Th3 Core

Other than the books category in every category Amazon has entered with a big announcement that crashes the stock prices of competitors it has thusfar been a stock buying opportunity for the likes of Walmart, Target, Kroger, Walgreens Boots, CVS, etc.

Target has made billions selling their private label brands just like Amazon.

If they are copying the ad stuff online then that's going to be basically free money for the offline retailers.

“We’re making sure that when consumers are typing in ‘ketchup’, our product is really above, that it comes up into that first screen,” Nina Barton, Kraft Heinz president of global online and digital growth, told Reuters in an interview.

Won't those who make such comments ultimately end up bidding against themselves?

What is the point of the category-leading brand building investment over many years if you also then have to pay again on every search?

I am not faulting retailers for doing it.

I was only suggesting the 2 themes / narratives are sort of counter to each other here:

• we have to invest hundreds of millions or billions into brand building to drive demand
• if we are not the first ad visible above the fold on cell phones we have lost

One or the other can be absolutely right, or they can both be sort of true, but they can't both be absolutely correct.

Either the brand building works well enough to be sought out, or it doesn't and paying by the click for prime real estate makes sense.

Also online video ads are a big growth market. How much sense does it make to buy a bunch of video ads for brand recall if at the moment of search on any retailer a competitor is buying perhaps both the generic terms AND in some cases any branded terms where you spent a ton of money on brand ads to drive the awareness and demand.