I don’t know about you but Amazon is far more a part of my life than I care to admit. Amazon is on my TV. It’s on my phone. It’s often on my doorstep..at least a couple times a week. In other words, I’m at peak Amazon! So to my surprise I’m here writing about the company….in my defense, at least I’m somewhat reluctant about it.

As we all know Amazon is big, really big. In terms of market value, Amazon is the second largest company in the world and it’ll likely hit $1 trillion soon. Given that Amazon is already so much a part of my life, I actually don’t pay that close attention to all the news about the company. I mean it is endless. But despite this my eye did catch a surprising headline- ‘Amazon Sets It’s Sights on the $88 billion Online Ad Market” -from Monday’s New York Times.

Google and Facebook dominate the nearly $100 billion online ad market. But ad dollars are starting to be diverted from these giants of the digital ad market to the giant of online shopping, Amazon. The reason why I’m saying that Amazon is likely going to play well in online ad buying (in the title of this post), is due to the fact that Amazon.com is kinda, sorta like a classified ad section of your local paper. I can imagine everyone doing a big eye roll at that last statement but bare with me.

Years ago, as many of you likely remember, the classified ad section was a huge source of revenue for newspapers. But even today, at Mediabids, we have print advertisers that generate tens of thousands of calls a year from classified liner ads alone. The reason is because the classified section is still where people go to shop.

Now consider this quote in reference to why Verizon sees Amazon as a good place to advertise (even though Verizon doesn’t sell anything on the Amazon site):

”It’s where the shoppers are. They have people who are in a shopping mind-set, so that’s valuable for Verizon to be seen as a resource within that mind-set,” said John Nitti, the chief media officer at Verizon.

Amazon has 100 million Prime members and judging by how often I see Amazon boxes on my doorstep (and Amazon’s market value) there’s a lot of shopping going on.

This is a long way of saying that publishers need to be thinking in terms of being places ”where people shop.” Brands are increasingly becoming performance marketers and performance marketers are migrating to the publications and platforms that offer the best places to reach people in the ”shopping mind-set.”