JPMorgan's marketing chief says Amazon is a real challenger to Facebook and Google in digital advertising

(Getty/John Lamparski)

Amazon is sharpening its assault on the ad business, and big-name advertisers are starting to take notice.With product and search ads on Amazon.com, and its data on shoppers being used to run display ads all over the web, the Seattle-based e-commerce giant is increasingly becoming top of mind for advertisers. In fact, its ad business is already worth over $2 billion.

"I think that they are a force to be reckoned with, they are excellent with everything they do," said Kristin Lemkau, chief marketing officer at JPMorgan Chase. "You have to do business with Amazon."

Lemkau, speaking at the Association of National Advertisers' Masters of Marketing Conference on Thursday, said she sees Amazon as a potential challenger to the Facebook-Google duopoly in the digital advertising space.

"They take customer obsession seriously," she said. "And I think they feel like the first big, emerging advertiser that can be grouped with Facebook and Google."

"They have a search engine, a programmatic stack, premium content and one of the top five apps," she told Business Insider in an interview later. "And they are the biggest consumer company in the world today."

Lemkau also addressed the issue of brand safety, which has been foremost on the minds of marketers over the past year. JPMorgan Chase, in particular, has been vocal about the issue of branded content appearing next to inappropriate or violent content online.

It stopped working with YouTube earlier this year, for example, when the platform was in the thick of its brand safety controversy, and also pulled its ads from NBC in June, ahead of an interview Megyn Kelly did with controversial guest, Alex Jones.

"Performance is important, but at the time, we didn't care about the performance," she told ANA chief Bob Liodice. "We were putting a stake in the ground that we were not going to support fake news."

She also mentioned how before the company decided to crack down on fake news, its ads were running on 400,000 plus websites, but getting clicks from merely 12,000. JPMorgan Chase then restricted those sites to just 5,000, and is currently on its way to limiting its display ads to about 10,000 approved sites.



"We cull it all the time, but this is something incumbent on brands themselves to figure out."