- Amazon’s video ads chief laid out his plan to grow TV ad share, including a new ad buying and planning tool.
- He said Amazon is prioritizing ad performance over “public bragging rights.”
- Amazon faces stronger competition for streaming ads as rivals grow live sports and TV viewership.
Amazon led the way in bringing live sports to streaming and disrupted the market last year when it rolled out ads by default to its Prime Video viewership. But it’s facing stronger competition in 2025 from Netflix, Google-owned YouTube, and more.
One advantage Amazon still has is its massive scale and trove of data.
Krishan Bhatia, the NBCUniversal vet who was tapped to lead ad sales for Prime Video last year, said reach was “fundamental” — especially when using “data and targeting to optimize against audience segments.”
Amazon touts a reach of 115 million monthly ad-supported viewers on Prime Video, which grows to 175 million when the rest of its TV offering is included.
Another core part of Bhatia’s pitch is making it easier to buy advertising across that audience. To help grow its share of advertisers’ budgets, Amazon is rolling out a new tool called Complete TV. This tool lets advertisers view data from their streaming TV ad buys across Amazon and its competitors in one place. Complete TV can then give them AI-generated recommendations for how to spend more of their budgets (with Amazon, presumably).
Bhatia spoke ahead of planned pitches scheduled with ad holding companies the week of March 3.
Amazon’s pitch may not satisfy some TV advertisers, who have told BI they don’t want to be limited to using Amazon’s ad-buying tech, which they say prevents them from holistically measuring their spending across media companies. They asked for anonymity when discussing business deals; their identities are known to BI.
Advertisers still question who’s watching
Bhatia talked up Amazon’s live sports prowess, bolstered by the addition of the NBA this year, plus its customer data and ability to tie ads to outcomes.
But beyond sports, Prime Video has more to prove to advertisers who want to be associated with shows people are passionate about. Amazon’s share of TV viewing, at 3.7% in January, trails YouTube, Netflix, and Disney. It has broadly popular shows but hasn’t had a mega hit with the cultural impact of Netflix’s “Squid Game” or “Stranger Things.”
Bhatia pointed to the action TV series “Reacher” and sci-fi drama “Fallout” as examples of Amazon’s popular entertainment.
“I think everyone wants to have hits,” he said. “There’s no question about that. I think we’ve had our share of hits and our studio teams and content programming teams continue to be focused on finding great IP that scales in the US and scales globally as well.”
Bhatia said Amazon is working to develop more audience insights for advertisers but that it wouldn’t match Netflix in publicizing comprehensive viewership stats for shows and movies.
“When we serve the customer, we talk about the data that matters,” he said. “And they understand the performance, they understand the reach, they understand the audience insights that we’re delivering to them. That’s more important than the public bragging rights that may come along with them.”
However, some advertisers tell BI they still want more data from streamers generally — particularly around which shows their ads appear on — similar to what they get on linear TV.
Amazon also touts as a selling point that it relies less on interruptive formats by using shopping carousels and AI tools to soup up its ad targeting abilities.
“We’ve been committed from the outset to keep the interruptive ad load to a minimum,” Bhatia said. “That means that you’re going to have a lower interruptive ad load on average. It’s a balancing act, but our strategy is to have a diverse set of ad experiences that do not just rely on growing 15 and 30-second commercials.”
Rick Kern/Getty Images for Amazon
Amazon faces tougher competition in 2025
Amazon pulled in $3.8 billion in streaming video revenue last year, to Netflix’s $1.5 billion, EMARKETER estimated.
But it faces increased competition.
Netflix is making ads a bigger part of its growth plan and has shown it can convene large live audiences with two Christmas Day NFL games and the Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson boxing match late last year. YouTube has user data that rivals Amazon and has been the top TV viewing destination for two years running. Disney now has more TV viewing share than Amazon across Disney+, ESPN+, and Hulu combined.
Ad insiders say thanks in part to Amazon flooding the market and driving down rivals’ prices, buyers have more places to go and expect still more bargains — which they expect to use to extract further price cuts.
