Sponsored Brands and Video: The Brand-Term Question First

The first question is whether you should be paying for your own brand name at all. On accounts I inherit, brand-term Sponsored Brands campaigns carry 20 to 35 percent of reported ad revenue and very little of it is incremental, because the shopper typing your name was already arriving. The test is a fourteen-day pause in one marketplace with brand-term organic units, total branded search volume and buy box status read daily. Sometimes the pause costs nothing and the budget moves to acquisition. Sometimes a competitor is bidding on you and the defence is real. Either way I run the test before writing a line of creative. Where this format actually earns: Sponsored Brands pays when it introduces a catalogue rather than a product. A product collection ad pointed at a Store page built for that campaign, not at the shelf and not at the brand homepage, lets a shopper who arrived on one term see the three things that answer it. For an edtech catalogue where the workbook, the app subscription and the classroom pack are three separate ASINs, that page is the ad. I build the Store page as part of this work and keep the campaign pointed at it rather than at a list of ASINs assembled by whoever had the file open. Video decisions I make and defend: The product in frame inside two seconds, because the unit renders about a third of a phone screen wide and autoplays muted. 1920 by 1080, no letterboxing, captions burned in rather than relied upon. Fifteen to twenty seconds where the buyer needs convincing, under ten where the brand is already known. Past thirty seconds a brand is generally talking to itself. I write the shot list, direct the edit and sign off the deliverable. I do not own a studio: production is your team's or a crew here in Lisbon that I brief and that bills you directly, with no margin passing through me. Sponsored TV, where it belongs: Where budget and catalogue justify it, the same creative extends to Sponsored TV. It shares the audience layer but not the intent, so it is planned as reach and read as reach. Judging a streaming placement on a fourteen-day attributed sale produces a number that is wrong in a direction nobody notices. How the work is judged: New-to-brand order share and new-to-brand cost per order, compared against the same weeks last year rather than against last month. Where an Amazon Marketing Cloud instance exists I query the path to conversion to see how often the video appears anywhere before a purchase instead of only in the position attribution happens to award it. Not included, and not offered separately: No brand identity work, no packaging, no product photography, no influencer sourcing, no Amazon Live. I will not write a script for a product I have not used or been shown working. Who should look elsewhere: If you have one hero ASIN and nothing to introduce alongside it, Sponsored Brands is a brand-defence line item your existing team can run and you do not need me for it. If the video is for a Prime Day three weeks away, the honest answer is that the creative will be rushed and the result unreadable against the event's own lift; ask me for the quarter after. And if the brand-term test is not something you are willing to run because the reported revenue is already in someone's target, we will disagree in month one and it is cheaper to disagree now.