Amazon aims to expand its advertising business by letting retailers use its ad tools in their stores.

According to cnbc, Amazon is letting other retailers use its homegrown advertising tools to run sponsored ads across their own websites.

The new offering, called Amazon Retail Ad Services, allows companies to show, quote, contextually relevant ads in the right place at the right time, end quote, in search results, product pages and other areas of their site.

Amazon said with Amazon Retail Ad Service, users will be able to customize the design, placement and number of ads shown across their sites, as well as use Amazon's ad measurement and reporting tools.

The service operates on systems that are separate from its own retail business and retailers manage their data, no surprise via AWS accounts.

And what do you think of Amazon's new retail ad service?

I think this is a smart pivot for Amazon.

I actually really like this and the reason is because we had Robert Joe, will you help me pronounce his last name?

Joe?

I want to say Joe Jose is the basketball player that I cannot, who's my eternal enemy.

Also, side note, my brother texted me last night and said that I, I said Jackson Smith, I said Najiba and it's, I did not pronounce it right.

He's like Ann, you've got to get your sports people's names right.

You said Jackson Smith and Najiba in the Seattle Seahawks video we did at Lee and Field.

I did not pronounce his name right.

Thank you for fact checking me a month later and Jokic is the next one that I'm going to get fact checked on.

I am certain.

But anyway, back back to the Schwartz Group.

So we were talking to Robert yesterday and I thought it was so, so, so eye opening for me how he explained retail media networks.

I think he's still one of my favorite interviews but the thing that he said is to be successful at retail media you cannot just take your like advertising or media buyers from your retail environment and then make them in charge now of your retail media network, which I think a lot of retailers were doing early on.

You have to operate as a retailer and a media company.

You are essentially replacing, you know, inline media that these media buyers used to to buy.

And not all companies are designed to do this or agile enough.

Gets back to what you're talking about Macy's.

Like they're just not agile enough to do both of these things.

So I think Amazon is providing a solution here that allows retailers like that to get into some of this advertising revenue.

No, it is not ideal because yes, you're still working with Amazon and they're getting some of this information even if they say it's a separate business unit.

But I, that this is still a good place for people to start to see the value that they can get from advertising like this Amazon, this Amazon ads capability and then figure out like, can we build this on our own?

Do we need to find a partner?

Do we need to join another network in order to be successful?

Because there is revenue, a lot of revenue to be made here if you can do this in the right way.

But what do you think about this, Chris?

Yeah, I mean your point, your point about retail media is really interesting because going back to the, you know, I think about what A and M said, like drawing the comparison to marketplaces, I feel like the analogy I would use is marketplaces is more akin to a retailer like, you know, say you're a crossfitter and you want to become a marathoner.

Like, you know, it's, it's not a bridge to, it's not, it's not that different of a muscle use.

But like the idea of standing up a retail media business in a lot of ways for retailers is like, you know, being a marathoner and wanting to become a gymnast.

Right.

It's just, it's just a whole nother thing that you've got to learn how to do.

And so, yeah, I don't have much to add on this story.

I mean the thing to me is just going back to what we said in the second headline, the, the flywheel just keeps on spinning.

Yeah, I mean this is, this is, this is a, a page from the playbook we've seen a thousand times with Amazon selling its tax so you know, which in turn generates more cloud usage.

The flywheel gets going which just keeps making Amazon more and more powerful with every single user.

So, so if I was Amazon, I, I mean net net, I, I absolutely 100 be doing the same thing.

And that's all I say.

I mean it's a no brainer.

Yeah, help out all the online retailers that need to place ads on their site because they want to place ads on their site and they want to do it effectively and they want to get money for it.

Yeah, right.