CES 2025: Key insights & announcements to support your annual planning conversations

Each year, CES serves as the kick-start to annual media priorities and investment conversations for brands. The event showcases innovative solutions from retailers and tech providers bound to shape the industry in the coming year, prompting advertisers to think critically about where they plan to invest next year across every element of commerce.

Key announcements & what they really mean

Flywheel & Amazon announce a first-to-market agreement to extend a brand’s AMC purchase look back data to 5 years

What it is:  

A first-to-market agreement between Flywheel’s digital commerce platform and Amazon that will expand Flywheel’s purchase data look back visibility into AMC from 12.5 months to 5 years.

What need does it solve?

While a year might seem like a sufficient into consumer purchases, we live in a world of “BOGO” promotions along with a longer consumer purchase cycle. This limited look back prevents brands from accessing the full data needed to track the long-term value of a consumer at both the product and portfolio level.

What it means for brands:

With access to this data, Flywheel can leverage its proprietary software that calculates customer value to look back five years and benchmark a point of market entry (POME) for a specific product. Flywheel then calculates the cost of acquisition against the five-year purchase history and see how customers’ conversions expand to additional selections across the brand portfolio.  

For example, for a company who sells household products, the data may show that consumers often start with hand soap, and over the course of several years expand their purchases to floor cleaning and food storage products. Understanding this broader purchase behavior gives increased flexibility to the cost to acquire a new customer given their greater lifetime value.

Breaking it down further, this allows brands to:

Unlock the true customer journey

• With a five-year look back, advertisers can get a much more complete picture of how a customer has behaved throughout the purchase journey. With this understanding, brands can calculate the true business impact of customers.

Inform future audience strategy

• Using the data from the five-year look back, advertisers can analyze these outputs and model against them to inform which sequence of product purchases delivers the maximum lifetime value.

Automate deployment to optimize media investment

• We're building toward audiences that can be seamlessly deployed through Flywheel Commerce Cloud and implemented as bid modifiers within Sponsored Products campaigns based on these models. These bid modifiers will be used to optimize media investment weighted toward the sequence of products that maximizes company lifetime value.

Additional thoughts:

It’s important to note that this data is strictly purchase data. It won’t include metrics like impressions. Because it’s AMC data, this means that we’re not relying on samples, panels, surveys, or statistical models. We can look at a precise, true total census measurement of how an entire group of shoppers interacts with your brand over the long-term.

For many brands, converting one-time customers isn’t enough to drive sustainable growth, and many assume a “halo effect” to quantify lifetime value of customer acquisition. With this advancement, advertisers no longer need to extrapolate this value but can calculate it directly using real data.

Overall, planners can build and deploy strategies that will enhance customer value across all Amazon Ad Products - including Prime Video, Amazon Sponsored Ads, and Amazon DSP - to maximize marketing effectiveness and business return.

Read more here: https://digiday.com/media-buying/at-ces-omnicom-media-group-strikes-extended-search-data-partnership-with-amazon-via-flywheel/  

Amazon Ads launches Amazon Retail Ad Services

What it is:  

A new service built on AWS that allows retailers to incorporate Amazon’s ad tech into their online stores. If participating retailers choose to make their advertising offerings available via the Amazon Ads console and APIs - this makes it easy for Amazon advertisers to discover additional opportunities to scale their reach. It also simplifies managing ad campaigns across multiple retailers with consistent reporting and optimization tools.

What problem does it solve?

For retailers, the integration of Amazon’s ad tech allows for the quick scaling of advertising efforts, opening up an additional revenue stream from advertisers. The ability to meet customers along the path to purchase opens the door for increased sales and customer loyalty over time. If this service expands to offsite placements, this could drive awareness for smaller retailers competing in the dynamic commerce landscape.

What it means for brands:

“Too many Retail Media Networks” has been a hot topic for some time now and for good reason. Brands have been bombarded with tens to hundreds of platforms to invest within, leading to the fragmentation issue that every retailer and tech provider is trying to solve.

While the retailers in beta here are small, the integration of Amazon’s ad tech allows brands to manage campaigns and reporting across multiple sites, heading toward a solve for fragmentation across networks. Most brands are familiar with advertising via Amazon, eliminating the learning curve of a new platform as well as the frustration of trying to pull together reporting across retailers.

*It’s important to note that while the data is available within the Amazon Ads console, it is not currently part of the existing Sponsored Products API reports – there is a new endpoint that needs to be integrated with to pull this data in.

As one of the first to test the service – the results have been encouraging thus far. We’re seeing high ROAS and achieving placements with modest bids. There’s a clear early mover advantage for brands willing to advertise across these retailers, reaching previously untapped audiences and building on the consumer path to purchase with contextually relevant ads that increase engagement.

Additional thoughts:

It's clear Amazon plans to be more than just a retailer and a retail media network – they are seeking to extend their offerings across the entire commerce ecosystem and across the full funnel.

We’ll have to observe on the above for the time being, but it will be interesting to see how advertisers perceive a retailer offering advertising infrastructure to other retailers versus true tech providers (who are not retailers) offering the solution. We expect to see further consolidation across retail media networks and encourage brands to continue to evaluate which networks drive the most return.

Read more here: https://advertising.amazon.com/library/news/retail-ad-service-announcement  

Omnicom & TikTok launch first-mover solution to drive consumer discovery and advertiser decision-making

What it is:

A capability that identifies search trends in real time based on organic search queries within TikTok over a defined period. This capability provides Omnicom’s full-service influencer agency, Creo, access to insights that will enable more precise decisioning during influencer discovery, improved content briefing to influencers during creative ideation, better paid search outcomes and enhanced discoverability for influencer content through organic search.

Creo first analyzes trends and scale of organic search keywords on TikTok across a defined timeframe to then build data sets against the brand brief and audience that are activated in the Omni platform. These data sets are matched in real time to a list of creators in the TikTok Creator Marketplace that will inform content briefs for enhanced organic search discoverability and for paid search strategy development and optimization.

What’s the opportunity?

Social is becoming the search channel of choice among Gen Z and Millennials. Influencer recommendations, visual content, and a seamless search experience have propelled the rise of search and shopping on social media platforms amongst younger generations.  

This evolution from leveraging social media as an entertainment and learning hub to an engine of influencer-based search and purchase unlocks new data-driven search strategies for brand growth.

What it means for brands:

Search strategy precision

• Data-driven insights will enable more precise influencer discovery, relevant content, paid search outcomes, and enhanced organic search discovery.

Uncovering cultural impact

• Connecting directional search trends to the elements of culture that impact audience behaviors and preferences on social media platforms.

Optimizing influencer & paid search spend

• By integrating organic search trends into influencer content briefings, brands can extend the life of assets and maximize both social and search value.

Omnicom & Google launch AI-powered solutions to supercharge search

What it is:

Omnicom Media Group and Google have co-developed two new solutions leveraging AI technology:

Share of Voice Planning

• Provides insights into a client’s share of voice based on search query volume relative to that of competitors.

Next Generation Search Agent

• Takes data from the Share of Voice planning tool, the Omni Search Data Lake & Omni Audiences to create keyword, targeting, and assets (text, video, image) recommendations.

What problem does it solve?

Brands often lack a baseline understanding of their top of mindedness for consumers as measured by relative share of voice in their competitive set. To date, such insights in search have been limited and tools to action on such information were lacking.

Google provides keyword data that reveals brand query trends. Client query volumes can then be compared to competitors, unlocking key insights into brand share and untapped demand. Teams can now identify relative brand lift and compare against category query trends, with opportunity to correlate and compare this approach to traditional planning.  

The Next Generation Search Agent constructs new keyword sets, recommending new audience and affinity targeting based on Omni Audiences that have been fused into Google. Then, the agent - based on Gemini - develops creative outputs including text, imagery (Imagen), and video (Veo) that best align to customer intent.

What it means for brands:

Understanding brand share

• Using search query volume, brands can understand brand share against their competitors. With this data clients can adjust investments within search and beyond to increase relative share of voice. Additional inclusion in OMG’s Anomaly Detection tool is to come.

Discovering untapped demand

• The pairing of Intelligence from the SOV planning tool paired with the Next Gen Search Agent can inform the search team of which branded keywords should be targeted.

Improving ROI with GenAI Creative

• Good or Excellent Response Serach Ads generate 12% more clicks & conversions. Brands can accelerate the go-to market search strategy and activation timeline with the speed and intelligence of OMG's AI agent.

Omnicom & Roku leverage partnership to leverage content searches for enhanced audience insights

What it is:

Leveraging viewer searches on Roku’s streaming devices and connecting data from Roku and Omni via a clean room connection can reveal much richer audience insights – including program, content, genre, performer-specific searches and more. This enables more precise media planning, relevant messaging, and as a result, more effective outcomes for clients from their CTV spend.

In a privacy safe way, OMG sends brand-specific Omni audiences into Roku’s clean room. There, that audience is matched to users and households (via email/device ID) and layered with Roku’s anonymized and aggregated search data on the most searched programs, content categories, genres, performers, etc.  

With this data advertisers can see in aggregate what users are searching for, and that can be indexed across the average Roku audience. This can be done at the program level and can be levelled up to genre/contextual category. This data can then be used to inform advertising spend and content decisioning (such as tentpole sponsorship selection), tailored creative messaging, and contextual optimization.

What problem does it solve?

OMG’s proprietary research has shown that 38% of consumers already leverage Smart TVs for search. Understanding how a brand’s core customer interacts with media is critical to effective investment planning and developing effective video campaigns.

Until now, brands have only had a partial view on how their customers interact with CTV, making it that much more difficult for advertisers to optimize media planning and audience targeting, and deliver the most relevant messaging.

What it means for brands:

Informing investment decisions

• Using these net new search insights, advertisers can identify contextual categories and tentpole events such as Olympics and the Grammy’s favored by their target audience, informing upfront and investment decisions.

Audience enrichment with search behavior

• With this data, clients can segment their audiences into deeper categories based on the type of content they most enjoy rather than treating them as a singular audience. This allows brands to craft unique messaging based on these unique within-audience cohorts.

Connecting linear & streaming behaviors

• Using Omni Assist, advertisers can compare how their audience searches for content on streaming devices to viewing content on linear devices. This enables brands to better optimize their investment between linear and streaming to maximize engagement and reach.

These announcements are game-changers for commerce, and we’re excited to dig into the data and implement the value each launch into our client’s businesses. Cheers to CES 2025, and we’re looking forward to CES 2026!

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