Amazon Australia was not so much the content, but the fact that they decided now is the time to hold such an event.

This week was something of a coming out moment for Amazon’s local operation. It seems like longer ago, but Amazon only launched its Australian website in late 2017, with a local Amazon Ads team starting a couple of years later.

This week was the most industry-facing Willie Pang has been since becoming Amazon’s country manager two years ago. On Monday we recorded the podcast interview published alongside this post. Yesterday he presented the keynote at REmade, our retail media conference. And tonight he was on stage at Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion, talking to the biggest industry audience Amazon has yet addressed in Australia.

As Pang put it in our interview: “It took us a couple of years there to build, to scale, and we feel like we are ready now.”

The increased profile is a function of the inexorable progress being made by Amazon. Back in 2023 it passed the threshold as Australia’s most visited online retail destination. And last year, came the big move - the arrival of an ad tier on Amazon’s Prime Video.

Unlike other streaming services, the default for users is that advertising tier. That instantly made Amazon one of the biggest players in Australia’s connected TV ecosystem.

In our interview, Pang claims a five million total audience, although I think I detected a reticence to expand on where that number comes from. That was answered in this afternoon’s presentation, with the asterisk “Amazon internal”.

Pang said there have been talks with ratings body OzTam. Good. I suspect the market will want independent audience verification.

Amazon’s challenge now is to get that audience actually watching more Prime Video content.

That was a shortcoming revealed at tonight’s event. It was an upfront with very few local upfront content announcements. We already knew that Amazon has the ICC cricket and NBA basketball rights. The only new local announcements were a second season of comedy drama Deadloch and an as-yet-untitled AFL documentary from the production team behind Netflix’s F1 series Drive to Survive.

Prime’s content strategy is global rather than local.

Not returning, by the looks of it is the Australian edition of workplace comedy The Office. The reviews for the first season were rotten.

Instead, the focus was on Amazon’s claim to all parts of the marketing funnel, backed with some tech updates. “Full funnel” was the most frequently used phrase of the afternoon.

Pang also appears to be coming to the market with more humility than some of the players Amazon is seeking to displace (Cartology in the retail media space, and Google in the online space spring to mind). Says Pang in our interview: “We would love for brands, marketers, agencies to perceive us as firstly, humble and hardworking. And second, that we’re here to deliver incredible results and value.”

He repeated the words “humble and hard working” on stage this afternoon too. That’s a smart position. The message: ‘We can do the same stuff as Google and Meta but we’re nicer’ might well resonate locally.

I suspect that the market will soon be talking about Amazon’s demand side platform Performance+ campaign optimisation tool and its audience discovery tool Brand+, in the same breath as Meta’s Advantage+ and Google’s Performance Max. The naming convention certainly suggests that’s the aim.

Amazon’s DSP now extends across premium partners including Netflix along with Prime, the Amazon retail platform and the company’s live streaming platform Twitch.

A decade ago, the conversation was what Amazon would do to the market when it finally arrived. Without a shadow of a doubt, Amazon is now here.

Vinyl Group hits one-year low

Music publishing and platforms company Vinyl Group took the biggest tumble on the ASX today as its share price fell to the lowest point in more than a year. Vinyl lost 4.4% to land on a market capitalisation of $119m.

Meanwhile Southern Cross Austereo lost 1.7% and Ooh Media lost 1.6%.

Among the broadcasters, Seven West Media had the best day, gaining 3.7%.

The Unmade Index lost 0.21%, closing on 477.6 points.