Amazon's Rudolf Schneider Argues the Old Idea of a Marketing Funnel No Longer Holds
Rudolf Schneider is Director EU, Retail Media at Amazon Ads. He opened Retail Media Pioneers with a case for rethinking how brands plan across the funnel, built on a story from years before retail media existed as a category.
Before joining Amazon in 2016, Schneider managed a directory assistance service in Germany. A long-running internal debate there questioned whether a seven-figure marketing budget delivered any real impact. On July 3, 2010, during Germany’s World Cup quarterfinal against Argentina, Schneider ran a television ad during the match break. He watched call volume spike the next day.
He drew three lessons from that moment that would shape the rest of his talk. Reach matters, since 26 million people watched that match. Relevance matters, since the ad’s storyline aligned naturally with football. And measurement matters, since the spike gave him proof the budget was doing something a debate alone never could.
Schneider compared sponsored ads, introduced by Amazon in 2014, to a striker on a football team: the position that scores the most visible goals. But he argued that many brands still build their entire retail media strategy around that one position. “Imagine you’re a football coach and you’re just fielding two strikers,” he said. “Do you think this would be a good strategy to win the match?” The analogy set up his broader argument that full-funnel marketing, not performance media alone, is where retail media needs to go next.
He backed that argument with figures on how complicated the modern customer journey has become. Customers now cross more than ten touchpoints before a purchase. Only a small share of consumers say they recall the ads they see as relevant. More than 60 percent of advertisers describe measurement as a challenge. Schneider said this pushes many teams toward simpler last-click attribution, since it’s easier to report, even though it credits only the final touchpoint in a much longer journey.
Schneider organized the rest of the session around three qualities. He said these define brands that succeed at full-funnel planning: reach, being present where customers actually spend their time; relevance, reaching them with the right message at the right moment; and memory, understanding how each touchpoint along the way contributes to the eventual outcome.
On reach, he pointed to Amazon DSP’s access to premium inventory beyond Amazon’s own properties. This includes streaming partners like Prime Video, where roughly a third of UK adults watch content at least monthly, as well as other premium video and connected TV publishers.
On relevance, Schneider described Amazon’s use of contextual advertising. AI analyzes the content of a web page or video to align an ad with its surroundings, placing a smart watch ad within a fitness article, for example, or an action camera ad inside a sports film. He also introduced interactive video ads that let viewers add a product to their cart directly from a connected TV. This addresses what he described as a common gap: a viewer sees an ad, means to look up the product on a second screen, and forgets before they get the chance.
Schneider’s closing point centered on measurement itself. Amazon Marketing Cloud already lets brands connect upper and mid-funnel activity to sales and upload their own data for deeper customer insight. Later in the year, Amazon planned to introduce multi-touch attribution, moving away from last-click models that give all the credit to the final touchpoint, typically the sponsored ad. In early testing, Schneider said, sponsored TV saw a 24 percent increase in attributed impact once earlier touchpoints were properly credited.
He closed by posing three questions for brands to ask themselves. Are you maximizing reach by being present where customers spend their time? Are you reaching the right customer with the right message at the right moment? Are you genuinely planning full-funnel, rather than stitching channels together after the fact?
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