Two of the most powerful “frenemies” in video streaming, Netflix and Amazon, have formed an alliance to sell advertising.
Starting in the fourth quarter of this year, Netflix will offer buyers ad inventory for its SVOD plan with ads through the Amazon DSP programmatic buying platform in 12 markets, including the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the UK, Japan and Germany. The official announcement can be read here.
After doubling advertising revenue in 2024, Netflix expects to do it again this year. And having its inventory be widely available is part of the strategy. The streaming company already has programmatic integration on most of the major buying platforms, The Trade Desk, Google DV360, Yahoo and Microsoft included.
Netflix wants to make its ads easier to buy.
“By integrating Amazon DSP and enabling even more advanced capabilities together over time, we’re making it easier than ever to connect with Netflix’s global engaged audience,” said Amy Reinhard, president of advertising at Netflix, in a statement.
For its part, Amazon has something the others do not — access to gobs of commerce data on its own retail platform. Notably, during his company’s Q2 earnings report, Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk, insisted that Amazon DSP doesn’t represent a competitive threat. The market has not agreed. The Trade Desk was down another 11%+ in late-day trading Wednesday.
Amazon, meanwhile, has already carved out similar deals with Disney and NBCUniversal in recent months. Amazon wants its platform to be the dedicated place content distributors — well beyond just Amazon Prime Video — come first to sell their commercial inventory.
“Our goal is to remove the guesswork for advertisers by making it simple to manage all of their TV planning and buying with Amazon Ads,” added Paul Kotas, senior VP of Amazon Ads, in a statement.
Notable is the work of Kelly MacLean, the longtime Facebook/Meta advertising product engineer, who Amazon brought in back in April.
“Amazon has completely rearchitected the backend of its DSP tech stack to help publishers leverage their data to buy ads across the internet vs. only on Amazon,” wrote the analysts of LightShed Partners, who also cited the transcript excerpt below.
“Our key differentiators are really those signals,” MacLean told Next in Media podcaster Mike Shields earlier this week. “The trillions of buy, browse and streaming signals that premium inventory and reach, you know, we have the largest premium reach across the open internet, paired with deterministic identity across Prime Video and the majority of all premium pubs … We’re now the only DSP that is offering authenticated reach to over 80 million CTV households in the U.S, and then ultimately just kind of underpinning all of that with tech and interoperability …”