An anatomy of the trust fault line running through Amazon’s ad ambitions

In fact, it has intensified as Amazon pushes its ad business beyond its own walls and deeper into the broader web. The pitch is performance at scale. The concern is whether those ad dollars are being steered to the best outcomes or toward the parts of the ecosystem Amazon controls. It’s the familiar strain of any platform that sells ads inside their own gardens while extending their reach across the open internet. Google faced these suspicions. Amazon is confronting it now, at a moment when automated buying and real-time optimization send more dollars through tech as influential as the Amazon DSP.

“For all the advancements made to the DSP, its algorithms have tended to favor their O&O,” said a media buyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize any commercial arrangements. 

Given how the DSP works, the concern is understandable. It leans on Amazon’s shopper and audience data to automated targeted burying across Amazon properties and the wider web including CTV. That creates natural uncertainty when a brand’s priority sits outside Amazon’s commerce loop – the conversions that don’t feed back into an Amazon sale. 

Or as the media buyer put it: “It’s still to be determined whether Amazon can deliver efficient performance when the conversion is off-Amazon.”

Retail marketers feel this most acutely. 

They turn to Amazon’s DSP because its shopper data is often the most reliable indicator of who is actually in-market, even when the retailer wants the sale to happen on its own site. Amazon sees search intent, browsing behaviour, product detail page views, cart activity price checks and purchase history across millions of shoppers. Few retail media networks – or open web DSPs – can match that view, which is why advertisers keep coming back to it. 

But that’s also where the unease comes in. The same dataset that makes Amazon’s DSP so compelling can create a gravitational pull back into Amazon’s own storefront unless measurement, controls and conversion data are deliberately balanced. 

“Yes, advertisers have those concerns,” said a media buyer on condition of anonymity. “But there’s a part of this that’s rooted in the fact that Amazon will continue to be the number one place consumers go to buy products, and they’re proud of the data that shows that.”

Amazon’s rivals, unsurprisingly, have pounced on that ambiguity. 

The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green has been explicit that the commerce company is naturally incentivized to keep ad dollars in its own ecosystem, where margins are more favorable. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s DSP teams have raised similar critiques privately with marketers. 

It adds up to a complicated picture for advertisers. Whether it’s enough to shift budgets is an open question, not because they’re blind to self-preferencing – every major platform has pushed them through some version of this before – but because they know the mechanics matter. A system trained on Amazon’s commerce data will naturally treat Amazon environments as lower-risk, higher-confidence conversion paths because the feedback loop is full. When the sale happens on Amazon, the DSP sees every step from impression to purchase. What can be read as favoritism often reflects where the data is richest and least ambiguous. 

“Amazon O&O is a huge reason people work with Amazon,” said Liz DeAngelis, managing director of programmatic at Brainlabs. “It’s also a lot more cost efficient given they own the inventory and it bypasses multiple “ad tax” opportunities (i.e., SSPs in particular multiple hops), so it’s likely that the DSP is ‘favoring’ this inventory due to it being available and more cost efficient, which can ultimately be beneficial to certain advertisers.” 

Seasoned Amazon advertisers tend to get this dynamic intuitively. For newcomers, it’s a steeper learning curve, and Amazon has been recalibrating accordingly. 

Over the past year, Amazon ad execs have reworked both how the DSP is packaged and how outcomes are measured. Programmatic guaranteed deals now let marketers lock in premium CTV and live sports placements at set prices, easing the sense that budgets are being funneled back into Amazon-owned inventory without their say, 

Amazon Publisher Direct now opens access to thousands of premium publishers without Amazon sitting in the middle. The Certified Supply Exchange program gives Amazon clearer visibility into open exchange supply by formalizing ties with major SSPs. And recent deals with Roku, Disney Netflix, Spotify and iHeartRadio underscore a broader push to expand distribution well beyond Amazon’s own real estate. 

Advertisers can even exclude Amazon-owned properties entirely – a detail Amazon increasingly emphasizes as proof that the DSP isn’t structurally wired to force O&O delivery. 

Plus, Amazon Marketing Cloud has emerged as the measurement layer where brands evaluate on and off-Amazon performance through privacy-safe clean room reporting. AMC now connects Amazon’s browsing, streaming and shopping signals with a brand’s own data and third -party sources like LiveRamp and Salesforce. No-code and low-code tools have expanded access, and adversaries can acetate AMC-derived insights directly into Sponsored Ads and DSP campaigns. 

Taken together, the moves signal Amazon’s effort to recast the DSP as a broader media buying platform built to support outcomes wherever brands need them to land – not just  a tool that feeds its retail flywheel. Internally, Amazon frames the shift as consistent with tis long-held view that customer experience and advertiser performance reinforce each other. 

None of this will eliminate their suspicions but it does give advertisers more tools to interrogate how the machine behaves. What advertisers are watching now is whether those tools are truly neutral or simply better packaged guardrails around the same center of gravity. 

“I think one needs to be careful saying with 100% certainty that the Amazon DSP favors the Amazon-owned inventory, because that is very difficult for an ad buyer to prove,” said Vlad Chubakov, associate director, programmatic at Delve Deeper. “If a streaming campaign is set to deliver against all streamers, including Prime Video, and it ends up delivering a large number of impressions on Prime Video, that doesn’t necessarily mean Amazon is acting maliciously. It’s a very popular streaming service, so receiving a large amount of impressions could be based on viewership or a number of other factors the buyer is optimizing to.”