‘There’s a big shift’: Amazon is turning the upfront into a pitch for its ad tech, not just primetime

“There’s this big shift from these content-first decisions into more of this integrated approach, where you have premium content, deterministic signals and AI-driven technology all activating together,” said Kelly Maclean, vp of Amazon Ads.

It sums up what the upfront has come to represent for Amazon. Not a launch event for new agents or targeting tools but a moment to land bigger commitments on the tech it has already built. That matters since ad tech controls don’t work like media buys. They’re closer to enterprise software agreements — annual or multi year, requiring teams to be trained and systems to be integrated. That’s not a decision a trader makes. It’s one a holdco makes. And the upfront, with its concentration of senior agency leaders in one room, is one of the few moments in the year where that conversation can actually happen. 

“It [the upfronts] still remains a critical moment where buyers are allocating TV dollars at the end of the day,” said Maclean. “But the reality too with DSP tech is that it is often a new enterprise software, and so marketers are much more open and willing to test and commit bigger dollars than they have in the past.”

The tech won’t close those deals. But it does shape them. Especially, since advertisers don’t just want guaranteed slots. They want a system smart enough to know what to do with them. 

For MacLean and her team, those conversations will hinge on Amazon’s unified buying system — the demand-side platform and Ads Console collapsed into one system. Inside it are two modes: Smart Mode is AI-led, whereby a buyer sets an objective, uploads creative and lets the AI run. Expert Mode keeps the human in the loop, giving buyers more granular control over which segments to target, which to exclude and which to supply access — with AI available throughout as a co-pilot rather than the driver.

Sitting across both is the Ads Agent. Buyers give it a media plan — budgets, dates and goals — and it builds a campaign automatically inside the same unified buying system. The buyer reviews it before anything goes live but the manual work of configuring a campaign inside the DSP is gone. For agencies that want to run it through their own systems rather than Amazon’s, its MCP server lets them do that without changing how they work.

“Our approach is we really want to enable them [agencies] wherever they are because you have some holdcos who are really bought in on a centralized system for their own tech or leveraging other tech. in those cases, we just want to make it as easy as possible for them to connect to our MCP server,” said Maclean.

That flexibility is deliberate. By meeting agencies where they are, whether that’s inside Amazon’s own UI or plugged into a holdco’s proprietary stack via MCP, Amazon isn’t asking buyers to tear up how they work. It’s trying to fit around it. It’s the same flexibility buyers have been asking for at the upfront table for years just applied to the tech stack rather than the media buy.

It’s notable because agencies like PMG and Horizon are already making their own architectural choices outside the upfront. PMG’s Alli platform is being built explicitly so that a trade never needs to leave it, routing budget across The Trade Desk, Amazon or any other DSP based on whichever delivers the best outcome at any given moment. Horizon is doing the same. For those agencies, individual DSPs are becoming interchangeable. Amazon knows it.

“There’s a lot of questions on where the industry is going to go,” said MacLean. “There’s no debate on the efficiency and the power of AI, but it’s more about how you most quickly connect to all of your internal systems, your identity systems, and ensure you’re delivering against all of those outcomes.”

As those questions have gotten more acute, Amazon’s ad tech has become more holistic. It’s less about the pipe and more about what runs through it: authenticated signals, agentic tools and a unified buying system that connects planning to activation in one place. It goes back to what MacLean earlier said earlier in the year about the brains behind how upfront dollars are paced, optimized and measured. It’s the infrastructure play, put simply. And increasingly, that infrastructure is showing up on other people’s stages. MacLean appeared on Samsung TV Plus and Tubi’s NewFronts earlier this year. Looking ahead, the Amazon DSP is expected to be name checked by media owners during Upfront Week itself.

Shirley Marschall, an ad tech consultant, summed it up: “Upfront has evolved into a conversation about ‘how do I make my entire ad dollars work together?’ and Amazon is positioning itself as uniquely capable of delivering the answer via content (owned and integrated (Disney, Netflix, Roku, etc.) and data (shopping data, streaming data, payment data etc) in ways competitors can’t replicate by stitching sources.”

It’s a mindset shift that’s been building for years but has crystalized this upfront season. The fragmentation problem has finally become the fragmentation priority.

“We’ve really tried to reinvent how we’re partnering with agencies on their ad tech needs,” said MacLean. “The pace of innovation and automation is really accelerating, and we’re bullish that the AI agents we’ve been developing — these agent-assisted workflows — are helping businesses really move much more quickly from insights to action, reducing this traditional operational complexity and ultimately unlocking new performance capabilities.”

How much that shift has helped pull ad dollars into Amazon’s ads business is up for debate. What is clear is the importance of sports. So much so that Amazon is now unifying direct and programmatic buying across its live sports inventory, meaning whether a marketer is committing upfront dollars or buying in real time, they’re using the same targeting, the same signals, the same optimization tools. It’s significant because live sports is the one inventory type where scarcity still holds — audiences are largely engaged and can’t be time-shifted. Making it accessible programmatically, without sacrificing provision removes the last reason a performance-minded buyer might have had to sit out Amazon’s upfront. 

Amazon’s upfront pitch is a broader strategic bet that the next frontier of advertising isn’t just reaching the right person at the right moment, it’s reaching them before they’ve decided to buy. Agentic shopping is already happening in pockets, and the brands that win will be the ones that show up inside AI-driven purchase decisions with the right message. The LinkedIn partnership it recently announced sharpens that argument, pulling a billion professional audience signals into Amazon’s ad platform. That’s less about CTV targeting and more about proving that Amazon’s authenticated graph is becoming the connective tissue between content commerce and identity. 

“The annual cadence and streaming spend still on the raise, gives Amazon a concentrated moment to get advertisers to commit not just to inventory, but to its adtech stack,” said Marschall. “A combination that helps advertisers understand how audiences interacted with and reacted to ads.”