About this CFP
Amazon Ads helps grows businesses and brand of all sizes. This mission includes (1) managing advertising for long term growth, (2) measuring incrementality and spillover effects in marketing, (3) helping advertisers take action to leverage online assets, (4) behavioral economics approaches to online bidding, and (5) detection of bias, fraud and collusion in advertising. We welcome proposals related to these themes and offer the following examples of research questions within each theme:
Theme 1: Managing advertising for long term growth
- How do sellers measure their business growth and how does the marketing mix fit in?
- How do advertisers evaluate currently available funnel metrics and how can they be improved?
- How large is the interaction (synergy) between ads focused on different funnel stages?
- How do proposed funnel metrics react to marketing and convert into sales?
Theme 2: Measuring incrementality and spillover effects in marketing
- How to measure the incremental, causal effect of ads on performance?
- How to combine randomized (experiment) with observational data?
- How to scale causal Measurement at Scale?
- How do actions taken in one campaign affect other campaigns?
- What are the spillover and long-term effects of online ads, either within-online (eg online retailers and social media) or with offline?
Theme 3: Helping advertisers take action to leverage online assets
- How to derive insights at scale from unstructured data?
- Audio Ads and podcasts: how to shape advertising in audio?
- When and for which consumers is online video more effective?
- How does giving broader education on ad products increase advertiser performance?
Theme 4: Behavioral economics approaches to online bidding
- How to improve allocation and pricing in bidding auctions recognizing bidders may not adhere to risk-adjusted utility?
- Competitive dynamics: how do payoffs change when competing advertisers adopt advice?
- Should different advertisers get different advice to reduce this competitive cancellation?
- How do U.S. based findings hold up in international markets?
Theme 5: Detection of bias, fraud and collusion in advertising
- How to mitigate bias/ensure fairness in algorithms and decision support
- How to detect highly distributed fraud from relationships between customer accounts
- How to detect suspicious activity masked behind genuine users and IPs
- How to label for human/bot activity using semi-supervised and adversarial techniques
Timeline
Submission period: June 3 - July 8, 2022
Decision letters will be sent out December 2022
Award details
Selected Principal Investigators (PIs) may receive the following:
- Unrestricted funds, no more than $50,000 USD on average
- AWS Promotional Credits, no more than $20,000 USD on average
- Training resources, including Amazon advertising tutorials and hands-on sessions with Amazon scientists and engineers
Awards are structured as one-year unrestricted gifts. The budget should include a list of expected costs specified in USD, and should not include administrative overhead costs. The final award amount will be determined by the awards panel.
Eligibility requirements
Please refer to the ARA Program rules on the FAQ page.
Proposal requirements
Proposals should be prepared according to the proposal template. In addition, to submit a proposal for this CFP, please also include the following information:
- Please list the open-source tools you plan to contribute to.
- Please list the AWS ML tools you plan to use and data you plan to obtain.
Selection criteria
ARA will make the funding decisions based on the potential impact to the research community, quality of the scientific content, and relevance for Amazon Advertising customers.
Expectations from recipients
To the extent deemed reasonable, Award recipients should acknowledge the support from ARA. Award recipients will inform ARA of publications, presentations, code and data releases, blogs/social media posts, and other speaking engagements referencing the results of the supported research or the Award. Award recipients are expected to provide updates and feedback to ARA via surveys or reports on the status of their research. Award recipients will have an opportunity to work with ARA on an informational statement about the awarded project that may be used to generate visibility for their institutions and ARA.