Amazon audiences will be trending on Netflix soon.
On Wednesday, Amazon Ads announced that, starting next quarter, US media buyers will be able to tap Amazon Audiences for targeting when they run Netflix campaigns through the Amazon DSP. The news follows Netflix’s decision in September to make its inventory available programmatically in Amazon’s DSP.
Prime Video has scale. Since defaulting subscribers to an ad-supported plan in 2024, it now reaches roughly 130 million people. But Amazon still needs to prove to media buyers that Prime Video can reach viewers beyond the garden walls.
By tying commerce and shopping data to streaming impressions on Netflix, Amazon Ads can give buyers more of what they want, especially with upfronts on the brain, and that’s performance.
Amazon’s first year in the traditional upfront market in 2024 “was about establishing ourselves as content makers,” Sarah Iooss, director of agency partnerships and Twitch at Amazon Ads, told AdExchanger, adding that, until that point, Amazon was mostly known for ecommerce.
But this year, Amazon is pitching advertisers on recent improvements to its ad tech stack, Iooss said, pointing to product upgrades it unveiled at its Amazon Ads unBoxed event in November. These products include Campaign Manager, an ad platform meant to centralize reporting, and a creative agent designed to reduce the operational lift of generating video creative.
What all these enhancements have in common, Iooss said, is the goal of driving advertising effectiveness and performance.
Creative is at the heart of good advertising, “but then we want to see an outcome,” Iooss said. Which is why, for this year’s upfront, Amazon’s narrative will focus on its ability to tie content to conversions, she said.
Amazon <3 performance
Buy-side demands for performance tied to streaming investments are only ramping up.
But first, media buyers must be able to treat streaming like a “full-funnel” investment rather than just an upper-funnel reach vehicle, Iooss said. In other words, marketers need proof that they reached their intended audiences and that those people took a desired action.
And what better way to connect impressions to sales than with actual purchase data? That’s Amazon’s argument, at least.
According to Amazon, every campaign running through Amazon DSP automatically benefits from its authenticated identity graph technology. Amazon Ads claims its graph includes 90% of US households.
Starting next quarter, advertisers will be able to cross reference that reach with logged-in Netflix accounts. Amazon Audiences gives buyers access to trillions of data points on customer shopping, browsing behavior and streaming across Amazon properties, including the flagship ecommerce site, according to the company. For example, buyers will be able to target their campaigns to Netflix viewers based on factors such as lifestyle, interests and products they are actively shopping for.
Expanding its audience segments to Netflix inventory is part of a broader effort to improve ad performance by connecting shopping and streaming data, said Iooss. She noted that this is also the rationale behind partnerships Amazon Ads has inked with agencies over the past year, including a new deal with Omnicom Media in January to tackle frequency capping.
Expect to hear more at Amazon’s upfront this year. AdExchanger will be there.
