Amazon Devices Brand Studio: Wrangling Cross-Functional Teams Into Wins Across Customer Journey
I joined Amazon’s Devices Brand Studio as a Creative Director, Content Strategy in April 2020 and was later promoted to Global Head of Content Strategy. My five-person team shaped the narratives and GTM strategies for new devices and services launches across product lines, including global new-to-world and next-gen product launches from household names Alexa, Echo, Kindle, Ring, Fire TV, and others, as well as newer subscription service launches, including Amazon Luna cloud gaming and Amazon Halo health/wellness wearable.
My team co-owned our briefing process — the Product Marketing Guide — the master docs outlining the overall business goals and strategy, and the creative assets and marketing levers needed to deploy and reach them. These launches often involved hundreds of stakeholders.
Our strategies are shaped by deep auditing and competitive analysis, and outline how that narrative would be expressed across channels in the customer journey — app, product page, category page, educational page, gateway/Amazon.com, email, social media, PR, blog, broadcast, and marketing real estate from various other internal partners (Prime Student, Amazon Music, Prime Video, Amazon Fashion). This required real-time harvesting and analysis of customer journey data to ensure creative was driving acquisition, engagement, and conversion across the funnel. The Amazon Devices Brand Studio, and especially the Content Strategy Team, was at the cross-roads of more than 20 different product lines, and by managing centralized editorial calendars and insights, we could identify synergies and efficiencies in storytelling, production, and marketing, as we strove to tell a holistic, portfolio-level “Amazon Devices” story. We wanted our brands to break out of their silos.
This was a new way of thinking at Amazon Devices, which was previously siloed and focused solely on the product detail page. But through demonstrating and communicating our omni-channel successes, we changed entrenched processes at one of the world’s largest producers of devices and services.
Those wins include cross-product marketing campaigns for the Amazon Devices sustainability and accessibility narratives, which included all products and services in the org. Due to the centralized nature of the team, Content Strategy led XPL campaigns.
Below, see our first sustainability campaign, including a 0:45 spot, Earth Day landing page, and two voice AI UX:
“Alexa, let’s get sustainable”
“Alexa, plant a tree.”
After the success of the XPL sustainability campaign, we embarked on replicating it at a much larger scale, with a new campaign to help the People With Disabilities community. This campaign included a new landing page, including UXs for each cohort in the PWD community — vision, hearing, mobility, speech, and learning. We also developed and produced 10 videos — a 0:45 hero spot, inclusive of multiple product lines and features, aimed at the entire PWD community. Plus nine other 0:15 clips aimed at specific PWD cohorts and the features the Amazon devices and services org is building to help improve their lives. See below.
The accompanying $1.2MM marketing campaign to connect these videos to customers included pre-launch market testing, followed by targeted spends with the Amazon Display Ads network, focusing on Prime Video and Freevee (OTT), various online video placements (OLV), a paid social media blitz, and omni-channel O&O campaign across Amazon’s web of levers.
Another exciting project that my Content Strategy team owned: sending Alexa to the Moon aboard Artemis I, the first of several NASA missions intended to land the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon. Alexa later joined the mission as part of Callisto, a technology demonstration payload embedded into NASA’s Orion spacecraft and built in collaboration with engineers from Amazon, Cisco, and Lockheed Martin. The rollout involved close and confidential collaboration with NASA and Lockheed Martin. We built an educational landing page and 0:45 hero video, supported by an O&O marketing and PR blitz with media buys across Amazon social channels, plus and O&O campaign across Amazon’s levers. After launch in November 2022, we captured BTS content with Amazon and NASA engineers, as well as celebrities… including Nick Jonas!
Over three years, my team managed and contributed to a variety of projects for the devices and services org, from a launch video for Amazon’s first home robot, Astro, as well as as additional behind-the-scenes clip focusing on the technology that went into it (see below). We also helped with the messaging strategy and UX flow for Amazon Luna, the new cloud gaming service. We produced playful instructional videos for the Alexa and Echo social media teams (see below), and delivered strategy and copy for all Alexa’s Trust Marketing initiatives, across web and app.
We also ran strategy and GTM for the new Echo Studio, collaborating with Amazon Music to feature the artist Breland (see below).
