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Amazon and Roku think they can sell more digital ads if they team up to do it.
The two streaming giants, which control the Amazon Fire broadband interface and the streaming Roku Channel, respectively, will pool their addressable audiences via Amazon’s demand-side platform, creating a way for marketers to buy up impressions tied to Amazon’s Prime Video, Roku Channel and other streaming services available on Roku and Fire TV operating systems.
The alliance aims to “enable seamless access to logged-in users across major streaming apps,” says Kelly MacLean, a vice president at Amazon’s ad unit who oversees sales tied to its Amazon DSP, during an interview. The companies say early tests of the technology show advertisers reaching 40% more unique viewers while cutting back the frequency of a specific ad running in front of the same users by nearly 30%.
Roku and Amazon estimate their partnership will make available a pool of 80 million connected TV households in the U.S. Roku works with other demand-side platforms, including those operated by The Trade Desk, Yahoo, and Google, against which Amazon’s DSP competes.
The two streaming titans team up as Madison Avenue is grappling with a glut of broadband-TV inventory on the market, much of the supply growing due to the entrance of both Amazon and Netflix into ad-supported streaming. This partnership will deal primarily with so-called “programmatic” advertising, or digital inventory that gets bought based on algorithms that define qualities of the specific consumers being sought by a marketer.
The combination of the Roku and Amazon user bases in this deal could boost the scale advertisers can get in an era when audiences have grown increasingly fragmented across sundry platforms.
The partnership will give rise to “a better experience for marketers, consumers, and programmers that are on our platforms,” says Jay Askinasi, Roku’s senior vice president of global media revenue and growth. “It means more relevant ads, better frequency management from a consumer perspective, more addressability and measurement on our programmer partners.”
The integration utilizes technology that allows Amazon’s DSP to recognize logged-in viewers across the Roku operating system and devices in the U.S. Advertisers using the service will be able to target audiences more precisely. The new service will be available in the U.S. to all advertisers that use Amazon DSP by the fourth quarter of 2025.
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