Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Amazon is all over the place!

Amazon doubles down on ad tech with free DSP testing and new RTB infrastructure
Source: Adweek, Digiday
Date: October 24-27, 2025

Summary: In this past week, Amazon attacked programmatic advertising from two sides: proving its DSP is superior to competitors while providing infrastructure that powers ad auctions.

The DSP offensive🔒: Remember when Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green said that Amazon is not a competitor? Well Amazon is now offering agencies free head-to-head tests, pitting Amazon DSP against competitors like … The Trade Desk. According to leaked pitch decks obtained by Adweek, Amazon will cover all costs—ad inventory, technology, and measurement tools—for 4-6 week parallel campaigns with matching budgets. The Trade Desk's Ian Colley dismissed the tests as unfair, arguing that Amazon primarily directs spending toward its own properties rather than the open web.

The cloud infrastructure battle🔒: Amazon’s cloud arm, AWS, just launched RTB Fabric — a new tool that lets ad tech companies run real-time ad auctions directly in the cloud.

Until now, only the biggest ad tech companies could afford the high-speed cloud infrastructure needed to process millions of bid requests per second. AWS wants to change that — and keep ad tech companies from drifting over to Google Cloud, which has been winning them over from Amazon with discounts and incentives.

These moves build on Amazon's monster year of inventory partnerships with Netflix, Disney, Spotify, Roku, and SiriusXM—plus the Microsoft Invest migration we covered earlier this month. 

These aggressive investments come as Amazon announced layoffs of 14K corporate employees this week, with potential cuts reportedly reaching 30K total—a stark contrast between its ad tech ambitions and workforce reductions.

Opinion: The idea behind RTB Fabric is simple: enable ad tech companies to conduct ad auctions in the cloud faster, more cheaply, and more easily. Amazon is doing this to prevent more defections of AWS ad tech customers to Google Cloud, and to get more ad tech companies to move their on-premises business to the cloud.

OK, cool. But what’s the BIG idea? 

Beyond monetizing its own ad space (which it’s doing a great job of), Amazon wants a cut of every ad dollar that changes hands in the digital ecosystem. That’s how it will continue to grow. Of course, it’s already doing that through its DSP (which is crushing🔒). But Amazon knows it will never be able to see all supply / demand in the ecosystem through its own DSP. So what’s the next logical place to go? Infrastructure!

By owning infrastructure for ad tech companies, Amazon can monetize “the rest” of ad tech by making money off their infrastructure needs. And as AI takes over ad tech, infrastructure needs will increase, which is another built-in growth opportunity for AWS. In addition, it’s very easy to see a path to where AWS ad tech customers are able to seamlessly match their data with Amazon data (using Amazon Marketing Cloud), tap into Amazon supply (using Amazon Publisher Services), and even tap into Amazon demand (using Amazon DSP). These connections will multiply Amazon's monetization opportunities across its entire ad tech stack.

To be clear, this is not groundbreaking. Cloud + Ad Tech has always fit together in this way. Especially for large walled gardens like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. But it’s an area where Google hasn’t done a great job. It takes a bit of strategic thinking, overcoming internal bureaucracy, and execution to make it happen. While Google is distracted, Amazon is making it happen with RTB Fabric.

Amazon is making a play to own it all. One might even say that Amazon wants to be fabric of the entire ads ecosystem.

Dean Aragón to Succeed P&G’s Marc Pritchard as ANA Chair🔒- Procter & Gamble’s Chief Brand Officer has led the Association of National Advertisers since 2016 and has been a fierce advocate for greater transparency and accountability in digital advertising and more diverse and inclusive marketing. He helped lead the charge to clean up the media supply chain, and he championed comprehensive media measurement solutions. Aragón, CEO and vice chair at Shell Brands International and an ANA board member since 2020, takes over immediately. Pritchard will continue serving on the board and chair the ANA's Global CMO Growth Council, a joint initiative with Cannes Lions that brings together brand marketing leaders to set industry-wide growth targets. Aragón has big shoes to fill.

Comcast Intros Biddable And Programmatic For Linear TV - Comcast Advertising is making all of its linear TV inventory available for programmatic buying with real-time bidding capabilities through its ad server, FreeWheel. Previous attempts at this kind of “programmatic TV” offering from DISH Media and Charter in 2023 only automated parts of the buying process for specific ad spots. While Comcast expects most TV programmers will still favor programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals over open exchange buying, the shift toward programmatic linear could help advertisers reach the same audiences across all TV formats through one unified workflow.

Yahoo Just Inked 4 Deals That Show Where Commerce Media Is Headed🔒 - Yahoo is positioning itself as a go-to partner for retailers looking to monetize their audience data offsite across the open web. The company's latest deals with DoorDash (50M global monthly users), StockX (30M monthly uniques), Dollar General (90M+ people visiting 20K stores), and Nextdoor (100M people globally) add significant scale to Yahoo's commerce portfolio, which already includes Kroger, Planet Fitness, and United Airlines. Yahoo's pitch centers on pooling diverse audiences across retailers and publishers to boost the reach and efficacy of offsite ads, and helping commerce companies tap into non-endemic advertiser budgets. Yahoo plans to integrate more commerce data and measurement directly into its platform in 2026 to help advertisers connect campaigns to sales outcomes.

TikTok ad execs are finally talking — just enough to keep Q4 intact🔒 - After weeks of silence, TikTok's US agency team is telling marketers that nothing will change in Q4 and that any changes would come in 2026, aligning with the January deadline to ratify the TikTok framework deal. The reassurance comes as marketers weigh how much they should spend on the platform during the lucrative holiday season. The framework deal—which would give US investors 65% control while ByteDance and Chinese investors hold less than 20%—has yet to be formally approved by the Chinese government, and the lack of detail has deepened concerns for advertisers. Some agencies see the transition as a simple platform update, while others fear that retraining the algorithm could degrade ad performance and reduce user engagement. 

WPP targets smaller advertisers and advances its AI push with WPP Open Pro - The holding company launched a self-serve version of its AI-powered platform WPP Open to give small businesses professional-grade marketing capabilities typically reserved for Fortune 500 clients. The tool helps marketers create ad campaigns from start to finish without an agency. It uses generative AI models from Google (Veo, Imagen, Gemini), OpenAI (Sora, DALL-E, ChatGPT), Adobe Firefly, and Claude to generate video, images, and text, then pushes campaigns directly to major ad platforms. The move comes after a turbulent year for WPP marked by client losses and follows WPP's $400M, five-year partnership with Google to build AI tools. Will selling AI tech to smaller advertisers help WPP catch-up to Publicis in the agency holdco wars?

Forrester: Open Web to Lose 30% of Ad Dollars in 2026 - AI is driving an exodus from the open web, as consumers increasingly turn to AI-generated summaries and chat interfaces that reduce web traffic and tank click-through rates. Those ad dollars will flow instead to entertainment-driven content platforms like connected TV, streaming audio, and social video, according to Forrester. A recent MediaLink/LoopMe study shows 45% of advertisers are already redirecting budgets toward mobile in-app experiences. To compete, the open web will need to deliver what closed ecosystems already promise: proven quality, performance, and curated premium inventory, at scale.

Paramount Taps Roku Vet Jay Askinasi As Chief Revenue Officer - Askinasi previously led ad sales at Roku and served as CEO of Publicis Media Exchange US.

The Trade Desk Announces CRO Shakeup Ahead of Q3 Earnings🔒 - Jed Dederick is out after a 13 year run, succeeded by Anders Mortensen, who spent 13 years at Google, most recently as Managing Director, US Lead Generation.  

Judge sides with online publishers in Google ad tech antitrust case - A judge gave Gannett, the Daily Mail, and digital media company Inform a partial victory in their lawsuit against Google for unlawfully monopolizing the digital ad market, citing the Department of Justice's successful antitrust case against Google from earlier this year. 

Taboola launches CTV product with Paramount - Performance Multiplier will use Taboola's Realize AI tech to help Paramount's small- and medium-sized advertisers run ads across the open web. 

Ads might be coming to Apple Maps next year - Local brick-and-mortar businesses like restaurants could buy search ads in Apple Maps as the company reportedly expands its ad offerings beyond the App Store. 

Reddit sues AI company Perplexity and others for ‘industrial-scale’ scraping of user comments - The lawsuit targets data-scraping companies that allegedly bypassed security measures by masking identities to steal Reddit's content from Google’s search engine results. 

LG Ad Solutions Partners with Databricks to Simplify Data Collaboration and AI Insights in Connected TV - Brands can now use Databricks AI to analyze LG TV campaigns, making it easier to buy data-driven advertising within LG's ecosystem.

Musk’s ad chief at X departs after just 10 months - Some thought John Nitti could have succeeded former CEO Linda Yaccarino. Instead, his exit is the latest in a wave of high-level departures. 

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