Amazon is no stranger to the world of advertising having first introduced ads in its online store 20 years ago. But last year something big happened in the Amazon ecosystem — it introduced TV advertising on its Prime Video streaming service.
The significance of that move was evident at the fourth annual Unboxed conference for Amazon advertisers, which was dominated by sizzle reels of Prime Video content, appearances by the stars of that content and, most importantly, lavish repetition of the word “full-funnel.” Amazon clearly wants the world to know that its advertising capabilities now reach all corners of the advertising universe, including television. “With the addition of Prime Video Ads to our already broad streaming TV supply, we can drive full-funnel outcomes better than anyone else,” claimed Kelly MacLean, VP of the Amazon Demand-Side Platform (DSP) at the event.
Of course, TV is just the cherry on top of Amazon’s already large cake, which in addition to Prime Video includes Amazon.com, Twitch, Fire TV, Alexa, IMDb, Wondery, Amazon Music, Kindle, Audible and Whole Foods. Altogether that encompasses an average monthly ad-supported audience of 275 million in the U.S., according to Tanner Elton, VP of U.S. Ad Sales at Amazon Ads.
That diverse content and commerce ecosystem, combined with the company’s tech prowess, is why Amazon is now confidently presenting itself to advertisers as a “full-funnel advertising solution.”
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“[Full-funnel advertising] means connecting campaign tactics across awareness, consideration and conversion into a cohesive strategy, and more importantly, to directly measure the contribution of each tactic, thereby allowing optimization,” said Paul Kotas, SVP of Amazon Ads at Unboxed. “With Amazon ads this means being able to grow awareness with customers across premium first-party content like Prime Video and Twitch, as well as third-party publishers like Paramount Global and Hearst with video and audio spots,” Kotas explained. “Then, driving consideration using display or online video on Alexa home screens in the kitchen, on the Fire tablet wake screen and across the web. Finally, converting those customers in our store or on your own store or website.
“We’ll leverage generative AI to deploy appropriate creative for each step, and then measure and optimize all of it with machine learning,” Kotas added. “It’s an exciting vision, and it goes without saying that we see full-funnel advertising applying to all brands, not just those that sell in our store.”
This week at Unboxed, Amazon set out to prove that it is not just the premier retail media partner for brands, but the premier media partner, full stop. Here are some of the biggest ways the company is working toward that goal.
A Banner TV Offering Anchored by Live Sports
Less than a year after debuting its ad-supported tier, Prime Video is off to the advertising races. The company reportedly secured more than $1.8 billion in ad revenue for its streaming services during the 2025 Upfronts, a significant amount for such a new offering and well above what competitors like Netflix were able to lock down, according to The Information.
Prime Video has an average monthly ad-supported reach of 115 million customers in the U.S., according to Danielle Carney, Head of Live Sports and Video Sales at Amazon Ads. And Amazon isn’t just staying stateside — advertising already is available in 10 Prime Video markets globally, and the company will expand to five additional countries in 2025: Brazil, India, Japan, the Netherlands and New Zealand. “We want to create new opportunities for brands to reach all types and sizes of customers alongside [our] incredible content, wherever those customers are streaming Prime Video,” Carney explained.
Just like last year, when Amazon first announced its plan to bring ads to Prime Video, the streamer’s wide slate of live sports content took center stage in its appeal to TV advertisers. There’s a good reason for that: “Sports is the new primetime — it’s the only day part where we continue to see growth and strength and live viewership,” explained Rosabel Murai, Chief Media Officer at advertising agency Team One during an Unboxed panel.
And when it comes to streamers, Prime Video is without a doubt leading the charge on live sports. Chief among these are Prime Video’s exclusive Thursday Night Football offering and its Black Friday football game that was introduced last year. In fact, the match-up last month between the Cowboys and the Giants was the most-streamed regular-season NFL game ever, with 16.2 million viewers. But the streamer also has deals with the National Women’s Soccer League and the WNBA, and it announced a new deal at Unboxed for exclusive coverage of five NASCAR Cup Series races.
“We’re also engaging with global audiences, like our new partnership with the NBA,” added Elton. “Starting in the fall of 2025, viewers all around the world will exclusively stream the NBA’s biggest matchups, including the final rounds of the Emirates NBA Cup, weekly regular-season games and extensive playoff coverage. [And] Prime Video is the exclusive global digital home for NBA League Pass, giving audiences across the world access to every NBA game of the season.”
As if that wasn’t enough, sports isn’t Prime Video’s only angle on live TV — separate from Unboxed, the streamer also announced it will air a live election night special on Nov. 5 anchored by former NBC News host Brian Williams.
And lest we forget, this is Amazon we’re talking about, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that in addition to traditional advertising inventory, the company also is doubling down on interactive, shoppable ad formats. “By the end of this year, with a click of your remote in your living room, you can instantly add items to your Amazon cart, or you can ask a brand for more information,” promised Carney. “This will achieve even more measurable full-funnel impact.”
‘Fortnite’ Integrations: The Beginning of a Bigger Gaming Play?
Despite advertising’s traditionally TV-heavy focus, there’s actually another major, largely untapped, opportunity for marketers — gaming. Gaming is the fastest-growing segment of entertainment, and Amazon has a central role in this space with its ownership of the gaming-focused livestreaming platform Twitch.
Not to let an opportunity pass it by, Amazon announced a new activation it’s calling The Glitch on Twitch. The offering allows brands to integrate into the playable experience of the popular game Fortnite, but these integrations are only visible to viewers on Twitch. It’s a significant opportunity for brands to connect with engaged audiences on one of the biggest online gaming platforms of the moment via Twitch, where, as Elton pointed out “nearly 70% of viewers are young adults and [they are] more likely to consider brands that support their favorite [Twitch] streamer.”
Amazon already has been making commerce-focused inroads in other gaming environments, and this new Twitch/Fortnite pairing seems to set the stage for an integrated advertising future in other popular games.
New Ad Tech that Enables ‘Full-Funnel Advertising at Scale’
Across all its many channels and content offerings, Amazon also continues to pioneer backend technologies designed to better enable marketers to reach their desired audience with the right creative at the right moment. Here are some of the biggest enhancements announced at Unboxed.
The event marketed the debut of AI Creative Studio, which brings together all of the generative AI tools Amazon already has released to aid in the development of campaign creative, including image generation, motion generation, video generation and various kinds of text generation. Joining the roster in this new, combined toolbox will be audio generation, to help marketers easily create and iterate on audio ads for Alexa-enabled devices.
“There are so many ways for you to reach your customers beyond our site, while they’re watching, listening, cooking and more,” said Jay Richman, VP of Products and Tech at Amazon Ads. “But while this opportunity is great, we also know it can be daunting to build and maintain ads for all of these moments. With AI Creative Studio, we’re launching an all-in-one solution to help you tell your story across the shopper journey. Whether you’re starting with a simple product shot and transforming it into videos, or in the near future, taking your TV commercial and converting it into sponsored ads, our tools make it easy to build and scale campaigns in new ways, helping you meet your customers wherever they’re at.”
Amazon also unveiled advanced multi-touch attribution (MTA) capabilities powered by “hundreds of thousands” of randomized control trials, to show advertisers how all the parts of their campaigns are contributing to conversions. While Amazon always has offered metrics to show how lower-funnel tactics perform, now with MTA advertisers also can see how mid- and upper-funnel tactics are contributing to purchases.
“Marketers have long focused on last-touch attribution or other easy-to-use shortcuts to determine what drives conversions,” explained Paula Despins, VP of Ads Measurement at Amazon Ads. “But we all know customer behaviors are way more nuanced than that, and that’s what multi-touch attribution gives you — it’s the ability to understand what marketing influenced customers along the way to a conversion. In our new multi-touch attribution algorithm, we use advanced machine learning to analyze trillions of signals, including shopping interactions like viewing a product or adding a product to a cart. So if you’re advertising using streaming TV, online video and sponsored ads together, your multi-touch attribution results will show the relative contribution of each touch point to your sales.”
Finally, Amazon showcased its revamped DSP experience, designed to help advertisers create and optimize campaigns more efficiently and garner smarter insights. Enhancements include updated creative formats; more efficient workflows; new frequency groups that allow marketers to manage frequency across multiple campaigns, channels and device types; and a new campaign management hub that offers a centralized view of all campaign insights.
“All of these enhancements work together to deliver impressive performance for our advertisers,” said MacLean. “And by the way, I’m not just talking about your campaigns across Amazon supply through our DSP. You can browse and deliver unique and curated deals from leading publishers across premium sites and apps, including deals from top publishers like Paramount Global, Fox and Hearst.”
Summing up the event’s key announcements, Claire Paull, VP of Global Marketing at Amazon Ads, said: “It is possible to bring customers all the way from awareness to loyalty, starting with premium content on Prime Video. It’s possible to set up campaigns in minutes, to optimize them and measure them through the new Amazon DSP experience. It’s possible to reach highly relevant audiences across Amazon and third-party sites and apps with capabilities like ad relevance. And it’s possible to know your efforts are working to drive business growth, with measurement solutions like conversion path reporting. This is full-funnel advertising at scale for everyone, and yes we mean everyone. Big brands and small independent agencies, brands that sell in our store as well as brands that don’t.”
