Amazon wants a bigger piece of TV ad dollars that are going programmatic.
The company is launching a new tool called Complete TV within its demand-side-platform, Amazon DSP, for advertisers to plan and manage their TV budgets, including linear and streaming deals.
With Complete TV, advertisers can track their upfront commitments—year-long TV budgets that are allocated across networks and platforms. Amazon is also pitching the tool as a way for advertisers to buy scatter TV inventory—ad space that wasn’t sold during the upfront.
“The current TV advertising landscape is full of inefficient spending, fragmented controls, and TV linear buys are shifting over to programmatic,” Kelly MacLean, VP of Amazon DSP told ADWEEK. “Our goal is to act as a neutral party because we know that these agreements are already transacted between advertisers and publishers—we just want to facilitate that.”
The tool uses artificial intelligence to track the pacing of upfront commitments. And for scatter budgets, Amazon’s AI identifies the best platforms to spend dollars, including its own Prime Video platform as well as other premium publishers. Advertisers upload their audience data from their TV deals, and Amazon DSP recommends where advertisers should spend to reach those audiences across TV and the open web. Amazon also has direct integrations with publishers through its Amazon Publisher Direct team.
Amazon’s tool aims to track metrics like reach and frequency—two metrics that advertisers use to ensure that they’re not targeting the same person watching TV across different devices or networks. In some cases, Amazon has seen that advertisers waste 55% of TV budgets by repeatedly targeting the same person, said MacLean.
Advertisers can also integrate their own measurement partners into Complete TV, MacLean added.
Amazon said that it has beta-tested the tool and it will be available for all advertisers who participate in the upcoming 2025 to 2026 upfront season.
Amazon is incentivizing advertisers to use the tool with low fees. Advertisers who use Complete TV for programmatic guaranteed deals on Amazon’s own properties will not be charged a fee. For programmatic guaranteed deals with other streaming publishers, Amazon charges a 1% fee.
“We recognize that the transition from linear to programmatic is challenging, it’s manual—we can very simply help advertisers understand those cost savings,” MacLean said.
