Media Briefing: Amazon’s off-site ad push is becoming publishers’ post-cookie playbook

For those outside the ad tech bubble it’s a plot twist; for industry insiders, a reveal years in the making. Amazon has expanded its demand-side platform, deepened publisher ties, and leveraged its shopper data to rival The Trade Desk and the walled gardens by combining massive first-party data, premium inventory and expanding publisher partnerships to become a powerful all-in-one ad platform for the open web.

Ask any publisher if they have a platform preference, and the answer is typically the same: they’re agnostic. Mainly because relying too heavily on any single platform — whether it’s Amazon, Google, The Trade Desk, or others — can create risks, and each drives value for publishers in different ways. And yet, it’s clear that Amazon is fast becoming a partner du jour for publishers: a kind of post-cookie data wingman that’s helping them monetize the approximate 70 percent of the open web that’s now unaddressable.

“Amazon sits in a very unique position in the ecosystem where they’re a tech provider, because they have the DSP and SSP pipes, but they also have a tremendous amount of signal on the other side [shopper purchase data] that they can bring to the table,” said Mike Nuzzo, svp, head of data solutions, Hearst Magazines, which announced a signal-matching agreement with Amazon in June. “And I think as Amazon started to bring those two worlds together internally, they’ve now realized that there is external benefit to that, and when they join that with the power of publisher data, that’s where you see the magic start to happen.”

For Hearst Magazines, that so-called magic is the combined data insights that come from matching its own audience behavioral and contextual signals (via its ad targeting platform Aura) with Amazon shopper data, to provide a full-funnel view of consumer behavioral patterns.

Amazon’s push into non-endemic, off-site advertising is giving publishers like Hearst a way to match upper-funnel interest signals with its shopper data, letting advertisers run coordinated campaigns that reach users both on Amazon and across the open web, said Jen Dorre, svp, ad product and data, Hearst Magazines and a former Amazon executive. 

In practice, that means if a travel advertiser uses Amazon signals like shoppers buying travel guidebooks for example, they can layer those with Hearst’s Aura audience data to uncover richer targeting insights. Hearst’s “Globetrotter” audience indexes high for travel intent, but so do career-focused and beauty-enthusiast segments, since they often prep for trips with new products. This lets advertisers validate and activate high-propensity audience cohorts across Hearst Magazines’ sites.

Hearst and Amazon’s combined data insights have been woven into one in three of all direct advertising campaigns currently running across Hearst Magazine sites, according to the publisher. Unlike more traditional data partnerships between platforms and publishers — which involved exchanging user-level signals, like IDs, cookies or hashed emails (so both sides could match and target individuals) — its current partnership with Amazon is different, stressed Nuzzo.

Instead of swapping user identifiers, the two parties are sharing concept-level signals, like contextual themes, content categories, or behavioral patterns, that are tied to encrypted signals on Amazon’s side. “This gives us a really interesting ability to look at both indexing and overlap in audiences and behaviors through the two parties. It’s an evolution of what a data partnership may have looked like three or four years ago, in a modern, privacy-safe environment,” Nuzzo said. 

And that’s a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to monetizing the shrinking addressable web, he stressed.

It also seems to be what’s fueling Amazon’s rapid ad growth. Amazon’s ad business reached over $56 billion in 2024, driven by initiatives like Prime Video ads and retail media networks, while Google’s ad revenue was $72.5 billion in 2024, and The Trade Desk had $2.44 billion in ad revenue in 2024, a 25.6% increase year-over-year.

New kind of symbiotic relationship 

People Inc. — recently rebranded from DotDashMeredith — was the first digital publisher to join Amazon’s Publisher Cloud (APC) in October 2023, integrating the publisher’s in-house contextual ad solution D/Cipher with Amazon’s DSP, letting advertisers access its cookieless audience segments and combining contextual insights with Amazon’s shopper data to enhance ad targeting capabilities. 

“Our partnership with Amazon allows both of us to offer a service to the buy side that neither of us could do on our own,” said People Inc.’s chief innovation officer Jon Roberts. “That level of joint innovation and investment means that we get to fix problems that nobody’s fixed yet.”

Lately, People Inc. has been testing a new APC capability that measures how digital content impacts the consideration phase of shopping. The publisher piloted these signals with a client in May to understand how the publisher’s data influenced customer shopping decisions and then used the insights to optimize campaigns. Roberts declined to share specific revenue numbers — or name the brand — but said that the performance of that advertiser’s campaigns increased by more than 50 percent as a direct result. 

“With Amazon, we have a partner fully all in, to go fix and build and work on this, because they know there’s a ton of [consumer] intent on the open web beyond what they see on their site. They have all these great signals on Amazon itself, but until they worked with us, they weren’t able to take that signal and understand how it translated into behavior, not on Amazon but before people got there [to Amazon],” said Roberts.

He added that Amazon’s collaborative approach enables joint development of new products that improve on past offerings — a contrast to Google, which has historically lacked that kind of co-building relationship with publishers.

Put it all together and it’s clear the pitch for Amazon’s DSP is shifting: it’s now an open gateway to inventory from other publishers, not just Amazon’s own properties. For example, while Amazon may have NFL rights, it can also give advertisers access to broader sports inventory — like college football — through publisher partnerships built into the DSP. That means advertisers can tap premium events without using another DSP, and run hyper-targeted buys like Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football to broad CTV campaigns spanning free ad-supported streamers like Samsung TV, Paramount and Pluto, said Lambos.

“I think they’re making it very cost-effective [for publishers] — there’s a huge advantage to path into a large set of advertisers [on its DSP],” Vasilios Lambos, CEO of Lambos Digital — a performance marketing agency and Amazon DSP partner. 

He also added that when media planning on behalf of clients, he can often buy inventory for much cheaper than the industry standard. (Remember this Amazon pitch deck, which touted it charges a 1% DSP fee versus its rivals’ 4%). “I mean, Amazon is sort of eating up the market in a very, very quick fashion, becoming very competitive.”

By the numbers 

• $34.5 billion: How much AI startup Perplexity has bid to buy Google’s Chrome browser. 
• 660,000: The number of paying digital subscribers Bloomberg has, having added 100,000 in the past year. 
• 48% of 80,000: Percentage of articles published across five newsrooms (Investing.com, The Defiant, Benzinga, CoinDesk, and Bitcoin News) that were generated or assisted by AI tools.
• 14%: The median referral traffic drop non-news brands took year-over-year from Google Search, with news brands taking a 10% hit, according to new internal member data from Digital Content Next.

What we’ve heard

“I think there’s a misconception that many people have in the market. They think this is purely an editorial problem, and if we just change the content that we write, then we will survive. You will help one part of it, but it’s not enough with great editorial content alone. The rest is down to branding and technical capability. If you’ve got excellent editorial content, but the citation is branded from a brand that is unknown, you won’t get those click and engagement signals you need to remain competitive.” 

—Jes Sholz, marketing consultant and former Ringier CMO on how publishers can strategize for zero-click search.

What we’ve covered

Despite the hype, publishers aren’t prioritizing GEO

• Referral traffic is drying up. In theory that should make generative search optimization (GSO) a top priority for publishers.
• In practice, five publishers told Digiday they are holding back, skeptical of the hype and unconvinced that GEO offers a meaningful path forward for traffic referral and monetization.

Read more. 

YouTube’s deliberate slow pace on scalable creator ads raises eyebrows among marketers

• As brands increase their spending on scalable creator ads, some marketers say YouTube is lagging behind rival platforms in its implementation of the paid ad format.
• YouTube execs insist its slower rollout is designed to protect the platform’s creator community.

Read more.

The Trade Desk holds its own against Amazon’s growing, but still distant threat

• When The Trade Desk’s CEO Jeff Green waved off Amazon as a threat, he wasn’t entirely wrong. But he wasn’t entirely right, either. It’s a fair claim — for now.
• Amazon’s ad business is growing fast, but it hasn’t yet come at The Trade Desk’s expense. Several ad buyers told Digday as much. 

Read more.

Marketers’ focus on influencer performance fuels live shopping growth in 2025

• In 2025, live shopping platforms are reporting growth across the board. Once a niche trend in the West, live shopping — where creators livestream product sales — has gained traction.
• Whatnot reported over $3 billion in sales in 2025, surpassing its total for all of 2024, according to VP Armand Wilson.

Read more.

Meta’s Superintelligence Labs is already becoming part of the pitch to marketers

• The new unit consolidates Meta’s core AI teams — FAIR, foundational models and product — under one roof. As of now, LinkedIn shows 105 employees at SuperIntelligence Labs, though it’s believed the team is actually far bigger, with The Information reporting Superintelligence Labs currently has about 3,400 staff. 

Read more: 

What we’re reading 

The Washinton Post names Sara Kehaulani Goo president of its Creator Network

The publisher has made former Axios editor in chief Sara Kehaulani Goo chief of what it has called its “third newsroom” — a Creator Network which will center on building personality-driven content and franchises. 

Perplexity makes $34.5 billion bid for Google’s browser

On Tuesday, AI startup Perplexity made a $34.5 billion all-cash bid for Google’s browser, a move aimed at tapping its billions of users in the AI search race. The bid comes as regulatory pressure opens the door for rivals like OpenAI, Yahoo, and Apollo Global Management to challenge Google’s browser dominance.

Business Insider founder Henry Blodget to launch new podcast show

Henry Blodget is launching “Solutions” on August 18 — a podcast and YouTube series with Vox Media featuring interviews with guests offering ideas to tackle major challenges in science, business, and society.

Google is giving users more control over which publishers show up in Search’s Top Stories. 

The new “preferred sources” feature lets people pick the outlets they want to see most, with chosen articles appearing not just in Top Stories but also in a new “from your sources” section. The feature, which started testing in June, is now live in the U.S. and India.

USA Today’s visionary editor David Mazzarella dies at 87

David Mazzarella, the editor credited with steering USA Today toward hard-hitting, enterprise reporting, has died at 87. During his five-year tenure, he worked to shift the paper away from its reputation for light, bite-sized stories.