News you want to use week 5.

When a financial services provider wanted to promote its retirement advisory business, it directed ads to people in their 40s and 50s who had recently ordered a personal finance book from Amazon. The advertisers found those people by using Amazon’s advertising services, which leverage what the company knows better than anyone: consumers’ online buying habits. Ads sold by Amazon, once a limited offering at the company, can now be considered a third major pillar of its business, along with e-commerce and cloud computing. Amazon’s advertising business is worth about $125 billion, more than Nike or IBM, Morgan Stanley estimates. Amazon has slowly been developing ways for brands to target their own customers and shoppers, like other ad networks have offered for a while. Advertisers can upload their own customer lists, which Amazon matches with its database, and then show ads to those customers, or other people Amazon’s algorithms determine are similar.