February 20th-February 25th // Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

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…

Other Notable Headlines ✍️

X Hinted at Possible Deal Trouble in Talks With Ad Giant to Increase Spending🔒- X CEO Linda Yaccarino and an X lawyer have reportedly suggested to IPG that its merger with Omnicom could run into trouble if the agency holding company doesn't get its clients to spend more on the platform. The insinuation is that the deal could be delayed or sunk given Elon Musk's influence with President Trump. Not surprisingly, IPG has inked a new deal with X for "potential client spending." 

Yaccarino reportedly also met with several agency holding companies at CES to advocate for annual upfront deals. According to one ad buyer, Yaccarino mentioned X's antitrust lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers and advertisers for their illegal boycott of X after Musk bought it. In January, X added more advertisers to the lawsuit, and Yaccarino said the company planned to find out which brands and agencies and advertisers "colluded to withhold spending from X." Now, it appears that many brands are returning to the platform to avoid legal and political headaches. 

Aside from bullying tactics, X is trying to lure advertisers back by adding brand safety tools and some AI-powered tools🔒 to help advertisers generate ad copy, imagery, and campaign insights with minimal human input.

Walmart’s ad business grows to $4.4 billion - Walmart was the only public company we track that released its Q4 earnings in the past week. Revenue was up 4.1% to $180.6B, beating estimates. Its global ads business was up 29% in Q4, but the retailer didn't break out specific revenue numbers. For the full year, Walmart's ads business was up 27% to $4.4B. Walmart’s ads business is still far behind Amazon’s, which had $56B in ad revenue in 2024. But it is still, by far, the 2nd largest commerce media business. Walmart's ads business is also just a small slice of its overall revenue, which was $681B last year. But it's a high-margin business that the retailer expects to continue growing, fueled by surging demand for commerce media opportunities and its $2.3B acquisition of Vizio, which is expected to unlock new ways to work with advertisers. Walmart warned that profit growth would slow this year, sending shares 6% lower.

Google may be close to launching YouTube Premium Lite - YouTube could soon roll out a cheaper version of its subscription product in select countries, including the US, Australia, Germany, and Thailand. A YouTube spokesman confirmed that the company has been testing a new service that is ad-free for most videos, though didn't say how much it would cost or when it would officially launch. Separately, YouTube appears to be trying to improve the user experience for its ad-supported property by (finally) transitioning to less disruptive ads that appear during natural break points like pauses, rather than in the middle of a sentence.

Ad tech pulls media into data clean rooms as brands demand transparency🔒- LiveRamp and Adobe have introduced products that are attracting more publisher participation. LiveRamp's new Cross-Media Intelligence capability is essentially a clean room where brands can securely access data from multiple publishers for planning and measurement. Previously, they could only use LiveRamp’s clean room for one-to-one data sharing. Hill’s Pet Nutrition, a pet food brand, is using the tool to determine how its media strategy overlaps with multiple retailers and evaluate how its spend can boost its overall media plan. Meanwhile, Adobe's Real-Time Customer Data Platform has been adopted by Warner Bros. Discovery, making it easier for brands to sync to its data and target audiences. WBD said the product has improved match rates, with 3.2x more targetable identities relative to other methods. The Real-Time Customer Data Platform became generally available to brands last week.

Reddit paywall plans now confirmed by Huffman - Reddit is looking at new ways to monetize the site now that it's a public company. One option in the works is paid subreddits, where some subreddit threads would only be available behind some kind of paywall. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman confirmed the development in a pre-recorded video shown during the company's most recent earnings call with investors. He said it's a "work in progress". In an earnings call in August, he said, "We will unlock the door for new use cases, new types of subreddits that can be built that may have exclusive content or private areas, things of that nature." If we had to guess, we'd say that the news isn't going to go down so well with Reddit's users, who haven't always responded kindly to changes on the platform.

Other Notable Headlines
(that you should know about too) 🤓 

Big Tech ad giants plan to spend $240 billion on AI in 2025 - Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon are going all-in on AI spending. So far, their AI-driven revenue has largely failed to impress Wall Street.

DIRECTV Advertising and Magnite Enhance Live Streaming Programmatic Demand During Peak Viewing Events - DIRECTV is using Magnite's tech to give advertisers more ways to access desirable inventory like live sports. DIRECTV says it has expanded its programmatically enabled inventory.

How advertisers are reacting to Google’s declining share of the search market🔒- After Google's search market share declined, some brands began reallocating budget to other Google products, social platforms, or retail media networks, while others started exploring experimental channels.

Salesforce and Google Bring Gemini to Agentforce, Enable More Customer Choice in Major Partnership Expansion - Salesforce customers will be able to use Google’s Gemini models for AI agents and deploy Salesforce on Google Cloud.

OpenWeb's ousted founder and CEO is back at the tech company in an advisor role after a messy boardroom battle🔒- After being ousted by OpenWeb's board in September, Nadav Shoval agreed to become a senior advisor to new CEO Tim Harvey.

Perplexity teases a web browser called Comet - Perplexity has launched a sign-up list for the browser, but details are scant and it's not clear when it will be launched. Perplexity, known for its AI-powered search engine, also announced a $50M seed and pre-seed VC fund.

Trade Desk (TTD) Faces Class Action Suit Over Alleged Kokai Rollout Stumbles - Hagens Berman - Some investors have filed a class-action lawsuit against The Trade Desk, claiming the DSP misled them about the slow rollout of its AI-powered buying platform Kokai, which has hurt the company's growth.

Consumer sentiment falls nearly 10% as concerns about inflation, tariffs escalate - The Trump bump has disappeared. 

That’s It For This Week 👋

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