Smart TV home screens were the talk of the town in Denver during the StreamTV Show last week. Amazon is trying to continue that conversation on the southern shores of France, where the Cannes Lions Festival is taking place this week. AdExchanger is on the ground (or, erm, beach).
Amazon is making a splash by touting recent Fire TV interface upgrades designed to help viewers find relevant content more easily, including when they are watching the 2026 FIFA World Cup, now underway until July 19. The upgrades, paired with the rising popularity of home screen advertising, is driving more buy-in for Fire TV home screen space, according to Amazon.
Fire TV is home to a “World Cup hub [with] all of the content you might want to watch, from the games to the highlights,” Charlotte Maines, VP of devices content and advertising, told AdExchanger ahead of Cannes. The hub has custom channels with expert commentary from “The Athletic” and ways for users to ask Alexa questions about the tournament, such as, “What are the chances the U.S. is going to make it to the knockout round?” Fire TV Channels World Cup sponsors include Credit Karma, Xfinity and Haleon (owner of Advil and Tums).
For Amazon, the point of pushing Fire TV’s home screen updates is to appeal to advertisers by pitching the high engagement and reach that comes with more user-friendliness. Which is why Amazon says it’s seeing more marketing dollars earmarked for Fire TV home screen ads. For example, a media and entertainment advertiser (that Amazon didn’t name) “re-upped significant investment” in home screen takeovers, Maines said. This year’s World Cup sponsors include Peacock and Telemundo (airing Spanish-language matches), Fox and Tubi (airing English-language matches) and Dove.
Amazon expects Fire TV home screen advertisers to see similar success to Peacock’s when the streaming service developed custom home screen takeovers for the Olympic Winter Games and Super Bowl earlier this year. Those campaigns drove more than eight times the average clicks compared to Amazon’s benchmarks.
Get your game face on
Home screen advertising is getting trendier as marketers chase engagement, the precursor to performance. And users are most engaged when they first turn on their TV device, before they get sucked into a (possibly ad-free) show. In that time period of content discovery, users are a “captive audience,” Maines said, which is a great opportunity for advertisers who have something relevant to show them. This rationale is especially true when users aren’t sure what they want to watch.
According to Amazon, nearly half (44%) of Fire TV users are not certain what they want to watch when they turn their TV on. Instead, they expect to spend some time looking for content and are thus more receptive to advertising compared to users who just want to dive straight into their favorite show. That’s the type of consumer Fire TV wants to help advertisers reach, Maines said, because users who are engaged in content discovery are likely not distracted by their phones.
Sports come with an even bigger engagement play.
Most TV viewers nowadays will inevitably go on their phones at some point during their streaming sesh. Sports viewers are likely looking up or watching content related to sports, often something complementary to whatever is on the screen, said Jon Giegengack, founder and principal Hub Entertainment Research, speaking at the StreamTV Show last week. In comparison, viewers who use their phones while watching scripted TV are more likely to be totally distracted.
When it comes to viewers who watch ad-supported content, home screen advertising can punch up ad performance even more.
“When advertisers pair a Fire TV hero placement with a Prime Video commercial, they can drive over 90% incremental reach with only a 6% audience overlap,” Maines said.
To be fair, those numbers are somewhat impacted by subscriber numbers. There are plenty of streaming viewers who use a Fire TV device but don’t subscribe to Prime Video (like yours truly). So a similar analysis for streaming services with higher viewership, such as Netflix and Disney, could reveal higher audience overlap. (You win some, you lose some.)
Either way, Amazon has a point when it suggests that diversifying ad formats can lead to better engagement and thus better results. Previous research suggests that pairing a 30-second commercial with a nontraditional TV ad format increases ad recall.
In a nutshell, Maines said relevant and personalized home screens “creates a highly engaged audience” and thus a major opportunity for advertisers in their competition for consumer attention.
In other words: Game on.
But first … we’ll see you in Cannes.
