In 2023, Amazon Ads launched The Spark—a film series spotlighting the inspiring, human stories of founders and entrepreneurs of SMB brands. Many B2B case studies tend to adhere to a formula, both in content (rote recitation of challenge-solution-results) and in style (corporate settings, talking heads). With The Spark, our intention was to re-imagine the case study format—anchoring it to a human story and giving it a cinematic treatment.
As part of this series, we featured the story of Chicago-based brand Nyssa, which focuses on women’s health. Nyssa emerged from its founder Eden Laurin’s experience of the “fourth trimester”—the months after childbirth when a mother’s body is recovering, which is often not talked about. Nyssa was created to address the absence of health products for women at this time—as well as to erase the taboo around discussing women’s health issues.
The goal of our video was to spotlight the important mission-driven work Nyssa was doing, while also demonstrating how Amazon Ads enabled the brand to increase awareness (and thereby drive conversation around women’s health products) as well as to drive sales (helping the business grow). Specifically, we aimed to show how Amazon Ads can help SMB brands achieve their missions. Our bet was that we could better advance our own awareness goals by taking a story-led approach to a traditionally informational format. Ultimately, the Nyssa video and The Spark series helped improve key perceptions of the Amazon Ads brand and drove efficient traffic to our website.
One of our business priorities in 2023 was to drive awareness and adoption among SMB customers. Beyond growing awareness levels across markets, our primary goal was to increase saliency, as defined by improving the areas that most inform advertisers’ decisions—statements such as “helps grow my organization’s business,” “has an audience in a mindset that is receptive to brand messages,” “is a trusted partner,” etc. We measured success through multiple brand lift studies, as well as content engagement and efficiency metrics (total reach, website traffic, CTR, CPC, time on page, etc.).
To improve key perceptions among your audience, your audience must first engage with your content. Accordingly, our main challenge was to develop a series concept that could break through the clutter—one that B2B audiences would actually want to watch. To do this, we took inspiration from film, TV, and online video, and curated elements of entertainment. Ultimately, we arrived at a cinematic, human, narrative-led case study format—one that appealed to the heart, not just the head. This concepting phase—defining parameters, identifying structure of films, determining creative look and feel—took several months. Additional challenges included getting internal buy-in for this approach (moving away from traditional, product-led formats); sourcing customers with compelling stories; developing a cross-channel distribution strategy; and the typical video production hurdles (e.g., changing locations on the day of filming).
In 2023, The Spark series—and the Nyssa video, specifically—helped to deliver against our goals of improving key perceptions and driving traffic to the Amazon Ads website. Using brand lift studies, we determined that our videos led to 3x increase in key perceptions vs. our goal (measured in percentage points). These included key perceptions of “is a trusted partner,” “reach my target audience,” “provides first-party insights,” “has a receptive audience,” and “has upper-funnel capabilities”—adding context to generic awareness level metrics. We also saw double-digit lifts in consideration among key audiences, including agencies and brands that don’t sell products on Amazon. Regarding traffic, our paid media campaign that featured the Nyssa video delivered 3.5x CTR vs. benchmarks, at half the benchmark CPC—proving that our content resonated with our audience, while driving efficient clicks. The Nyssa video also saw the highest traffic of any content on the Amazon Ads blog in 2023. Equally important was the qualitative feedback we received. Eden Laurin, the customer featured in the Nyssa video, said: “It is INCREDIBLE! Secretly I was stalling on watching because I hate seeing myself on film (I never watch interviews), but this is beyond!”
