We deliver! Get curated industry news straight to your inbox. Subscribe to Adweek newsletters.
Prime Video recently launched a new feature that gives marketers unprecedented visibility into what content their ads run against, according to three media buyers and documents reviewed by ADWEEK.
The offering surfaces show-level reporting that breaks out impressions, CPMs, and content adjacency by title, genre, and content rating, bringing a novel degree of transparency to a streaming ecosystem that has historically withheld such data from marketers.
While other streamers offer varying versions of this kind of information, this tool marks the first time a streaming service has made it available in real-time, according to David Nyurenberg, the senior vice president of digital at Intermedia Advertising.
“Amazon is the only major player that makes this freely accessible at the push of a button,” Nyurenberg said.
Although the suite of features has no formal name, the capability—found in the “content details” section of the platform—has been available since late 2024, according to Mike Treon, the head of CTV and video strategy at PMG. In recent months, Amazon has begun proactively directing marketers to explore the new offering, according to sources.
“Amazon Ads is focused on inventing ad technology that enables high performance marketing across channels, devices, and services, regardless of the advertiser or property,” said an Amazon spokesperson. “Amazon DSP provides advertisers with transparency and measured outcomes that help them make more informed decisions and reach their desired audiences.”
The rollout comes on the heels of other product releases from Prime Video, such as a forthcoming contextual targeting solution, that promises to bring further granularity to advertising campaigns on the platform.
Prime Video introduced ads to its service only a year ago, but in that short period of time it has sought to use transparency and interoperability as key differentiators from its competitors, sources said. Part of Amazon’s appeal as a DSP is the ability to buy across third-party CTV apps.
What marketers can see—and control
The reporting tool applies only to Prime Video and Freevee content, excluding third-party apps accessed through Fire TV.
It allows marketers to view where their ads ran across titles, along with associated metadata like genre, content rating, and delivery metrics, according to Gloria Steiner, the head of product at Gigi.
Marketers can use the tool to exclude up to five genres (out of around 28 total) or content categories (out of around six total) from their campaigns. However, they cannot specify which titles they want to appear alongside, nor can they exclude individual shows.
Using the filter to rule out entire genres and content categories is a broad tactic, limiting its utility, according to Steiner. For instance, PMG has only used it to exclude running ads against mature content and unrated content, occasionally cutting out a genre or two, according to Treon.
For now, this primarily serves as an insight tool for clients, letting them see what shows their ads are running against. Marketers can also use it to validate that certain genre-based buys are working as they should.
“We’re not making buying decisions with this data, by design,” Treon said. “Maybe we could in the future. Right now, it looks most promising as a planning tool.”
Slouching toward a linear pricing model
Still, the real value of the rollout is in what it could signal for the future, according to Steiner.
If Amazon were to make conversion data available on a per-show basis, for example, that would mean marketers could train their algorithms to value high-performing shows more and bid on them more competitively.
Right now, most DSPs with robust CTV offerings give ad buyers the option to buy based on specific shows, but no streamer passes that information along in the bid-stream, according to Treon.
Streamers have been reluctant to offer show-level data because they are worried that marketers will use the information to cherry-pick the best titles, cutting into the platforms’ ability to offer marketers scale, said all three media buyers.
The other streamers that do offer this data—Paramount, Disney, and Peacock, to varying degrees—package it only as a post-campaign report, sharing with marketers what content their ads ran alongside at the end of a campaign or by request, according to all three buyers.
While Prime Video does not yet include show-level data in the bid stream, it does make it available as a report.
If show CPMs were priced by performance, that could make more performant content more expensive to bid against. The result would be a pricing landscape similar to the kind that defined linear ad buying for decades, according to Nyurenberg.
“It’s the conversation starter of a bigger goal that Amazon is trying to achieve,” Steiner said. “It’s the beginning of something big.”
