Most brands treat Amazon retail media as one budget line, when it’s really three or four very different tools with very different payback. Some reliably earn their keep. Others are close to money set on fire. The difference rarely gets interrogated closely enough before the spend goes out.
Where Amazon ad spend reliably pays off
Sponsored Products defending your own branded search terms is close to the safest spend on the platform — you’re paying to stop a competitor sitting above your own listing on your own brand name. Spend supporting a genuine new launch, timed tightly to the first few weeks when the algorithm is still learning who to show your listing to, also earns its keep reliably.
Where brands waste budget
Broad-match Sponsored Products spend left running untouched for months is the single biggest source of waste — it drifts onto irrelevant search terms and nobody notices because the top-line spend number looks consistent. Display spend aimed at competitor product pages also underperforms far more often than the pitch decks suggest, unless the category has a genuinely undecided shopper at that specific point in the journey.
A simple test before you commit spend
Before approving any line, ask what specific shopper behaviour this spend is trying to change, and how you’ll know within two weeks whether it worked. If nobody can answer both parts of that question, the budget is going to a habit, not a strategy — and habits are exactly where retail media spend quietly leaks away.
Not sure your Amazon and retail media spend is earning its keep?
Steven Woodgate, Founder, Emmer Green — former Head of Category (Technology), John Lewis & Partners; former senior commercial leadership roles at Samsung, Dell Technologies and Microsoft.
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