American Express Debuts Amex Ads Digital Advertising Platform

American Express has introduced a digital advertising platform dubbed Amex Ads.

Announced Monday (Oct. 6) the platform is designed to let brands connect with the company’s 34 million consumer card members in the U.S.

Starting on AmexTravel.com and ultimately moving to other Amex-owned platforms, “brands can serve high-spending Card Members relevant, contextual ads in the moments they are likely to engage, shop and spend with the brands they love,” Amex said in a news release.

The program is meant to build on the “foundation of relevant value” brought about by the company’s Amex Offers, which drove $15 billion of spending at merchants last year.

“Powered by American Express Membership and building on the success of Amex Offers, Amex Ads harnesses the power of our direct relationships with Card Members and brands to benefit both,” said Alexander Drummond, executive vice president and general manager for membership portfolio services at American Express.

“With Amex Ads, brands can reach Card Members with relevant content at exactly the right time, while maintaining the privacy, security and trust our Card Members expect.”

According to the release, American Express piloted the program earlier this year with brands like Marriott Bonvoy, Macy’s and TUMI to develop campaigns that targeted Card Members with relevant, contextual ads as they reserved trips on AmexTravel.com.

For example, Marriott Bonvoy used Amex Ads to reach and convert card members who had reserved a flight on AmexTravel.com but had not booked a hotel.

“Leveraging Amex’s first-party transaction and travel booking data, Marriott achieved results 3x higher than its target benchmark,” the release added.

The launch of Amex Ads follows Mastercard’s recent debut of its Commerce Media network. As PYMNTS wrote last week, this service will “use insights from permissioned data to deliver personalized offers and content to consumers, and it will use proprietary card-linking technology to attribute conversion and incrementality for advertisers.”

As reported here last year, credit card use can provide granular insight into buying habits and help lengthen the lifetime value of customer relationships, helping make advertising ever more personal in nature.

More recently, PYMNTS explored the way retail media networks are seeing greater momentum as they leverage first-party data and cultivate partnerships across commerce ecosystems, serving benefits from data about what people buy and how they shop.

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