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Amazon has spent the last few months announcing key deals with publishers and advertising companies that have enhanced its demand-side platform (DSP), an offering that CEO Andy Jassy has described as “fully featured” — and one that is a growing part of an advertising business that saw revenue jump 24% year over year to $17.7 billion in Q3 2025.

“The past couple years have been a lot of product and engineering work to get the DSP to service our customers’ entire marketing needs,” Meredith Goldman, director of Amazon DSP at Amazon Ads, told Marketing Dive. “That has been the vision for a while, but really accelerated the past couple of years, where all the features that were being delivered, all the capabilities to be able to plan, optimize, activate and measure, really came to fruition.”

All together, these deals combine access to premium inventory with the trillions of first-party signals that Amazon has gathered about consumers, chiefly through its e-commerce platform, allowing for the kind of full-funnel, closed-loop measurement and attribution that could deliver on the promise of digital advertising that has yet to be fully realized elsewhere. It also presents a growing threat to industry-leading demand-side competitors Google Display & Video 360 and The Trade Desk, even as larger questions about Amazon’s tech world dominance persist.

“Amazon is closest to eliminating the fundamental trade-off brands face between what is hard to measure — the impact of brand building — and what is easier to measure — performance tactics,” said Doree Wendling, vice president of marketing at Global Overview, a full-service agency focused on Amazon and other retail media platforms, in emailed comments.

Amazon is expected to reveal more innovations around its entire ad business — from DSP to streaming TV and beyond — at UnBoxed, the annual Amazon Ads conference that kicks off today (Nov. 10) in Nashville.

Deeper, more direct deals

While Amazon has worked with publishers for years — Amazon Publisher Services launched nearly a decade ago — several recent deals have deepened partnerships and built out more direct integrations between supply and demand sides.

“How do we not just have access but depth in these partnerships, and be able to bring forward all of this signal density that comes with the benefit of having a direct integration? Not just buying through SSPs and exchanges… but getting closer with the publishers, giving them the right tools to merchandise and express the value of their supply directly to the Amazon DSP customers,” Goldman said.

A deal with Roku provides advertisers with what the companies claim is the largest authenticated connected TV footprint in the U.S., promising improved addressability across more than 80 million households. A similar deal with Disney’s Real-time Ad Exchange gave advertisers access to Disney’s premium inventory across Disney+, ESPN and Hulu.

In a major move, Amazon and Netflix in September announced a pact that gave advertisers using Amazon DSP the ability to programmatically buy premium Netflix inventory. The partnership found synergy between two areas of growth for companies that otherwise compete in the streaming arena.

Amazon has also worked to grow its inventory of audio advertising, partnering with the top three players in streaming audio. Advertisers using Amazon DSP can now reach SiriusXM Media’s 160 million monthly digital listeners, Spotify’s global audience of 696 million monthly users and iHeart’s millions of listeners of streaming music and live streaming radio (with podcast and broadcast to come in 2026).

Beyond publishing deals, Amazon has secured deals with other advertising companies. Amazon DSP in October became the preferred transition partner for customers of Microsoft Invest, the platform (formerly Xandr DSP and AppNexus) that it will sunset early in 2026. At the same time, Microsoft Monetize is now a preferred supply-side platform (SSP) in Amazon’s Certified Supply Exchange program.

“We are trying to make sure that we’re giving customers the full aperture of the omnichannel supply across the different mediums of media,” Goldman explained. “Audio, display, streaming TV obviously are critical, and with Microsoft Monetize, it’s another premium partner that we will have access to. Not only will we be an important transition partner for their advertiser customers, but continue in offering their Microsoft supply to all of the Amazon DSP advertisers and customers.”

Competitive landscape

Amazon’s accelerated work to deliver a fully featured DSP is causing waves in the ad-tech space, much like the growth of its ad offerings disrupted the advertising duopoly of Facebook and Google. Some marketers reportedly moved millions in spend from The Trade Desk to Amazon DSP, and an Adweek report about Amazon’s offer of free head-to-head testing of its DSP caused The Trade Desk’s stock to tumble last month. However, The Trade Desk has pushed backed on Amazon’s developments in the space.

“Amazon’s DSP is mostly about buying Prime video and very little is buying the open Internet. Our estimates are that low single digits are in their DSP and a small percentage of that is pointed at decisioning the open Internet. It’s either Prime video or nondecision buying like programmatic guaranteed,” Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green said on the company’s Nov. 6 earnings call.

“In advertising, Amazon first competes with Google and then it competes with Netflix and Disney. Very little time and money is competing with us. So the reality is we’re playing in a very different sandbox,” Green added.

Still, reports about Amazon DSP’s growing importance to advertisers and moves around the fees it charges persist. The ability for advertisers to have full coverage of premium CTV advertising all in one DSP helps Amazon’s value proposition.

“Advertisers can lean in on lower platform and DSP costs compared to some of their other DSP frenemies in the space, and more working media equals more value,” said Jacob Weithorn, the video center of excellence lead at media agency Kepler. “The more money you can put in market with less dollars going toward fees is always great.”

One-stop shopping

For its part, Amazon has looked to offer customers transparency, whether around pricing, the use of artificial intelligence or optimization, working to explain its decisions about what ads ran where and for how much to customers, Goldman explained.

“That’s a very important venture for us… making sure that as we innovate and move quickly that we always maintain that glass box approach, so that we’re not innovating so fast and jumping ahead that we’re losing the trust of our customers,” the exec said.

That speed of innovation and investment speaks to Amazon’s scale and size in the advertising and technology landscapes. Amazon Ads, inclusive of the DSP, draws first-party signals from the retail environment, utilizes a privacy-safe cloud environment with the Amazon Marketing Cloud, and is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) — an all-in-one offering that other companies haven’t yet been able to match.

But after an AWS outage took down large parts of the internet last month, there are renewed questions around whether all-in-one is the right play for advertisers. Amazon has worked to address these and related concerns about consolidation by maintaining interoperability as a core value and allowing customers to bring in third-party vendors for areas like measurement.

“The Amazon value system of price, selection and convenience holds true even in the advertising org, to really be able to provide customers a selection of offerings, allow them to pick the path by which they want to be activating their marketing budgets, but making sure that we’re providing them the right insights and data to make the best choice for their business,” Goldman said.