Custom advertising on Amazon: from your own ad images to bespoke campaigns

Custom advertising on Amazon can mean three different things, and they suit very different businesses. Custom creative is available to most brands in self-service campaigns. Fully custom campaigns come from Amazon Ads' Brand Innovation Lab and need a large budget. And Amazon Custom is not an ad product at all, but a program for selling personalized products that you can then advertise.

For most brands, custom advertising starts with Sponsored Brands. Amazon Ads describes Sponsored Brands as customizable ads featuring your brand logo, a headline, a video or lifestyle image, and multiple products, shown at the top of and within shopping results, on product detail pages and on the homepage.

The formats are collection, Store spotlight and video, and ads can link to a product page, a simple landing page, a custom landing page or your Brand Store.

Sponsored Brands is open to sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry, vendors and agencies. That makes Brand Registry the real entry ticket to custom creative for a seller.

Display ads use the product image from the detail page on a white background by default. Amazon Ads lets you replace it with a custom product image: your own graphics, with background colors and art direction that tell the brand and product story. Amazon says one rectangular image, which you can also crop to a square, lets the ad serve in up to 12,000 size variations.

The ad keeps the elements that help it perform, such as the star rating, product title, price and a Shop now button, and still links to the product detail page. Custom images can be reused across sponsored ads programs, though each is reviewed against the display ads moderation policies. Amazon lists the feature as available in the US and nine other countries.

At the top end, Amazon Ads' Brand Innovation Lab is a global team of strategists, creatives and technologists who build bespoke campaigns with brands and agencies. Its campaigns can reach customers across Prime Video, Twitch, Alexa, Amazon Music, Fire devices and more, and Amazon says that if an idea needs something that does not exist yet, the team builds it.

This is not a seller tool. Amazon says programs require working with an ad consultant and are subject to a required minimum spend, production can take from several weeks to several months, and brands do not need to sell on Amazon to use it; the Lab has worked with auto makers, movie launches and financial services. It is available in 17 countries.

Amazon Custom is the program many sellers mean when they search for custom products on Amazon, and it serves customers who want something made for them: a name on a gift, a logo on a mug, a set of options they choose themselves.

It lets customers tailor your products from a list of options or with their own text, images or logos, for engraving, embroidery, bundles and more. Customized products appear in their Amazon departments and in the Amazon Custom store, where shoppers go to find customizable items. Amazon also points out that customers understand customization takes time, and that stating production and delivery times clearly protects your performance metrics.

To join, you need a Professional selling account; Amazon says approvals are typically emailed within an hour of registration. Each product can use every customization type, up to five surfaces with 15 customizations per surface, and up to 100 options. Products must be new, you must be the only seller on the listing, and you fulfill orders yourself with Fulfilled by Merchant tools.

Custom creative earns its place only if shoppers respond to it. The way to learn that is to change one thing at a time and compare performance metrics over enough time for the numbers to settle: the same products and targeting, a new image or video, and a few weeks of data.

Each metric answers a different question. Click-through rate shows whether the creative stops shoppers in search results. Conversion rate shows whether the page they land on delivers what the ad promised. Return on ad spend shows whether it pays.

And because Sponsored Brands is built for discovery, Amazon highlights sales from customers new to your brand on its Sponsored Brands page; that information tells you whether the creative reaches a new audience or only people who already know you.