Ross Walker is the Director of Retail Media at Acadia.
The "Amazon DSP for non-endemic brands" story has existed for years, but it remained mostly a conference-panel talking point rather than a widespread budget shift.
The reason wasn't necessarily a lack of awareness. Marketers have always understood that Amazon possesses valuable purchase data. But for most brands, that alone wasn't enough to justify moving budget away from Google, Meta, television, or established programmatic platforms.
Today, however, the conversation is changing. We've moved beyond asking: "Why should I buy Amazon media if I don't sell on Amazon?" and brands are beginning to realize something much bigger.
The shift isn't that Amazon DSP became better (which it did). The shift is that consumer data has become harder to access everywhere else.
As cookies disappeared, audience targeting became less reliable, and attribution became increasingly fragmented; Amazon's first-party commerce data became disproportionately valuable.
Today, marketers aren't buying access to "Amazon shoppers."They're buying access to one of the world's largest commercially observable consumer-behavior graphs. And that distinction changes everything.
Why the Reframe Is More Actionable Than Ever
The data has been available for years; what changed in 2026 is that the three things that used to keep this theoretical (deploying it at scale, proving it, and affording it) came down at roughly the same time.
- Deploy it at scale (reach & identity). Amazon DSP has rapidly expanded its reach and efficiency through new Open Internet integrations, particularly across Connected TV (CTV). With partnerships now spanning Roku, Disney+, and Netflix, Amazon DSP reaches approximately 80 million authenticated CTV households per month: more than 80% of all U.S. CTV households. This expansion means brands can now access premium streaming environments such as Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery, Pluto, Tubi, Disney, Roku, Fubo, or Sling directly through Amazon DSP. This represents a seismic shift for media buying across both traditional programmatic platforms and linear TV because all of this audience inventory is available through Amazon DSP. What once required multiple programmatic buys across different platforms can now be managed and measured through a single, unified system.
- Prove it (measurement). For non-endemic advertisers, the proof comes through Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), a privacy-safe data clean room. You bring your own first-party and CRM data in via identity partners such as LiveRamp and match it against Amazon's exposure and behavioral signals to see how Amazon DSP drove real outcomes off Amazon: site conversions, leads, and sales. The same clean room lets you build lookalike audiences off your best customers to prospect at scale. A five-year signal lookback and AI-assisted querying made it far more usable in late 2025, so the historical dealbreaker (“you can’t measure it”) is largely answered.
- Afford it (economics). Amazon is buying market share with price. Its take rate sits well below the independents - the pressure was visible enough that The Trade Desk began negotiating its long-fixed fees in late 2025. More of every dollar reaches working media.
First, Where Does Your Brand Stand?
We get two kinds of inquiries, and the distinction matters because it determines what you can and cannot do.
Non-Endemic Brands
These brands don’t sell on Amazon at all - no listings, no marketplace presence. Think financial services, insurance, automotive, travel and tourism boards, education, events, subscription apps, and DTC brands with no Amazon storefront.
For them, Amazon DSP is purely a media channel: a way to reach Amazon’s audiences and drive traffic to their own site.
Non-endemic advertisers run link-out campaigns by default - the ad destination sits off Amazon. Put simply, the ads are bought in a different ecosystem than the one where the transaction happens, e.g., an automotive brand using Amazon DSP to reach in-market car buyers and drive test-drive bookings on its own site.
Endemic Brands Running Link-Out Campaigns
These brands already sell on Amazon but want to use the DSP to push a different product, assortment, or destination, typically their own website.
They are endemic advertisers launching a link-out campaign. Note: not all link-out advertisers are non-endemic, but non-endemic advertisers are always link-out.
The Rules That Govern Both
Link-out simply means the ad sends people to a destination outside Amazon. What you can do from there comes down to two things: the kind of landing page you send traffic to, and whether you already sell on Amazon.
- Your landing page decides your inventory. Amazon’s owned-and-operated (O & O) placements (Amazon.com, IMDb, Fire TV) are available when the landing page is non-transactional — a lead-gen form, an insurance or education page, a test-drive, or quote booking. If the landing page is a commerce-enabled store that sells directly, those O&O placements are generally off the table, and the campaign runs across Amazon’s off-platform publisher network and CTV instead. This depends on the landing page, not on whether the brand is endemic.
- Selling on Amazon doesn’t unlock on-Amazon retargeting. This is the one that trips up endemic brands. If you already sell on Amazon, it’s natural to assume you can retarget the shoppers who viewed your products there and push them to your own D2C site - but you can’t. Amazon reserves that on-Amazon audience for link-in (on-Amazon) campaigns. A pure non-endemic brand has no Amazon listings in the first place, so the limitation never applies to it since it builds audiences from purchase signals and its own first-party data rather than from on-Amazon product views.
So a DTC brand with no Amazon presence is far from shut out; it just works the channel differently: a lead-gen or non-transactional landing page to open up O&O inventory, plus in-market reach and first-party audiences across the publisher network and CTV. Either way, both brand types can tap first-party data, segment audiences, and run targeted campaigns, whether they’re driving into Amazon (link-in) or off it (link-out).
Why It Matters Now: The Dependency Trap
Brands that lean heavily on Google and Meta for performance keep running into the same wall.
- Rising CPCs. Search and social auctions are more competitive than ever. Climbing cost-per-click squeezes margins and makes efficient growth harder to sustain.
- Concentration risk. When two platforms carry your growth, an algorithm change or a cost spike hits revenue directly. There’s no diversification buffer.
- No capture layer up-funnel. Brands invest in CTV, audio, and video for awareness, but outside the Google SERP there has been no efficient way to capture the demand they create.
Amazon DSP is increasingly the answer to the third problem and a hedge against the first two.
The Opportunity: Purchase Signal, Not Interest Signal
The core difference is simple. Most platforms target what people click on or browse. Amazon targets what people actually buy, with their own money, over time.
Someone who repeatedly buys diapers, formula, and wipes is caring for an infant. Someone buying hiking boots, a tent, and a national park pass is an active outdoor participant, not someone idly curious about the outdoors.
Purchases signal participation; browsing signals interest. For a non-endemic brand, that is a category of targeting available nowhere else: reaching people by what they purchase, even though your product isn’t on Amazon’s shelf.
What can you build with it?
- Shopping & in-market signals. Who is buying what, and when, drawn from trillions of unique signals across categories.
- First-party activation. Onboard CRM data via CAPI, build lookalikes off your best customers, and exclude existing customers to concentrate spend on acquisition.
- Cross-sell & upsell. Identify shoppers showing intent across both your website and Amazon, and message them accordingly.
- Retargeting. Re-engage site visitors and non-converting ad viewers with cross-device matching and sequential messaging across Amazon and third-party inventory.
Reach: The Largest Authenticated CTV Footprint In The U.S.
So we established that Amazon DSP isn’t limited to Amazon’s own properties. Through its publisher network, it reaches across the open web, mobile apps, and connected TV, all informed by Amazon’s purchase data.
- 275M+ average monthly ad-supported audiences in the U.S. across Amazon’s owned-and-operated properties.
- ~80M authenticated U.S. CTV households via the exclusive Amazon–Roku integration — more than 80% of U.S. CTV homes — using a shared identifier for deduplicated reach and frequency control.
- Early Roku-integration tests: +40% unique viewers on the same budget, ~30% lower frequency per user, and roughly 3x more value from ad spend.
Why it matters for non-endemic brands: a pet-insurance provider can reach households that recently bought pet supplies; a veterinary clinic can find new pet owners; a pet-travel service can target ongoing pet-care behavior.
None of them sells those products - all of them benefit from Amazon seeing the behavior. You can engage shoppers while they are streaming, scrolling, and shopping, across Display, streaming TV (STV), and online video (OLV).
Learn more: Premium And Exclusive Inventory
Through Amazon DSP, non-endemic brands can access inventory that most DSPs can’t.
- Owned-and-operated: Prime Video, Fire TV, Twitch, and IMDb.
- The publisher network: premium partners including Disney, Paramount, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery, plus free ad-supported services such as Tubi, Pluto, and Xumo, and, new for 2025–26, Netflix inventory available through Amazon DSP.
- Live sports: Amazon’s portfolio now extends well beyond Thursday Night Football, which just delivered its most-watched season ever (15.3M average viewers). The lineup also includes the NBA (under a new 11-year rights deal), the WNBA, NASCAR, and MLB, giving advertisers a near year-round, large-scale, simultaneous audience.
- Complete TV (2026): a new planning capability to manage streaming buys across Prime Video, Netflix, and Paramount+ from within Amazon DSP.
Diverse Ad Formats
Amazon DSP supports display, online video (OLV), connected TV, and audio, plus premium placements on Prime Video, Twitch, and IMDb.
For 2026, interactive CTV formats have moved mainstream: pause ads and “add to cart” / “learn more” prompts via remote turn passive viewing into a response channel.
💡Learn more: OLV: The Hidden Gem of Your Marketing Mix
Amazon DSP vs. The Alternatives
Here at Acadia, we’re platform-agnostic - we run whatever drives the best result and benchmark Amazon against other DSPs side by side. With that said, two things consistently stand out.
- Economics. As we stated above, Amazon is in growth mode and prices accordingly, sacrificing margin for share. Its take rate sits well below the independents - the gap between Amazon can be ten points or more of working media. The pressure is real enough that The Trade Desk, long firm on pricing, began offering fee concessions in late 2025. More working media means more impressions, more reach, and more results per dollar.
- Signal & Inventory. CPMs across DSPs are often comparable - for broad CTV, we’re now seeing Amazon in the $12–$25 range, down from roughly $35 a couple of years ago, but no one has a better read on who is shopping for what, right now, than Amazon. Run the same in-market test on Amazon and a competitor, and compare the audience quality directly. On top of that, Amazon brings exclusive O&O and live-sports inventory that other DSPs simply can’t offer.
Platform-fee advantage means more of your budget works harder - more impressions, more reach, more results.
What Performance Looks Like
For non-endemic and link-out DTC brands, the pattern we see is incremental: turn on Amazon DSP, and you get incrementally more traffic and sales on top of existing channels.
Incremental ROAS typically lands around 1.5x–2.5x, verified against baseline. That’s strong for upper-funnel, prospecting-led buying.
It won’t look like branded search or pure retargeting - and it shouldn’t, because it’s net-new growth rather than demand you were already going to capture.
So does it pay for itself? We believe it does.
Example results brands are seeing:
- Incremental ROAS - 1.5x–2.5x. Typical return across non-endemic and link-out DTC campaigns, with incrementality verified against baseline.
- CTV CPMs - $12–$25. For broader CTV buys, down meaningfully from a few years ago.
What To Look For In A Partner
f you are ready to start, know that choosing the right DSP partner matters. Look beyond certifications and awards.
- Honest counsel. They tell you what’s possible and what isn’t - no overselling. If an O&O restriction applies to your brand, they surface it upfront.
- A custom approach. No two brands are the same. Your partner should understand the DTC growth model: ROAS thresholds, customer-acquisition economics, and what “incremental” actually means to your P&L.
- Full-funnel thinking. They connect upper-funnel CTV and video to lower-funnel performance - traffic and revenue outcomes, not just awareness metrics.
- Platform-agnostic. They run the best platform for your goal and benchmark Amazon DSP against StackAdapt, MNTN, and others with real, side-by-side data.
Final Thoughts
Results don’t happen overnight. We recommend a minimum three-month commitment - enough time to generate statistically meaningful incrementality data and optimize towards it.
The most important thing to understand about Amazon DSP in 2026 is that this is no longer a retail media conversation.
The winners of the next decade won't simply be the brands with the largest media budgets. They'll be the brands with the deepest understanding of consumer behavior.
Google tells you what people search for. Meta tells you what people engage with. Amazon tells you what people buy.
For brands looking to diversify acquisition channels, reduce dependency on Google and Meta, and access signals competitors cannot easily replicate, this is a real strategic advantage.
We've helped brands at every stage of DSP maturity, from their first open auction campaign to locking in custom streaming TV inventory for major retail moments. If you're ready to take your programmatic strategy further, we're ready to help.
Get in touch to learn more about our 90-Day Test Framework.
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