Amazon.Com - Amazon.com Dominated The Holiday Shopping Season, 2000

Amazon.com DOMINATED THE HOLIDAY SHOPPING SEASON (2000)

According to AdRelevance, Amazon.com was the most advertised company on the Internet for eight out of nine weeks during the 2000 holiday shopping season. Its $61.8 million ad budget for December led the pack in Internet advertising, with nearly 3 billion ad impressions. Barnesandnoble.com was a distant second with $23.8 million spent on Internet advertising in December. Amazon.com advertised on more than 100 Web sites, but it made an effort to dominate on the top sites. The top five sites it advertised on were MSN, AOL, Netscape, Juno, and Excite, where it was the number one advertiser on four of those sites and the number three advertiser on Excite.

Amazon.com employed brand recognition as well as direct marketing advertisements in its campaign. Before the holiday season, only 5.3 million of the company's 275.3 million ad impressions were direct marketing impressions. By the end of November, Amazon.com had begun to place more emphasis on direct marketing impressions. During the last week of November, Amazon.com ran 320 million branding impressions, compared to 212.8 direct marketing impressions, in an effort to achieve immediate results. Each direct marketing ad had 4 million impressions, while each branding ad had 750,000 impressions.

Perhaps Amazon.com 's most important partnership of 2000 was its online joint venture with Toys 'R' Us, which had been struggling to develop its own online strategy. For the 2000 holiday shopping season, Amazon.com and bricks-and-mortar retailer Toys 'R' Us joined forces to create Toysrus.com. The alliance was announced in August 2000, with the newly created Toysrus.com to select and purchase the toys using its parent company's clout, while Amazon.com would run the store on its Web site, ship the products, and handle customer service. The venture played to the strengths of both companies, and it paid off in a big way for the 2000 holiday shopping season. According to a report by Nielsen/NetRatings, the joint site was the number one online shopping site during the holiday season with 123 million visitors. Coming in second with 21.12 million shopping visits during the season was rival eToys, followed by Dell.com with 21 million visitors, Barnesandnoble.com with 20.25 million visits, CDNow.com with 20 million, and Walmart.com with 18 million.