Amazon has spent the previous couple of months announcing key deals with publishers and promoting firms which have enhanced its demand-side platform (DSP), an offering that CEO Andy Jassy has described as “fully featured” — and one that may be a growing a part of an promoting business that saw revenue jump 24% 12 months over 12 months to $17.7 billion in Q3 2025.
“The past couple years have been a whole lot of product and engineering work to get the DSP to service our customers’ entire marketing needs,” Meredith Goldman, director of Amazon DSP at Amazon Ads, told Marketing Dive. “That has been the vision for some time, but really accelerated the past couple of years, where all of the features that were being delivered, all of the capabilities to find a way to plan, optimize, activate and measure, really got here to fruition.”
All together, these deals mix access to premium inventory with the trillions of first-party signals that Amazon has gathered about consumers, chiefly through its e-commerce platform, allowing for the type of full-funnel, closed-loop measurement and attribution that would deliver on the promise of digital promoting that has yet to be fully realized elsewhere. It also presents a growing threat to industry-leading demand-side competitors Google Display & Video 360 and The Trade Desk, whilst larger questions on Amazon’s tech world dominance persist.
“Amazon is closest to eliminating the elemental trade-off brands face between what is tough to measure — the impact of brand name constructing — and what is simpler to measure — performance tactics,” said Doree Wendling, vp of promoting at Global Overview, a full-service agency focused on Amazon and other retail media platforms, in emailed comments.
Amazon is anticipated to reveal more innovations around its entire ad business — from DSP to streaming TV and beyond — at UnBoxed, the annual Amazon Ads conference that kicks off today (Nov. 10) in Nashville.
Deeper, more direct deals
While Amazon has worked with publishers for years — Amazon Publisher Services launched nearly a decade ago — several recent deals have deepened partnerships and built out more direct integrations between supply and demand sides.
“How will we not only have access but depth in these partnerships, and find a way to bring forward all of this signal density that comes with the advantage of having a direct integration? Not just buying through SSPs and exchanges… but getting closer with the publishers, giving them the appropriate tools to merchandise and express the worth of their supply directly to the Amazon DSP customers,” Goldman said.
A cope with Roku provides advertisers with what the businesses claim is the biggest authenticated connected TV footprint within the U.S., promising improved addressability across greater than 80 million households. An identical cope with Disney’s Real-time Ad Exchange gave advertisers access to Disney’s premium inventory across Disney+, ESPN and Hulu.
In a serious move, Amazon and Netflix in September announced a pact that gave advertisers using Amazon DSP the flexibility to programmatically buy premium Netflix inventory. The partnership found synergy between two areas of growth for firms that otherwise compete within the streaming arena.
Amazon has also worked to grow its inventory of audio promoting, partnering with the highest three players in streaming audio. Advertisers using Amazon DSP can now reach SiriusXM Media’s 160 million monthly digital listeners, Spotify’s global audience of 696 million monthly users and iHeart’s thousands and thousands of listeners of streaming music and live streaming radio (with podcast and broadcast to are available 2026).
Beyond publishing deals, Amazon has secured deals with other promoting firms. Amazon DSP in October became the popular transition partner for patrons of Microsoft Invest, the platform (formerly Xandr DSP and AppNexus) that it can sunset early in 2026. At the identical time, Microsoft Monetize is now a preferred supply-side platform (SSP) in Amazon’s Certified Supply Exchange program.
“We are attempting to ensure that we’re giving customers the total aperture of the omnichannel supply across the various mediums of media,” Goldman explained. “Audio, display, streaming TV obviously are critical, and with Microsoft Monetize, it’s one other premium partner that we’ll have access to. Not only will we be a crucial transition partner for his or her advertiser customers, but proceed in offering their Microsoft supply to the entire Amazon DSP advertisers and customers.”
Competitive landscape
Amazon’s accelerated work to deliver a completely featured DSP is causing waves within the ad-tech space, very like the expansion of its ad offerings disrupted the promoting duopoly of Facebook and Google. Some marketers reportedly moved thousands and thousands in spend from The Trade Desk to Amazon DSP, and an Adweek report about Amazon’s offer of free head-to-head testing of its DSP caused The Trade Desk’s stock to tumble last month. However, The Trade Desk has pushed backed on Amazon’s developments within the space.
“Amazon’s DSP is generally about buying Prime video and little or no is buying the open Internet. Our estimates are that low single digits are of their DSP and a small percentage of that’s pointed at decisioning the open Internet. It’s either Prime video or nondecision buying like programmatic guaranteed,” Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green said on the corporate’s Nov. 6 earnings call.
“In promoting, Amazon first competes with Google and then it competes with Netflix and Disney. Very little time and money is competing with us. So the fact is we’re playing in a really different sandbox,” Green added.
Still, reports about Amazon DSP’s growing importance to advertisers and moves across the fees it charges persist. The ability for advertisers to have full coverage of premium CTV promoting multi function DSP helps Amazon’s value proposition.
“Advertisers can lean in on lower platform and DSP costs compared to a few of their other DSP frenemies within the space, and more working media equals more value,” said Jacob Weithorn, the video center of excellence lead at media agency Kepler. “The extra money you may put in market with less dollars going toward fees is all the time great.”
One-stop shopping
For its part, Amazon has looked to offer customers transparency, whether around pricing, the usage of artificial intelligence or optimization, working to explain its decisions about what ads ran where and for a way much to customers, Goldman explained.
“That’s a vital enterprise for us… ensuring that as we innovate and move quickly that we all the time maintain that tumbler box approach, in order that we’re not innovating so fast and jumping ahead that we’re losing the trust of our customers,” the exec said.
That speed of innovation and investment speaks to Amazon’s scale and size within the promoting and technology landscapes. Amazon Ads, inclusive of the DSP, draws first-party signals from the retail environment, utilizes a privacy-safe cloud environment with the Amazon Marketing Cloud, and is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) — an all-in-one offering that other firms haven’t yet been able to match.
But after an AWS outage took down large parts of the web last month, there are renewed questions around whether all-in-one is the appropriate play for advertisers. Amazon has worked to address these and related concerns about consolidation by maintaining interoperability as a core value and allowing customers to herald third-party vendors for areas like measurement.
“The Amazon value system of price, selection and convenience holds true even within the promoting org, to really find a way to provide customers a choice of offerings, allow them to pick the trail by which they need to be activating their marketing budgets, but ensuring that we’re providing them the appropriate insights and data to make the perfect selection for his or her business,” Goldman said.
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