About the authors: Danilo de Castro Alvares is a Senior Retail Media Manager at Acadia.
Ross Walker is the Director of Retail Media at Acadia.
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Amazon DSP (Demand-Side Platform) has become one of the most powerful tools available to brands looking to reach highly targeted audiences through programmatic advertising. But for many brands, the platform can feel like a maze: multiple access models, buying methods, and deal types, each with its own trade-offs.
This guide breaks it all down, walking you through how to access Amazon DSP, how to think about buying media at every stage of maturity, and what the future of programmatic buying on Amazon looks like.
Choosing the Right Amazon DSP Access Model
Before a brand can start buying programmatic media on Amazon DSP, it needs to secure access to the platform. There are three distinct paths, each with different levels of control, support, and investment required.
1. Managed Service Through Amazon
The original and most hands-off option. Amazon's managed service is a white-glove offering where Amazon's own team handles the media buying and strategy on your behalf. You don't have direct access to the platform's controls, and Amazon acts as the intermediary. This was historically the primary way brands accessed Amazon DSP, and for brands that want support without the complexity of self-service operations, it remains a viable starting point.
2. Working With an Agency or Tech Partner
The second model involves partnering with an agency or technology partner that already holds a DSP seat. This self-service approach gives you access to campaign management without needing your own seat. The agency creates and manages campaigns on your behalf within its seat, with full visibility into performance and strategy. This is one of the most common paths for brands that want programmatic expertise without the overhead of managing it in-house.
3. Owning and Operating Your Own DSP Seat
The most advanced model is purchasing and operating your own seat, either directly through Amazon or through a DSP reseller like Acadia. This gives the brand end-to-end ownership of the platform and is best suited for larger brands with a dedicated team of operators capable of managing optimizations, creative testing, and pacing on an ongoing basis. Without that in-house capability, owning a seat without proper management tends to underperform.
It's worth noting that Amazon has deliberately evolved its platform to lower the barrier to entry across all three models. In its earlier days, DSP was a complex, walled garden, accessible only to those with deep technical expertise.
Amazon has since invested heavily in making the UI more approachable, improving training resources, and expanding access through reseller partnerships.
The goal? To democratize programmatic buying and bring more brands into the ecosystem.
The Crawl–Walk–Run Model for Media Buying on Amazon DSP
.Once access is secured, brands face another important decision: how to actually buy media.
An easy framework for thinking about this is a crawl-walk-run model, with each stage introducing more complexity, control, and strategic commitment.
Crawl: Open Auction
The Open Auction is where most brands should start. It's the standard programmatic buying environment: flexible, low barrier, and a great place to learn how bidding, pacing, and audience targeting actually behave in practice.
For brands coming from a PPC background, it will feel familiar: you're bidding for audiences and impressions in a real-time auction environment. CPMs can be very efficient, and the UI surfaces audiences clearly, making it easy to connect targeting to your core customer.
The Open Auction is also front and center in Amazon's learning courses and UI, which is a strong signal that it's the intended starting point for most advertisers. For a brand selling consumer goods, starting with in-market audiences relevant to your category is a natural, intuitive first step.
Audience Penetration: 70-80%
Walk: Off-the-Shelf Deals (Private Auctions)
Once a brand has exhausted its core audience reach through the Open Auction, typically signaled by declining delivery rates or performance metrics, it's time to move into deal-based buying.
Amazon's off-the-shelf deals, called Private Auctions (PAs), are pre-curated bundles of premium inventory. They offer more brand-safe placements, include floor pricing for spend predictability, and are relatively straightforward to activate.
Think of Private Auctions as the bridge between open programmatic and fully custom deal-making. They give you access to incremental inventory: audiences and placements you can't reach in the open exchange, like Prime Video or Twitch, Disney and Netflix, without requiring the planning overhead of fully negotiated deals.
Audience Penetration: An additional 10-20%
Run: Custom Deals (Preferred Deals and Programmatic Guaranteed)
At the most advanced but also abstract stage, brands can negotiate custom deals directly with Amazon's supply desk team or eventually through emerging self-serve tools like Project Deal Builder (more on that later on).
The two primary deal types at this level are:
- Preferred Deals (PDs): Fixed CPMs and direct access to specific premium inventory, offering pricing predictability without guaranteed delivery commitments.
- Programmatic Guaranteed (PGs): Fully guaranteed inventory with fixed CPMs and committed spend. These are best suited for high-stakes campaigns. For example: Securing Prime Day reach, locking in streaming TV inventory for the Winter Olympics, or ensuring brand presence during a key cultural moment.
Custom deals require significant planning and maturity. Minimum CPM floors typically range from $5 to $12+, meaning you're committing real budget to specific placements.
There's a risk–reward dynamic here that makes this level appropriate only for brands that have already established their foundational DSP strategy and are looking for the final 5 to 10% of audience penetration that open and off-the-shelf buying can't reach.
Audience Penetration: The last 5-10% and premium inventory
Aligning Deal Types With Brand Goals and Maturity
A useful way to think about deal selection is in terms of audience penetration. For most product categories, the Open Auction can realistically capture 70–80% of your core addressable audience.
Off-the-shelf deals can extend that reach further into inventory that isn't accessible in the open exchange. Custom deals are for brands pushing toward near-total category dominance or locking in premium moments that demand exclusivity.
This also maps to brand maturity and category position. A challenger brand entering the market will typically find tremendous opportunity in Open Auction without needing to venture into the complexity of custom deals. A category leader, on the other hand, may need those premium placements to maintain dominance across every touchpoint.
The decision isn't about replacing one method with another, but about strategic layering. Each method serves a role in a well-structured full-funnel DSP strategy:
- Open Auction for efficiency and core audience reach
- Private Auctions for incremental reach and brand-safe premium inventory
- Preferred Deals for fixed-price, direct access to desirable placements
- Programmatic Guaranteed for committed reach around high-value events
How Custom Deals Work in Practice
Before anything else, we always recommend focusing on the low-hanging fruit. Make sure you do the ground work before you jump into Custom Deals.
If your brand is ready to start something new, building a custom deal typically starts with a conversation between your agency and Amazon's Supply Desk team. The process involves sharing your brand's core audiences, product category, and campaign goals and having Amazon's team identify curated inventory bundles with strong audience overlap.
💡Example:
For a hair care brand focused on a specific audience profile, we worked with the Supply Desk to identify a curated bundle of networks, such as NBC, CBS, Discovery, and others, that have high overlap with their core in-market shoppers.
The result was a custom supply deal with meaningful audience relevance, rather than simply broad reach. When combined with strong creative, such as interactive TV ads that encourage engagement, the deal delivered measurably better performance than standard inventory.
The key ingredient for success at this level is a strong working relationship with Amazon's Supply Desk team. That relationship enables more precise audience briefs, access to curated inventory that isn't available through standard channels, and sometimes early access to emerging opportunities other brands won't see.
It’s one of the clearest examples of how the quality of your agency’s partnership with Amazon translates directly into competitive advantage.
Custom deals also require that the foundational groundwork has been done: open auction campaigns running, core programmatic strategies tested, and audience data validated.
Jumping straight to custom deals without that foundation is a significant risk.
Project Deal Builder: What's Coming Next
One of the most notable recent developments in Amazon DSP is Project Deal Builder, a feature announced at Amazon unBoxed and currently in closed beta. It plugs directly into Amazon's Inventory Hub and promises to fundamentally change how brands access custom deals.
The core idea aligns with Amazon's broader strategic direction: remove intermediaries, reduce complexity, and make self-service accessible for more types of inventory.
Project Deal Builder is designed to let brands self-serve the creation of custom deals based on their target audience, automating the negotiation and curation process that currently requires direct back-and-forth with the Supply Desk team and individual publishers.
In practice, this could mean that a brand wanting to advertise on a specific streaming network (a process that currently requires knowing the right contacts, having sufficient scale to attract attention, and manually negotiating terms) could instead specify their audience and goals, and have Deal Builder surface and negotiate the right inventory automatically.
It's still early, and full evaluation will have to wait until broader access is available. But the directional intent is clear: flatten the distance between the crawl and the run, and make premium deal-based buying accessible to brands that previously lacked the scale or relationships to unlock it.
The critical question will be whether the system can match the relevance and precision that comes from a well-managed Supply Desk relationship, particularly as audience quality, not just reach, will determine whether these deals actually move the needle.
Transparency and Incrementality Across Buying Methods
One dimension that often gets overlooked when comparing these buying methods is measurement transparency. The ability to assess incrementality, to know whether your media spend actually caused a lift in sales, traffic, or brand awareness, varies significantly depending on the deal type.
Open Auction sits at the top of the transparency spectrum. You get full reporting, detailed audience insights, and the ability to connect campaign data directly to Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) for deep analysis.
Private Auctions offer good performance data, but with reduced visibility into which specific publishers or placements drove results.
Preferred Deals and Programmatic Guaranteed sit at the bottom of the transparency spectrum. You're buying a fixed block of inventory, which makes it excellent for reach but harder to attribute impact precisely.
This is one reason why Programmatic Guaranteed deals are often compared to traditional TV advertising. There's an element of committing budget with a degree of faith in the audience and placement quality, and measuring the outcome requires additional tools like AMC analysis, geo lift testing, or Amazon's own Brand Lift Studies.
The practical implication: the right measurement framework needs to evolve alongside the media buying strategy. As brands move up the maturity curve into deal-based buying, the investment in measurement infrastructure: AMC, lift studies, and new-to-brand analysis, becomes increasingly important to justify and optimize spend.
The DSP Buying Strategies That Deliver Results
Across all of the options available on Amazon DSP, the most effective strategies tend to involve combining methods strategically rather than choosing one to the exclusion of others.
The highest-performing approaches typically look something like this:
- Preferred Deals or Private Auctions for Streaming TV: Using fixed CPMs and clean premium inventory to build awareness and reach new audiences in a high-quality, brand-safe environment.
- Open Auction retargeting to close the loop: Converting the awareness generated by deal-based inventory into performance outcomes through efficient, audience-targeted retargeting.
- High-quality custom creative that matches the placement: Particularly for Streaming TV, interactive ad formats that drive engagement can significantly outperform standard display units.
- AMC analysis layered in: To connect the reach from deal inventory to downstream sales outcomes and identify which combinations drove new-to-brand customers.
The evolution of what constitutes an exciting buy has shifted significantly.
The open auction, long a reliable workhorse for efficiency-focused buyers, is now increasingly being complemented by custom and deal-based inventory that unlocks unique audience behaviors, such as targeting buyers of premium beauty products on Amazon, combined with emerging inventory from platforms like Roku and Netflix.
These aren't just incremental reach extensions; they represent genuinely new and differentiated ways to reach your customer.
Final Thoughts: Building a Mature Amazon DSP Strategy
Amazon DSP offers a more sophisticated and comprehensive programmatic advertising ecosystem than many brands realize. But that sophistication requires a deliberate, phased approach to unlock.
Start with the Open Auction. Get familiar with how the platform works, validate your audiences, and optimize toward outcomes. Once you've saturated your core audiences and are looking for incremental reach, explore Private Auctions and off-the-shelf deal inventory. When the brand has the scale, the budget, and the strategic intent to own premium moments, graduate to Preferred Deals and Programmatic Guaranteed, backed by strong measurement infrastructure and, ideally, a well-cultivated relationship with Amazon's Supply Desk team.
Amazon's continued investment in democratizing DSP access, from improved UI and training to tools like Project Deal Builder, is lowering the barriers at every stage.
Stay close to these developments and build your programmatic capabilities systematically, and you will have a durable advantage as the platform matures.
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.
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