ADVERTISING

and 54 percent of digital ad revenue worldwide, according to eMarketer. That leaves little for others. Nationally, the next-biggest U.S. revenue share goes to Microsoft, with only 4 percent.

Globally, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is third to Google and Facebook with less than 9 percent of the market, according to eMarketer.

Amazon’s current share is just 2 percent nationally and less than 1 percent worldwide.

But as advertisers have followed consumers from the printed page to the electronic screen, digital advertising has boomed and promises to continue to be a huge moneymaker. Worth $228 billion globally and $83 billion in the U.S., the market is expected to grow 27 percent domestically and 34 percent globally over the next two years, eMarketer reported.

And with digital

advertising relying on data-driven targeting of specific consumers, Amazon is uniquely poised to disrupt the status quo, experts said.

“Facebook knows your interests, Google knows your intent and Amazon knows what you do commercially,” said Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser.

Wieser believes eMarketer’s estimate of Amazon’s digital ad market share is too low, but he said guessing is hard because Amazon doesn’t make it clear in its financial reporting how much revenue comes from advertising.

Amazon runs advertisements from other companies in a number of locations on its websites, including ads on search-results pages, on pages for specific products for sale, and on its home page, from companies including Sony, Comcast and Wells Fargo. It also sells ads on other Amazon sites, including Digital Photography Review and the movie-focused Box Office Mojo.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment about its digital advertising plans.

But the company appears to have reached a tipping point of sorts, and could start taking market share from Google and Facebook, eMarketer analyst Monica Peart said.

“What we’ve seen with Google and Facebook as an example, they’re getting a share of probably everyone’s budget at this point,” Peart said. “We expect Amazon to really become for many advertisers part of the suite of platforms that they are using to advertise.”

WPP CEO Martin Sorrell has, in earnings reports, described Amazon as a potential “third force” in digital advertising beyond Google and Facebook, and revealed that WPP opened an office in Seattle specifically to cater to Amazon. Norman noted that when discussing increased spending on Amazon, it’s important to remember that the agency’s current

expenditure is relatively small.

“What we spend with Facebook and Google is orders of magnitude greater than what we spend with Amazon and what we’ll spend with Amazon (in 2018),” Norman said.

Still, Norman and others see a strong likelihood that Amazon will grab an increasing share of the U.S. digital ad market — possibly up to 10 percent. “I’m not sure that I see the path right now to get into the 25s and 30s,” Norman said.

However, Amazon’s digital assistant “Alexa,” inside millions of “Echo” virtualassistant devices that Amazon has sold into U.S. homes, should give the company a powerful boost in an online advertising market driven by consumer targeting, Merlivat said.

“As you ask Alexa for things, you’re kind of telling Amazon what your habits are, how many people you have in your household, what your interests are,” she said.