Amazon decided to shut down HQ2 in New York but advertisers see no sign of the e-commerce giant slowing down its attack on Madison Avenue

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Amazon won’t move forward with its plan to build a campus in Long Island City, but that change doesn’t seem to have impacted Amazon’s advertising expansion plans.
Amazon is hiring for 867 roles in New York, with 117 positions in sales and advertising, and agencies say they’re hearing more and more from the e-commerce giant.
Amazon also recently moved to a bigger office in the Hudson Yards neighborhood, indicating that it plans to continue hiring.

Amazon’s decision to pull the plug on its high-profile HQ2 project for New York City likely won’t affect one bright area of the company’s growth: advertising.

Last week, Amazon said that it planned to stop its plan to build a new headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, that would have added up to 25,000 jobs to the city, mostly in engineering and technical roles. While the Queens project is scraped, Amazon’s ramp-up of its advertising business shows no signs of slowing down in Manhattan, according to agencies.

An Amazon spokesperson pointed to its blog post, saying that the company has 5,000 employees in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island and plans to continue growing its team.

Amazon’s plan to build out its New York-based advertising team predates HQ2. In 2017, Amazon expanded its Manhattan office and promised to bring 2,000 roles to the city, mostly in advertising. Since then, the ad team has outgrown its office space in a building close to the Empire State Building and expanded into a 360,000-square-foot office in the Hudson Yards neighborhood.

According to Amazon’s job listings on its website, the company is hiring for 867 roles in New York, 117 of which are in sales and advertising-related roles.

While Amazon’s advertising office in New York is in Manhattan, some staffers could have worked out of Long Island City, which would have been a tough sell to advertisers who have most of their meetings in Manhattan, said David Tucker, head of strategy at media agency SwellShark.

"Asking agencies and clients to go to a different borough probably would have meant less likelihood to visit," he said. "There’s a reason why Facebook and Google have all these showcases in Manhattan."

Amazon is running house ads through its own programmatic, demand-side platform (called DSP) that are targeted at people in New York to advertise that it’s hiring in the area, said Joshua Kreitzer, founder and CEO of Channel Bakers, an Amazon-focused ad agency.

"The mindset is ‘Sure, Queens didn’t work out’ but within Manhattan, it’s still very relevant for them to be there because of all the brand advertising teams that exist in the city," he said.

Amazon’s ad team is taking a page from Facebook’s playbook

Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Snap and Twitter all have Manhattan offices that they use to get face time with agencies and brands and often use the spaces to show off their newest projects to advertisers. As Amazon has grown its New York office, agencies say that they’re hearing from the company more and that it’s pitching ad formats aimed at performance marketers and, increasingly, brand-focused marketers.

Agencies said proximity to Amazon’s offices doesn’t influence how much they spend on advertising.

"When you have more face-to-face meetings, that obviously helps build a relationship with the agency and client," said Jeff Malmad, executive director and lead of Shop+ at Mindshare North America. "But at the end of the day, we’re still asking the same questions, we’re still bringing forward the same requirements and KPIs for partners and budgets, whether you’re in New York or in Seattle."

Malmad added that Amazon is increasingly building its sales teams to serve specific clients and verticals, as Facebook has long done with bigger advertisers. Platforms’ biggest ad spenders get dedicated sales reps who give them early access to new products.

"I have definitely seen a greater emphasis and growth from Amazon in regards to client-centric teams in New York," Malmad said. "The benefit to having an Amazon team that’s dedicated to your client specifically is that there’s more focus on driving business outcomes for brands and agency partners, which is obviously the end goal."

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