Most premium brands treat Amazon as a place to capture demand, not create it. The listing exists, the ads bid on the right keywords, and the brand waits for shoppers who already know what they want. For a commodity product, that works. For a premium brand, it leaves the hardest problem unsolved.
The hardest problem is consideration. When a product costs $70 instead of $15, shoppers don’t add it to the cart on impulse. They want to understand what makes it worth the price before they commit. A search ad can win the click, but it can’t carry the story that justifies the premium. That’s the gap Amazon video advertising is built to fill.
Why Text and Static Images Hit a Ceiling
A premium brand’s advantage is rarely the lowest price. It’s the story: the ingredients, the craftsmanship, the heritage, the reason the product works better than the cheaper alternative. That story is hard to tell in a product title and a few bullet points.
Static creative can show the product. A video can explain it. For a premium beauty brand, the difference between a shopper seeing a jar of cream and watching the texture, the application, and hearing why the formulation matters is the difference between a browse and a purchase. Category data in premium beauty points in the same direction: video is the format that moves consideration, because consideration is an education problem, and education is what video does best.
This isn’t an argument that video replaces everything else. It’s an argument that, for premium brands specifically, video is the format that does the work the price point demands.
The Three Formats of Amazon Video Advertising
Amazon video advertising offers several formats, and they’re often treated as interchangeable. They aren’t. Each one intercepts the shopper at a different stage, and the value comes from using them together rather than picking one.
Online Video (OLV) runs across the open web and Amazon-affiliated properties like IMDb and Twitch, as well as third-party sites and apps. It’s bought through Amazon DSP. Think of it as video display advertising: the shopper isn’t searching for your product, they’re watching or reading something else, and your brand story reaches them in that environment. OLV’s job is awareness. It introduces the brand to people who’ve never encountered it.
Sponsored Brand Video (SBV) appears inside Amazon search results. When a shopper searches a category term, a video ad plays in the results with the product right there, ready to add to cart. This is the opposite end of the funnel from OLV: the shopper is actively looking, intent is high, and the video does the final bit of persuasion at the decision point.
Streaming TV (STV) runs on connected devices for long-form streaming content. It’s the closest thing to traditional TV advertising, but bought programmatically and informed by Amazon’s shopping signals. It extends reach and keeps the brand story in front of audiences in a premium, full-screen environment.
The mistake is treating these as a menu to choose from. The unlock is sequencing them so the same story reaches a shopper at awareness, holds through consideration, and closes at the moment of intent.
Consistency Is the Multiplier
Running video formats in isolation produces scattered impressions. Running them as one coordinated narrative produces compounding.
The principle is simple: every touchpoint should tell the same story. If the OLV ad introduces a brand’s three core ingredients, the display ads that follow should carry the same message, and the search video should reinforce it. A shopper who sees the awareness video, then encounters a consistent display ad days later, then sees the search video when they finally look the category up, has been told one coherent story three times. That repetition is what builds enough familiarity for someone to spend $70 on a brand they didn’t know existed a month ago.
This is also where Amazon’s targeting tools earn their place. Solutions like Brand+ use Amazon’s first-party shopping signals and AI to find net-new shoppers who are likely to become customers over time, not just people already searching. Amazon Marketing Cloud lets a brand build audiences from its own best customers and find more people who resemble them. The targeting decides who sees the story; the video tells it. Together, they let a premium brand find and educate the right new audience at scale, which is something search advertising alone can’t do.
How We Put This to Work With ELEMIS
ELEMIS, the global skin wellness brand, set an ambitious target on Amazon: 60% year-over-year sales growth in premium beauty, one of the platform’s most competitive categories. With an average price point of over $70, the brand faced exactly the consideration problem described above. Shoppers needed to understand the brand before they would consider it.
The strategy was video-first, built around a consistent three-pronged narrative (scent innovation, regimen, and marine ingredients) delivered across every format. Brand+ OLV drove upper-funnel awareness, finding net-new premium beauty shoppers. AMC lookalike audiences powered display campaigns that carried the same creative narrative through to consideration. Sponsored Brand Video brought the story into search results at the point of highest intent. After Prime Day, Streaming TV extended its reach to new-to-brand shoppers.
The results tracked the thesis at every stage. Brand+ OLV drove a 73% increase in video impressions and a 651% increase in new-to-brand detail page views. The AMC-powered display campaigns delivered a 2x boost in new-to-brand detail page views. Sponsored Brand Video achieved a 53.85% new-to-brand sales rate. ELEMIS grew sales 124% year over year in July, and Prime Day drove a 529% increase in new-to-brand customers versus the prior month.
Click here to learn more about ELEMIS’ transformation on Amazon with Envision Horizons.
What This Means for Your Brand
If you’re a premium brand on Amazon and your advertising is built entirely around search, you’re capturing demand without creating it. That’s a ceiling, and it’s the ceiling most premium brands hit. Video is how you raise it, but only if you treat it as a coordinated narrative across formats rather than a single ad unit, and only if the targeting puts that narrative in front of the right net-new audience.
The brands that win premium categories on Amazon are the ones that show up like a brand, not just a listing. Video is the format that makes that possible.
At Envision Horizons, we work with premium brands navigating these exact challenges – from video-first advertising and creative strategy to full-funnel media and audience targeting.
Want to see what a video-first strategy could look like for your brand? Request a Growth Plan, and we’ll map it to your category and your goals.
Important Notice: Recruitment Fraud Warning