MarketingDojo #66: 🛒 Amazon's Astonishing Advertising Alchemy 📊
How Amazon spends big on its advertising, Liquid Death's creative advertising, avoiding adverbs and more.
Hello there,
I hope this week has been kind to you so far.
In a bid to beat my procrastination and finally send out this newsletter, I've camped out at the local McDonald's. Why McDonald's? The coffee is cheap and robust, and it's a good change of scene from my dull home office, where I work every day.
"Today is our 84th birthday"- The old lady is serving my coffee quips as she slips in a celebratory Biscoff biscuit.
McDonald's opened its first store on this in 1940. Today, McDonald's has over 40,000 restaurants in 119 countries and serves 68 million customers daily, more than the United Kingdom's population. McDonald's has not just mastered the art of making irresistible fries but also built a robust, profitable brand in the cutthroat, quick-serve industry.
If today's newsletter feels like it's on a diet, it is because I have been a master procrastinator recently. I spent all of Saturday in a massive library and over half of Sunday indulged in some Mother's Day pampering.
Now, after my flimsy excuse, here's what we're diving into today:
💰 Amazon math to spending big on advertising
🥤 Creative excellence: Liquid Death v/s sugary sodas
🗜️ Apple's not crushing it this time
✍️ Copywriting gold
And lots more.
Amazon’s Perpetual Money-Making Machine.
Move over, girl math; Amazon Math around the money it spends and makes on marketing has left me mind-blown.
Amazon's revenue from advertising services on its platforms grew to $11.8Bn in Q1 2024, a stellar 24% increase over the same quarter last year.
The aggressive growth of its advertising revenue makes its advertising spending look reasonable.
As the world's largest advertiser, Amazon allocated around $44 billion to advertising in 2023. To put this in perspective, Procter & Gamble, the second-largest advertiser, spends about $8 billion annually. Amazon's quarterly spending alone surpasses P&G's entire annual budget, illustrating the colossal scale of its advertising efforts.
Amazon is the king of taking long-term bets, and its planning makes its advertising spending look reasonable. Here's the money the company has made on advertisements on its platforms in 2023.
The company did not advertise for the first decade and a half of its existence. Around 2012, Amazon decided that marketing and brand-building were levers of its next wave of growth. The twist in the tale? Amazon participated both as an advertiser and as an advertising platform.
In the past 10-12 years, Amazon created a whole new category of digital advertising - Retail media.
Today, the company operates what might be likened to a digital perpetual motion machine in advertising. It defies conventional business strategies by creating a self-sustaining advertising ecosystem that maintains itself and generates surplus value.
Creative Excellence: Liquid Death v/s Sugary Sodas.
I never quite grasped the concept of branding water in cool-looking cans and selling it at a premium, but then this ad from Liquid Death made me question my thinking.
Brands like Coke and Pepsico spend billions of dollars advertising sugary syrups, and I never once find it odd. Talk about hypocrisy.
Liquid Death, valued at $700 million, was founded by former Netflix executive Mike Cessario. The company disrupted the beverage market by packaging water with the same bold, edgy appeal typically reserved for energy drinks. Liquid Death's latest campaign takes a direct swipe at its fizzy, sugary counterparts. The message is clear: soda is essentially just dehydrated sugar water, and contrary to decades of marketing, you won't find models or athletes drinking these in their everyday lives.
Decades of soda marketing are BS. There are many healthy drink brands, but only a tongue-in-cheek brand like Liquid Death could convey a message in its simplest, most direct terms—thumbs up.
Surely, You Can Write Better.
One sure-shot way to improve your writing skills is to skip adverbs.
Why is that? Here's a golden copywriting tip to improve your writing in an instant.
Apple Is Not Crushing It This Time.
Apple's marketing had a rare bad day recently. Its iPad ad, The Crush, created quite a stir in a negative way. Instead of wowing the audience, it left many feeling confused, unsettled, and even angry.
In the ad, art, music, gaming, and more are squished into a compact new iPad. This visual didn't sit well with creatives, who are already anxious about the AI threat to their livelihoods. For them, the ad was a nightmare come to life.
Many termed it the "Worst Apple ad ever." While Apple's marketing head apologised for the ad and said the company won't be promoting the advertisement further, the video has garnered over 57 million views on Tim Cook's X profile.
Two observations:
Familiar Concept, Bad Timing: Compressing music or art into an Apple product isn't new. Remember the iPod's "1,000 songs in your pocket"? But today, our relationship with AI-fueled technology is complicated. While AI promises long-term productivity boosts, its short-term impacts can be unsettling. The timing and the crudeness of the ad's concept worked against Apple.
Tone-Deaf and Ineffective: This ad wasn't just tone-deaf; it was ineffective. It missed the "Apple-ness" we've come to expect. System-1's analysis of the ad confirms the messaging didn't resonate at all.
Overall, this is a minor blip for Apple and the iPad.Consumers will soon forget the advertisement, but it serves as a reminder for us all: Trust in AI and the technological advances that it brings along need more work. That extra dose of empathy is just what the doctors have ordered for brand builders.
Short Stuff:
GAP reinstates its CMO position to strengthen its brand. (Sigh of relief).
TikTok begins to label AI-generated content automatically. (First for its category).
YouTube begins testing using AI-generated ideas for content creation. (AI-generated prompts for humans).
That’s a wrap on this week. Thank you for your time and attention. If you liked this week’s newsletter or found something interesting, please give me a like ❤️ or drop a comment🗨️. Your support helps drive the newsletter's discoverability.
Once again, thank you for your time. See you in your inbox next Wednesday.
Regards,
Garima Mamgain
P.S:
This year has been a complete grind, so I am desperate for some family vacation time.
In June, we are heading to Leh, India. I was there once more than 12 years ago, and I am sure it looks different now. But do you have some tips for me? What have you packed for? Or wish you were better prepared?
I am going with the little one, hoping to see a million stars in the sky. Any stargazing tips for us?
Reach out with your expert advice.