Amazon tightens its grip on TV ads with AI tool built for upfront negotiations

For marketers, this kind of automation tackles a persistent industry headache: delivering on upfront commitments in full. Historically, shifting audience behavior, inconsistent measurement and last-minute inventory fluctuations have made it difficult for advertisers to spend exactly as planned. So much so, in fact, that they often find themselves scrambling to move money into the scatter market to fill shortfalls — or worse, wasting budget on redundant reach. 

Amazon is positioning Complete TV as the fix for those inefficiencies. 

“We don’t want to insert ourselves in between the advertiser and the publisher, where they already have that working relationship,” said vp of Amazon Ads Kelly MacLean. “Instead, we want to just make it easy for them [the publisher] to deliver anything that’s pre-negotiated.”

Amazon’s data advantage

Unlike most streaming ad platforms, which rely on a limited set of engagement metrics, Amazon has a sweeping view of consumer behavior, spanning retail purchases, browsing habits and online video viewing. 

This wealth of first-party data allows Amazon to offer advertisers a granular understanding of where their audiences are, what they’re interested in and when they’re most likely to convert. Complete TV uses that intel to optimize ad placements in a way that few competitors can match, particularly as traditional identifiers like third-party cookies become obsolete.

That’s especially important for marketers aiming to maximize reach without bombarding the same audience. If they’ve met their upfront commitments and still have money left for the scatter market, for instance, Complete TV helps ensure those extra dollars find new audiences instead of the same ones. 

“That’s really where the dashboard is critical to monitoring those forecasted and actual outcomes — not just for incremental reach but also for things like publisher reach overlap, brand, lift, long term sales impact, and commitment pacing,” said Maclean.

Her point touches on a larger challenge in TV advertising: proving real business value beyond vanity metrics. That’s where Amazon sees an opening. By utilizing the Amazon Marketing Cloud, Compete TV promises advertisers deeper analytics, offering them a clearer picture of how their upfront deals and scatter market buys translate into tangible outcomes. 

“We are agnostic so any measurement partner an advertiser is working with today they’ll be able to continue to do so with Compete TV,” said MacLean.

The bigger picture

Of course, Amazon isn’t rolling out this tool out of pure altruism. By making TV ad buying easier, smarter and more accountable, the commerce giant isn’t just streamlining the process, it’s ensuring that more ad dollars flow into its ecosystem. 

Yet, as always, the real question is how much control advertisers are willing to cede to Amazon’s algorithms. Automated ad placement tools, no matter how sophisticated, still require trust that the system is deleting ads to the places marketers need them to be rather than simply steering those dollars toward the places Amazon wants. And with Amazon’s increasing dominance in the advertising space — it effectively repriced the streaming ad market last year — some buyers may wonder whether they’re optimizing their campaigns or simply optimizing Amazon’s bottom line.

Still, in a world where streaming ad dollars are growing and traditional TV models are fading, tools like Complete TV represent the inevitable future. Whether that future is as seamless as Amazon claims remains to be seen.

“Amazon isn’t selling as much total TV ads as some of the bigger legacy companies when you combine their linear and TV,” said Ross Benes, a senior analyst at eMarketer in an emailed response to Digiday. “But Amazon is already among the top streaming services and exceeds lower tier TV networks in ad revenue. Amazon’s influence will only grow as it adds more sports and gains more time spent. It isn’t in YouTube or Disney territory but it is a dominant player nonetheless whose influence is growing.”