A new Amazon-focused advertising firm wants to capitalize on the company’s growing streaming business.
Gigi is a startup that aims to enable brands to buy streaming video ads on Amazon and measure their effectiveness. Co-founder and CEO Adam Epstein said the goal is to help brands shift their TV ad dollars to Amazon’s ecosystem by leveraging Amazon’s wealth of data on what people buy and watch online. He said Gigi will initially focus on enabling brands to buy Prime Video ads through programmatic technology.
Amazon’s Prime Video has had a major impact on the TV advertising market since it launched its ad layer in January, with Wall Street predicting that Prime Video’s ad-supported tier will generate $7 billion in revenue this year.
“We see an opportunity in this narrow use case,” Epstein said. “We think there are a lot of problems to solve. A lot of people are trying to shape Amazon’s streaming TV strategy.”
Adam Epstein, co-founder and CEO of Gigi Gigi
Gigi wants to make it easier for brands to use Amazon’s ad tech
Gigi built its technology on top of Amazon’s demand-side platform, the tool advertisers use to buy programmatic ads, and Amazon Marketing Cloud, a data clean room advertisers use to measure their ads and gain insights about their customers. One challenge for advertisers using Amazon’s streaming TV ad formats is that they are harder to track sales compared to Amazon’s core search ads, which are often credited with driving sales because they are measured using last-click attribution.
Epstein said Zizzi’s goal is to get more brands to use the combination of Amazon’s DSP, which tracks last-click attribution for digital ads, and Amazon Marketing Cloud, which tracks brand metrics like awareness when targeting and measuring Amazon’s TV ads.
“This kind of entry into AMC is difficult,” Epstein said.
Epstein also said it’s difficult for advertisers to run SQL queries (or questions) using AMC’s technology without deep technical expertise. Zizzi has an application programming interface (API) for the Amazon Marketing Cloud that brands use to create lookalike audiences for ad targeting. The company also provides advertisers with detailed metrics like the incremental reach of TV ad campaigns, Epstein said.
With third-party cookies going away, Zygi’s pitch is that it will leverage brands’ first-party data to create more effective Amazon ads. Zygi uses a brand’s own first-party data to track a key metric called “new-to-brand” to find people who bought a product for the first time after seeing an ad. Amazon also offers this metric to advertisers, but Epstein said Amazon’s data only looks at whether someone bought a product for the first time on Amazon. In theory, Zygi could target first-time buyers not only on Amazon but also elsewhere, such as the brand’s own e-commerce site. For example, Shopify merchants could analyze Shopify website data and Amazon data to find target audiences for ads.
Gigi wants to work with an agency
While the majority of Amazon’s ads are bought using its traditional shopper marketing budget, Epstein said the company is focusing its TV ad budget.
These ad buyers are shifting their budgets from linear TV to streaming. Epstein said Zizzi’s clients are the ad agencies that handle most of the ad buys for TV networks, but he declined to name them.
Epstein is a former executive at Perpetua, an Amazon-focused ad tech company that was acquired by Ascential in 2021. Omnicom acquired the assets of Ascential’s e-commerce business, Flywheel Digital, in 2023.
Zygi’s investors include Golden Ventures, Aperium Ventures, Hercules Capital and angel investors including former ad tech executives turned investors Mike Baker and Roscoe Hill. Epstein declined to disclose how much funding Zygi has raised.
Epstein said Gigi has 10 employees and plans to hire more.
