Digiday covers the latest from marketing and media at the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. More from the series →
On the second official day of the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Amazon continues its charm offensive on advertisers, announcing a partnership with Disney Advertising that brings its demand-side platform into Disney’s Real-Time Ad Exchange.
The development comes almost a year after DRAX launched, meaning Amazon is only the third DSP, alongside Google and The Trade Desk, to grant advertisers access to DRAX. DRAX sells inventory across various properties, including Disney+, ESPN, and Hulu.
The tie-up with Amazon DSP lets advertisers leverage insights from both companies to refine their ad campaigns, including specialized campaigns that match Disney’s audience data with browsing, streaming, and purchase insights from Amazon Ads through a direct collaboration between Amazon Publisher Cloud, built on AWS clean rooms technology, and Disney Compass.
Additionally, the duo can now offer curated deal packages through Disney solutions, such as Disney’s Magic Words contextual targeting and the upcoming connection to Disney Select, Disney’s proprietary data offering.
In a statement, Amazon Ads’ Kelly MacLean, vp of Amazon DSP, said the tie-up was “breaking down traditional barriers between content and commerce signals,” a key underpinning of the e-commerce giant’s messaging to Madison Avenue this year.
Similarly, Matt Barnes, vp of programmatic sales, Disney Advertising, said “building a direct path connecting Amazon’s commerce insights to the full scale of Disney’s streaming ecosystem,” would “move the needle for our clients and deliver better results” for advertisers.
The new integration will be available to all advertisers using Amazon DSP starting in Q3 2025 following an initial rollout with select brands that were not named.
The announcement from Amazon DSP marks the second such reveal this week, as tens of thousands of advertising executives converge on La Croisette in Cannes, France, for negotiations that will help shape the media industry for the upcoming year.
On Monday, June 16, Amazon Ads and Roku partnered to make the e-commerce giant’s DSP the exclusive platform for accessing Roku’s CTV inventory, covering 80 million U.S. households, via a unified identifier. The partnership leverages a custom identity resolution service that lets Amazon DSP exclusively recognize logged-in viewers deterministically across Roku OS devices.
In particular, Amazon DSP has made cost-effectiveness its USP, with several Digiday sources noting that its platform fees are significantly less compared to those of rival offerings, such as The Trade Desk, in recent weeks.
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