Amazon, Zappos, Endless, And Me

About two years ago, I was hired by the now-nearly-defunct agency Fly Communications to build and run their fledgling media buying department, which is to say, a group of people who make decisions about where advertisements appear. The reason Fly suddenly needed a media department was because their client, Amazon, had asked them to place the online ads that Fly was in the process of creating. These ads were meant to drive traffic to various new Amazon properties, including Amazon Grocery (which still exists, though, now as then, it doesn’t really have its own brand), Amazon Unbox (a weirdly named video download service that has since morphed into the much improved Amazon Video On Demand), and Endless, Amazon’s online shoe store, an obvious competitor for Zappos. Read the rest of this entry »