‘Mad Men’ was a TV drama set in a 1960s Madison Avenue advertising agency about a group of advertising execs. This was the purported heyday of TV advertising and Mad Men was about those who owned attention in the TV age.
‘Mad Men’ used to rule advertising but not anymore. Today, its ‘Math Men’—the engineers and data scientists using data, algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
The power of ‘Math Men’ is incredible. Google (Alphabet) and Meta together hold the majority share of the global digital advertising market, with projections for them to capture roughly 55% of global ad spend outside China in 2025. In the UK, Google and Meta’s combined share of advertising is around 60%.
Amazon Advertising’s revenue is:
- Twice as big as the whole of the global music industry revenues.
- Delivers $20bn more revenue than YouTube.
- Has three time the revenue of the global newspaper industry.
- The same size as three of the major advertising holding companies in terms of revenues, for example, Publicis, Omnicom and Havas.
A different type of TV: ‘Math Men TV’
The centre of gravity has shifted from TV ‘commercials’ heralded by the ‘Mad Men’ era to a different type of TV – Connected TV.
Morgan Stanley expect US CTV advertising to grow about 13% a year to roughly $55.2bn by 2030, while old school the linear (broadcast + cable) share of total TV viewing has dipped below 50%.
Who is trying to ‘win’ on CTV? Amazon.
Amazon are building the most powerful, data-rich TV ad machine since Madison Avenue’s heyday — using shopping signals, premium supply, and a DSP that now reaches the biggest screen in the house.
The real driver of CTV success is the ‘math’, not the creative opportunities. CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy explains how this is so: “Our trillions of proprietary browsing, shopping, and streaming signals paired with extensive supply-side relationships and our secure clean rooms provide advertisers the ability to optimise advertising, deliver greater precision, and drive efficient and effective outcomes.”
In plain terms: Amazon can now promise TV-scale reach, quality of programming with Retail Media type targeting as well as closed-loop measurement — all in one place.
How? The centrepiece of this strategy is the renewed Amazon DSP.
The Amazon goal: become the number one DSP
In 2022, Amazon set an unambiguous objective: overtake Google and The Trade Desk to operate the world’s No. 1 demand-side platform. At the time, Amazon Advertising was already the third-largest digital advertising business in the world behind Alphabet and Meta selling to both endemic and non-endemic brands.
But the bigger opportunity lay offsite – not on Amazon, but on the wider web. By combining Amazon retail shopping data with advertising inventory across the wider internet, the DSP should have been a success.
The problem was the Amazon DSP. Even Amazon Advertising experts struggled to explain the subtle differences between Amazon Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP. Amazon Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP can appear both on and off Amazon, as well as show up on the product detail page, the search page, the Amazon homepage, as well as third party websites
In fact, the DSP was really just useable as a display advertising tool for retargeting. Hardly compelling.
Amazon went back to the drawing board on their DSP. According to Business Insider, Amazon have done the following over the last 18 months:
- Hired senior talent from Google, Meta, Roku who reengineered Amazon’s ad buying tech to better meet the needs of advertisers who were used to the slick interfaces of Google’s DV360 and The Trade Desk. It used to take 75 clicks to set up a campaign within Amazon’s DSP, it now takes just 4.
- Fixed long-standing product issues and connected the DSP to Amazon Marketing Cloud. Advertisers in the US can target 8,000+ different audience segments using the DSP. Amazon Marketing Cloud filters that down to identify new audiences based on an individual customer’s data and the advertiser’s campaign objectives.
- The fees Amazon charges advertisers to use its DSP changed: Amazon’s DSP fees are between 4% and 8% on average, Fees can vary depending on how much a particular agency or advertiser is spending.
- Amazon DSP was integrated with Disney’s Real-Time Ad Exchange (DRAX), allowing advertisers to leverage insights from both companies.
- Amazon partnered with Roku to offer advertisers using its DSP the largest authenticated CTV footprint in the U.S., a partnership Jassy called the partnership momentous, claiming that ‘It’s a giant leap forward for advertisers bringing best in class planning, audience precision, and performance to TV advertising.’
- A deal with the NBA deal (starting 2025–26) adds to the existing Thursday Night Football and a growing range of new content encourage viewers to continue to open the Prime Video app.
- Prime Video’s default ad tier created exclusive, premium inventory other DSPs cannot access.
Amazon are starting to see results: Prime Video, starting from a smaller base, is set to grow more than twice as fast as YouTube, helped by one decisive move: making ads the default on Prime Video.
What does Amazon say about its DSP approach?
Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy has made their positioning on their DSP clear – its all about full-funnel TV:
- “We’ve made it easier to do full-funnel advertising with us… from broad-reach advertising that drives brand awareness… to the bottom of the funnel, where sponsored products help advertisers surface relevant product ads to customers at the point of purchase.”
- “We also have differentiated audience features that leverage billions of customer signals across our stores and media destinations.”
Why should brand advertisers care?
Amazon DSP used to be something that brand advertisers did not have to care about. Now advertisers have to pay attention for three reasons
- Amazon DSP Scale: An average 300m+ ad-supported US audience across marketplace, Prime Video, Twitch.
- Audience Signal Scale: Trillions of shopping, browsing and streaming events stitched through clean rooms and Amazon Marketing Cloud give advertisers the ability to build, test and prove audiences that have actually bought something.
- Innovation: Amazon is renowned for speed. The new product cadence is now even more rapid. In May 2025 alone, Amazon rolled out AI-powered contextual ads (scene-aware, shoppable), expanded data partnerships (e.g., InfoSum, Magnite), and refreshed the DSP UX to reduce buyer friction.
The Impact on the Competition
YouTube is the leader on CTV viewership but Morgan Stanley expect Prime Video to grow twice as fast in ad revenue as Amazon’s shopping signals and closed-loop proposition is more attractive.
Disney and NBC Universal have premium content, but again, they do not have a closed loop proposition. The DRAX tie-up with Amazon’s DSP is a pragmatic choice – and more of a hedge as it lets buyers plan Disney inventory with Amazon’s audience and measurement tooling.
The biggest impact has been on The Trade Desk.
The Trade Desk’s shares have had a huge decline over the last few months. Analysts say competition from Amazon may be to blame.
However, The Trade Desk CEO, Jeff Green say that “Amazon is not a competitor and Google really isn’t much of a competitor anymore either. We’re trying to buy the open internet, leveraging technology that values media objectively. We don’t have any media, and we don’t grade our own homework.”
However, traffic on the open web is not as attractive as it used to be as AI search becomes part of our everyday repertoire.
Independence of media and an “open internet” are valuable, but investors clearly view Amazon’s CTV approach and exclusive content inventory and first-party shopping data as more compelling.
The bottom line: Amazon DSP is no longer a laggard
Advertisers are always looking channels that can provide them with unique audiences and demonstrable results, and this is where Amazon has remained supreme online. Extending this reach to high-impact channel like TV with lots of data from logged in viewers is very compelling for marketing budgets.
The original Mad Men sold ideas and ‘creative’ to sell products. Amazon now sells data, insights, and outcomes — and all from a CTV screen. Everyone else is now has to adjusting their media plans — and, increasingly, their business models — accordingly.