Amazon’s focus on advertising is picking up steam. One sign: In the last few months, agency media buyers say they now hear from the company at least twice as often as they did last year. And more agencies say Amazon is now creating teams to service specific brands — a common tactic for ad platforms as they mature.

Here are the major developments, according to media buyers:

• Amazon is running a series of attribution tests to see how its advertising stacks up against the Facebook-Google duopoly.
• Amazon is testing an application programming interface for Amazon Advertising Platform with a small group of agencies that will let marketers manage more of their programmatic campaigns on their own, enabling Amazon advertising to scale.
• Amazon has significantly grown its agency development group into hundreds of staffers, in a move modeled off the growth of Google and Facebook as advertising behemoths.

The moves all indicate that Amazon is taking its ad business, which is estimated at $2.8 billion, according to latest J.P. Morgan estimates, as a serious growth engine.

via Triopoly time? Amazon preps new attribution tool and courts ad buyers – Digiday