Amazon is not just a huge emerging advertising player — it is also spending boatloads on its own ads

Jeff Bezos

Amazon is the largest programmatic ad spender, according to a recent study by MediaRadar.
Amazon accounts for more than 10% of the spend of the top 50 programmatic advertisers alone, and spends 1.5 times more than the next biggest programmatic spender, Microsoft.

Amazon isn't just raking in ad revenue, it's also spending considerable ad dollars itself.

The e-commerce giant is the biggest programmatic ad buyer, according to data crunched by MediaRadar, a New York-based advertising intelligence company. Amazon accounts for more than 10% of the spend of the top 50 programmatic advertisers alone, and spends 1.5 times more than the next biggest programmatic spender, Microsoft.

Specifically, Amazon ran digital ads across more than 1,300 different sites in the first quarter of 2018. In that time, Amazon advertised over 100 different products and services digitally and ran display, video, native, and mobile ads.

"Amazon is pouring billions into marketing, and a big piece of that pie is dedicated to programmatic," said Todd Krizelman, CEO & Co-founder at MediaRadar, declining to give more specifics about Amazon's ad spending.

Despite pitfalls, major brands are pumping lots of money into automated digital ads

Programmatic advertising is the automated way marketers buy ads across thousands of websites online, relying on algorithms that determine the best possible pricing and the best time to run a campaign.

MediaRadar used its sales intelligence platform to examine over 76,000 brands placing ads programmatically, scrubbing through data across across ad exchanges like AppNexus and OpenX, programmatic exchanges like Nativo and Sharethrough as well as ad buying platforms such as Google's DoubleClick, MediaMath and DataXu.

The firm also compared the spending of brands in the first quarter of 2018 with the first quarter of 2017 to determine any year-over-year changes. According to this data:

94% of the top 50 programmatic spenders in Q1 2017, like Walmart and Verizon, were running programmatic placements again in Q1 2018.
Further, three-quarters or 75% of all brands tracked placed digital ads programmatically in Q1 2018.

"Despite concerns over transparency, advertisers continue to invest in programmatic," said Krizelman. "It is the preferred method for transacting media for many advertisers and it doesn’t appear to be changing."

He isn't wrong. More than $46 billion will be spent on programmatic advertising in the US this year, according to eMarketer and 86.2% of all digital display ads will be bought via automated channels by 2020.

Here are the the top 10 programmatic advertisers, according to MediaRadar's data: