February 20th-February 25th

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. It’s Amazon’s time…

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Amazon Ads to change URL transparency and reporting after high-profile CSAM report from Adalytics🔒
Source: Digiday
February 22nd, 2025

Summary: Amazon has been all over the news in the past week, with developments related to its demand-side platform (DSP), streaming TV, and content. We’ll use the top slot this week to summarize it all. 

• Brand safety: Amazon has updated its DSP in response to a recent controversy. Research firm Adalytics called out Amazon's DSP and other platforms a few weeks ago for serving ads on sites showing child sexual abuse material (CSAM). US Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) followed with stern letters asking how their platforms could have allowed ads to appear on these offensive sites. Amazon has updated its DSP to add strong brand safety controls with page-level reporting through its Traffic Events API. Similarly, DoubleVerify, which was also named in the Adalytics report, is now providing full URL-level reporting.🔒 

• DSP: Amazon's DSP is helping to drive the company's expanding ads business🔒, which grew 14% last quarter to $17.3B. The DSP is becoming advertisers' preferred way of buying Amazon Prime inventory and the dominant way advertisers spend on Amazon in general. Advertisers using Amazon's DSP generated 32% of Amazon's Q4 ad spend. Amazon has made its DSP cheaper than competing DSPs and positioned it as a "full-scale programmatic solution," which is already attracting more smaller advertisers. 

Amazon’s DSP is in 3rd place, behind Google’s DV360 and The Trade Desk, and gaining ground.

• Streaming: Amazon is also working with other streaming services to expand access to premium inventory, enabling marketers to use Amazon's DSP to buy streaming ads across multiple platforms while using the same targeting and measurement that's available for Prime Video. Amazon's impact in streaming TV has been significant since it began selling ads in Prime Video. The company offered lower CPMs than competitors, which have pressured ad prices downward🔒 across the landscape. Last year, for example, Netflix CPMs fell from $42.14 to $31.05, according to eMarketer. Disney+ CPMs declined from $39.81 to $28.82 in 2024.

• Content: Amazon is now in charge of 007. Amazon MGM Studios has taken creative control of the James Bond franchise by forming a partnership with long-time producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, who will step back but remain co-owners. When Amazon bought MGM for $8.5B in 2022, it gained the distribution rights for all James Bond movies, but Wilson and Broccoli retained creative control. The last James Bond movie was "No Time to Die" in 2021, which was Daniel Craig's final time portraying Bond. On Thursday, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos asked his X followers who they'd pick as the next Bond. (Obviously the right answer is … Jeff Bezos)

Opinion: Amazon is everywhere! Content, streaming, sports rights, data, the DSP. Their arrow is pointing up and to the right. Meanwhile, Google is facing antitrust woes (both Jeff Green and Ari Paparo have recently stated that they believe Google will “exit the open internet”), is late to the CTV game, and is dealing with declining search market share. The Trade Desk is in a world of pain from a public valuation and a “what-the-f-is-their-strategy” perspective. Their “we-won’t-own-any-data-or-inventory” pitch limits their upside while ambitious projects like UID2 and Ventura feel like long shots.

With Google and The Trade Desk flailing, Amazon has a BIG opening.

Not only is Amazon not dealing with any of the issues above, it has a lot going in its favor. Prime Video, a full-stack offering, a growing DSP, no antitrust scrutiny on its ads business, no privacy scrutiny, low fees, and possibly the most valuable, scalable 1st party data set in the world.

That said, it won’t be easy. To be successful, Amazon will have to nail 3 things:

1. Product (it’s getting better)

2. Marketing (most people still don’t quite understand their ad offering)

3. Cohesive Offering (bringing all their assets together from a storytelling and economies of scope / scale perspective). 

If they figure this stuff out? Watch out Google and TTD, this could be Amazon’s year…

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