Amazon Pitch Deck Shows Prime Video Expanding Contextual Ad-Targeting Capabilities

The streaming service Prime Video is preparing a significant expansion of its contextual ad-targeting capabilities, according to a pitch deck reviewed by ADWEEK and two people familiar with the matter. The new system would dramatically increase the number and granularity of the contextual audience segments available to marketers, offering ad buyers categories such as Female Voices, Top Trending, High Income Households, and Coviewing. Currently, Prime Video only offers genre-level segments, such as horror, action, and sports. The forthcoming product, which has an unknown release date, would add tremendous value to Prime Video because this kind of contextual targeting would unlock the value of its large content library, according to the first person. “Instead of having an audience strategy where you can target people based on who they are, they're taking the content and building an audience strategy from that, which gives them more scope to pull lots of content into that grouping," the person said. Amazon did not reply to a request for comment by press time. Prime Video, which introduced ads to the vast majority of its more than 200 million subscribers last February, has quickly become one of the most compelling streaming services for marketers in just over a year. Its scale and premium content, including sports like Thursday Night Football, combined with its wealth of retail data, affordable pricing, and proprietary adtech stack, have quickly made it a top prospect for advertisers, according to five media buyers. The streamer demonstrated its interest in improving its contextual ad products at its upfront event in May, rolling out a new contextually informed pause screen ad. By further expanding these capabilities, the streamer hopes to make it even easier for marketers to place relevant ads across its growing library. More and more specific, contextual segments According to the pitch deck circulated by Amazon, the system will be driven by artificial intelligence, which will analyse the Prime Video catalog and assign each title more than 700 metadata tags. The tag set is grounded in the IAB Content Taxonomy and expanded for extra detail. To create these inputs, the models will ingest a mix of text and video sources, including transcripts, plot outlines, synopses, keyword lists, and more. The result will be a library whose content can be grouped and bought by categories more nuanced than genre, according to the first person. Some additional segments shared in the deck include Popular Content, Award-Winning Content, Best Prime Video Series and Movies, Mother’s Day, Black Voices, and LGBTQ Voices. This kind of granularity allows marketers to not only reach new audiences in relevant moments, but also target desired cohorts through more sophisticated—and potentially more effective—routes. For instance, viewers of shows grouped under the Female Voices category are two-and-a-half times more likely to be in the market for an athletic clothing set, according to the deck. Rather than advertise solely against sports content, these kinds of insights would enable brands like Nike, Lululemon, or Adidas to reach these audiences in different settings. The expanded categories are the natural evolution of the basic contextual offerings Prime Video launched with, the first source said. Right now, buyers can build segments based on what Amazon products people are buying or what shows they are watching, but they cannot guarantee that their ads will appear in those shows. After the rollout, they will be able to do that, in addition to being able to build even more bespoke segments. Incorporating AI In taxonomizing its content library, Prime Video is also creating the infrastructure to allow artificial intelligence to serve contextually relevant ads. This offering would be a natural extension of the same technology, akin to what vendors like Wurl and Iris are developing. It relies on the same underlying thesis—that serving ads relevant to the content playing makes them more effective—but allows AI to make those decisions and optimize them over time. The company showcased its AI-generated advertising at its upfront event, which can optimize creative content and placement to add contextual relevance. In addition to ad efficiency, Alan Moss, vice president, global advertising sales at Amazon, told ADWEEK that relevance and engaging capabilities allow for Prime Video to keep a lower ad load. "That, to me, is the future, and that’s what we’re focused on," Moss said. "If we do that right, it won’t be an ad volume game. It’s going to be much more about authentic connections, ad relevance, and delivering value, both for the consumer and the advertiser." A brand new experience Both of these innovations would likely be embraced by smaller brands without dedicated agencies or the resources to plan comprehensive media strategies. This would help make advertising on Amazon even more accessible to independent businesses, which were responsible for 60% of its sales in 2024, according to the platform. It would also make the long-tail content on Prime Video, as well as its FAST channels, more valuable, as it would unlock the heightened performance of contextual advertising without requiring marketers to be familiar with the programming, the second source said. “Where you see adoption of this growing most quickly is among FAST channels,” the person said. “Big brands are wary of advertising when they are unfamiliar with the programming. This will show that it works.”

TV Upfronts

Amazon Pitch Deck Shows Prime Video Expanding Contextual Ad-Targeting Capabilities

The AI-driven system will allow marketers to create more granular categories, rendering its vast library more valuable

Mark Stenberg

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications