Yawn 🥱
Earth’s most customer-centric company is coming for your Facebook ad dollars at just the right time. So are its competitors.
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Jeff Bezos has written some good letters in his day. And, so, when the headlines hit Tuesday that he was stepping down as Amazon’s CEO, our first reaction wasn’t to see what he said, but what he wrote.
Sure enough, there was a letter to Amazon employees. With it, this line:
“We’ve done crazy things together, and then made them normal… If you get it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. And that yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive.”
What’s incredible about this isn’t just Bezos’ insight that inventions eventually become normal enough to be met with a yawn. It’s also—to Ben Thompson’s point in his weekly Stratechery article—that the yawn is most associated today with Amazon.
To illustrate his point, Thompson pointed to an anecdote about how Amazon automatically refunds him shipping and customs fees when they over-estimate the cost. (He lives in Taiwan.)
Is there any other company you’d expect this from?
The reason for this, of course, is because Amazon’s mission is to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company.”
As Bezos said in a 2000 interview with Charlie Rose:
“I have been a broken record on this inside the company of asking people to be terrified not of our competitors, but of our customers… What we love is if we’re heads down focused on our customers and our competitors are heads down focused on us. That’s our preferred state of the world.”
Contrast this with what’s going on today at Apple and Facebook, where two other high profile CEOs have reached full-on Mean-Girls-burn-book levels of obsession with dissing each other.
In our view, this is a big deal for brands. And not just because Facebook ad dollars are going to get less efficient thanks to Apple’s privacy push; it’s a bigger deal because Facebook ad dollars are going to start going to retailers, Amazon included.
Before you dismiss the idea, consider this:
Amazon’s ad business grew 64% YoY in Q4. It’s the third largest digital advertiser behind Facebook and Google.
Walmart—just this week—announced the acquisition of an ad-tech business, Thunder, to add to a self-serve advertising portal its rolling out.
Target beat just about every brick-and-mortar retail to the media network game and pitched to brands last year that it has profiles on more than 147 million customers.
None of these retailers, it should be noted, require brands to sell through them in order to access their ad products. And all this at a time when consumers are resetting habits, and narrowing the gap between time spent on Facebook and time spent shopping online.
Perhaps because of their immense scale and offline purchase insights, these three players differentiate their advertising offerings (slide 44) from Facebook today in one key way: Intent. Facebook, of course, is very good at interest. And interest equals discovery, a necessary accelerant for small brands.
But it’s not a stretch, at all, to think that, Amazon, Walmart and Target will elbow their way onto Facebook’s discovery monopoly while Facebook is busy buying newspaper ads. And we’ll probably end up yawning about that.