Over the past few months, Amazon has announced key partnerships with multiple publishers and advertising companies, significantly enhancing the capabilities of its demand-side platform (DSP). Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has described the DSP as a "fully functional" product, and this platform is becoming an increasingly important part of its advertising business—which saw revenue grow 24% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2025, reaching $17.7 billion.

"Over the past few years, we have invested a significant amount of product and engineering work to enable the DSP to meet all of our customers' marketing needs," Meredith Goldman, Director of Amazon Ads DSP, told Marketing Dive. "This vision has been around for a long time, but its realization has accelerated over the past two years, with capabilities such as planning, optimization, activation, and measurement all now in place."

Overall, these partnerships combine premium ad inventory with the trillions of first-party signals Amazon has accumulated through its e-commerce platform, enabling full-funnel, closed-loop measurement and attribution, which promises to fulfill the digital advertising promise that has not yet been fully realized. At the same time, this poses a growing threat to leading industry competitors—Google Display & Video 360 and The Trade Desk—although larger questions about Amazon's technological dominance remain.

"Amazon comes closest to eliminating the fundamental trade-off brands face between hard-to-measure brand-building effects and easily measurable performance marketing," Doree Wendling, Vice President of Marketing at Global Overview, a full-service agency focused on Amazon and other retail media platforms, said in an email comment.

Amazon is expected to unveil more innovations across its entire advertising business, spanning areas such as DSP and streaming TV, at its annual advertising conference UnBoxed, which kicks off today (November 10) in Nashville.

Deeper, more direct deals

Although Amazon has partnered with publishers for years—Amazon Publisher Services launched nearly a decade ago—several recent partnerships have deepened these relationships and established more direct integrations between the supply side and the demand side.

"We're not just getting access; we're deepening these partnerships and leveraging the signal density that comes from direct integrations. We're not just buying through SSPs and exchanges... we're getting closer to publishers, providing them with the right tools to showcase the value of their supply directly to Amazon DSP customers," Goldman said.

The partnership with Roku gives advertisers access to what the two companies call "the largest addressable connected TV reach in the U.S.," enhancing addressability across more than 80 million households. Similarly, the partnership with Disney's Real-time Ad Exchange gives advertisers access to premium inventory on Disney+, ESPN, and Hulu.

In a major move, Amazon announced a partnership with Netflix in September, allowing advertisers using Amazon DSP to programmatically purchase Netflix's premium ad inventory. This collaboration finds growth synergies between two companies that otherwise compete in the streaming space.

Amazon is also working to expand audio ad inventory, striking deals with the top three platforms in streaming audio. Advertisers using Amazon DSP can now reach SiriusXM Media's 160 million monthly digital listeners, Spotify's 696 million global monthly users, and iHeart's millions of streaming music and live radio listeners (podcasts and radio will go live in 2026).

Beyond publisher partnerships, Amazon has also reached agreements with other ad tech companies. In October, Amazon DSP became the preferred migration partner for Microsoft Invest (formerly Xandr DSP and AppNexus) customers, as that platform is set to be retired in early 2026. Meanwhile, Microsoft Monetize became a preferred supply-side platform (SSP) in Amazon's certified supply exchange program.

"We are committed to providing our customers with omnichannel supply across different media formats. Audio, display, and streaming TV are critical, and Microsoft Monetize is another premium partner we will gain. We will not only be an important migration partner for their advertisers, but we will also continue to offer Microsoft's supply to all Amazon DSP advertisers and customers," Goldman explained.

Competitive landscape

Amazon's accelerated push to build a fully functional DSP is making waves in the ad tech space, similar to how its advertising products have disrupted the Facebook and Google duopoly. Some marketers have reportedly shifted millions of dollars in budgets from The Trade Desk to Amazon DSP, and an Adweek report about Amazon offering free DSP comparison testing caused The Trade Desk's stock to fall last month. However, The Trade Desk has pushed back on Amazon's progress.

"Amazon's DSP is primarily used to buy Prime Video, and rarely used to buy the open internet. We estimate that only a low single-digit percentage of its DSP is used for open internet decisioning, and a small portion of that is used for non-decisioning buys like programmatic guaranteed," The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green said on a November 6 earnings call.

"In advertising, Amazon competes first with Google, and second with Netflix and Disney. Rarely do they have time or money to compete with us. The reality is, we operate in a very different sandbox," Green added.

Nevertheless, reports continue about Amazon DSP's growing importance to advertisers and its fee structure. Advertisers being able to comprehensively reach premium CTV inventory within a single DSP strengthens Amazon's value proposition.

"Advertisers can enjoy lower platform and DSP costs than some DSP competitors, and more working media means more value," said Jacob Weithorn, Head of the Video Center of Excellence at media agency Kepler. "Putting more budget into the market and less into fees is always a good thing."

One-stop shopping

On Amazon's side, the company is committed to providing transparency to customers—whether in pricing, AI usage, or optimization—working hard to explain its decisions on ad placements and fees, Goldman said.

"This is a very important mission for us... ensuring we always maintain a 'glass box' approach while innovating quickly, so we don't innovate so fast that we lose customer trust," the executive said.

This pace of innovation and level of investment reflects Amazon's scale and heft in advertising and technology. Amazon Ads (including DSP) derives first-party signals from the retail environment, leverages the privacy-safe cloud environment of Amazon Marketing Cloud, and is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS)—a one-stop offering that other companies have yet to match.

But after last month's AWS outage caused widespread internet disruptions, questions have resurfaced about whether a one-stop shop is right for advertisers. Amazon has sought to address these and related integration concerns by keeping interoperability as a core value and allowing customers to bring in third-party vendors for measurement.

"Amazon's value system of price, selection, and convenience applies equally to the ads division, truly offering customers multiple options in how they allocate their marketing budgets, while ensuring we provide the right insights and data to help them make the best business decisions," Goldman said.