I recently posted on LinkedIn about the death of Rufus.

Rufus was all the buzz for awhile for a couple of reasons.

AI seems to be everywhere these days and not without good cause. It has the potential to make all of our lives a little bit easier by taking the mundane things off of our plate so that we can focus on the things we like.

There are grand promises of taking everyone's jobs. It has taken some. It's anticipated to turn large companies into one man shows. It's done some of that too. But I don't think we're there yet. And all of that is fear based, a place in which I choose not to dwell.

Anyway, the point of my post was that Rufus was just a top layer that lived under Amazon's approach to search queries and the logic behind how they served listings up to customers. They were aiming at getting better results for the customer.

Amazon's always been customer centric. What is their mission statement? To be the most customer centric company in the world. Anytime Amazon does something, I always like to reflect back to their mission statement and their values. What's more customer centric than serving up a search result because Amazon believes a person's more likely to convert based on search intent?

Now that Rufus is dead, Alexa Shopping, built around Alexa Plus, is taking over. Amazon is moving into a more integrated approach to GenAI in search, one that actually takes more of the customer in mind based on it's history with Amazon. I honestly think that's amazing.

AI goes haywire when it lacks context. The most contextual thing a search engine could receive as inputs are history of purchases, your preferences, and your data.

What does that mean for us brands and agencies that are trying to win on Amazon?

People are scared we won't be able to pay to get in front of people anymore. We're going to lose our ability to influence customers and only big brands will win. I disagree.

Paid placements are a big deal for Amazon's bottom line. Those aren't going away. I'm anticipating bid modifiers showing up in the ad console for "Alexa Shopping." It hasn't happened. I believe it's coming. 

The main thing is...

Don't panic. Watch what else Amazon does. They've done a great job of managing their ecosystem up to this point, dramatically improved seller relations, and continued to grow their business. 

Stay curious and test everything. Anything Amazon puts out, give it a whirl. See if it works and if it does, find a way to expand that into your current strategy or approach to Amazon.

Keep moving forward.

My content often centers around the three distinct categories of Amazon’s business: Catalog, Creative, & Advertising. This is your tasting flight of smaller yet no less delicious samplings of the Amazon ecosystem. Today’s Flight focuses on upcoming promotions and events.

Amazon said back in April that Prime Day will be in June this year. Why the change? Maybe it’s to help investor relations and make their bottom line look better. Or they may just want to keep people on their toes and throw off other retailers who are competing with them. Either way, you want to participate because it’s an opportunity to build more sales velocity, faster than your competitors. Also, it’s probably gonna be a Prime Week. So be prepared.

These custom audiences are becoming really powerful. You can target people who have higher intent, i.e. someone who added my product to their cart and have purchased from you before, improving efficiency in ads and your bottom line. Work with your tech provider, which their are plenty of, to start creating these audiences now so you’re prepared post event.

Create audiences for people who have Added-to-Cart but haven’t converted. This is your key audience you want to target post Prime-Day. They’ve shown interest, likely clicked on your ads (so you’ve paid for them), and now it’s time to bring them home. Test audience creation to make sure you have enough people. You can run this audience now, if you like. Audiences can update regularly, in which case your post Prime targeting audience would automatically start to include these promo curious people.

Banana everything has my attention. Even just plain old bananas are amazing. One of my favorite places my family and I love to visit is Disney World. The food and drink is so so good. Disney’s newest Vacation Club villa at Disney’s Polynesian Island Tower has a restaurant called Wailulu Bar & Grill. They have a banana old fashioned that I wanted to recreate at home. It’s delicious, luxurious, and comes with a beautiful view of the water. This is that drink. It’s fire. You’re welcome.

Every two weeks I release a new podcast episode that talks all about the future of retail. This is the most recent one.

Being a Founder is hard. There are an endless barrage of obstacles facing you at any given moment. Doing that with a Co-Founder, well that often feels harder because now you've got two people who need to make the decisions: two people who aren't always on the same page.