Amazon Bets AI Can Rewrite the Upfront Playbook in a Fragmented TV Market

Amazon already shook up the upfront two years ago with an influx of ad inventory. Now, the company is looking to completely throw out the old playbook.

Ahead of Amazon’s upfront event on May 11, Amazon vp of global ad sales Alan Moss spoke with ADWEEK, previewing the company’s new pitch to ad buyers and noting that it is “reinventing” how it partners with agencies this year, as it looks to help them navigate fragmentation and deliver results across streaming, digital, and the open internet.

“The upfront conversation used to be, ‘What content can I buy?’ And today it’s, ‘How do I make my entire investment work together?’ The evolution of the upfront shows the impact streaming has had on how buyers plan and execute this year,” Moss said.

According to Moss, Amazon’s audience signals, combined with its DSP partnerships with publishers such as Netflix, Disney, Roku, and Spotify, help it reach around 90% of U.S. households through its authenticated graph. Amazon has a new partnership with LinkedIn’s CTV Ads through Amazon DSP, bringing LinkedIn’s first-party audience signals from more than one billion members to streaming TV inventory.

With that data and its AI offerings for campaigns, the company is looking to help brands achieve outcomes across the funnel during the upfront. Moss also noted that AI is making the barrier to entry lower, with more SMB brands getting into video and live sports and bigger brands extending their assets and increasing overall buys.

“Our approach with buyers combines premium content and digital signals with AI-driven solutions that optimize and deliver measurable outcomes that perform all year long,” Moss said. “For example, we’re offering sponsorship packages to our most premium content and live sports properties and custom creative brand partnerships with authenticated Amazon audiences and measurement capabilities.”

In addition to Amazon’s sports offerings, including Thursday Night Football, NBA, WNBA, NASCAR, and more, Moss told ADWEEK that its upfront event will also tout new series and movies, including The Greatest, a biographical scripted series about Muhammad Ali; Off Campus, a college soap about the love lives of an elite hockey team; and a new movie called Judgment Day, where Zach Efron plays a convict taking reality TV judge Will Ferrell hostage.

Talking with ADWEEK, Moss previewed Amazon’s pitch to advertisers, why brands need to prepare for agentic shopping, and how the upfront is evolving in the age of streaming.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s your strategy for the upfront marketplace this year?

The upfront market is strong this year. While there are always headwinds in our industry, we’re seeing positive signals that it’s going to be a healthy upfront season. What we’re hearing from senior agency leaders and brand marketers isn’t anxiety; it’s focus. Our prediction is premium content, especially live sports and custom creative title sponsorships, remain central, but overall, the focus is shifting towards how premium content is activated through innovation.

Specifically, there’s a tangible shift from content-first decisions to a more integrated approach, where content, signals, and technology are developed and activated together. The integration of premium content along with AI-driven capabilities is no longer an aspiration, it’s how buyers are planning and transacting. The big story this year is the integration of premium content and adtech, like AI agents, to drive measurable outcomes all year long.

What are some of the questions you’re getting from buyers right now?

The questions we hear most from customers are, how do I make my marketing dollars work harder and smarter? How do I make execution easier and more accountable? Our answer is our durable AI agents for campaign, planning, management, measurement and optimization. Again, we’re not guessing here. We know specifically the intersection of premium content and ad tech allows us to help advertisers find the right audiences across their buy, reduce waste, and reinvest in more effective media.

What can you tell us about the sponsorship packages you’re offering? For instance, you’ve said Unilever is a Prime Video Signature advertiser, which had custom integrations including Liquid I.V. with The Summer I Turned Pretty. What’s ahead?

Brands are fighting for cultural relevance in a fragmented landscape. They want to be part of cultural moments. And Prime Video Signature is our most premium sponsorship offering, putting brands at the center of moments audiences are most invested in. Additionally, custom creative and brand partnerships are a significant part of our upfront deals for brands that want to go beyond the spot and become part of the content itself.

Can you speak to some of those custom integrations in sports? And how are you geting more advertisers into live sports?

We’re making live sports more accessible and flexible through our open internet buys. So that continues to be a huge opportunity, and we offer custom integrations into those sporting opportunities. It’s been a great area of growth, and often gives brands an opportunity to be represented by some of our talent in Prime Video Sports and our various desks.

If you’re looking back on this upfront, what do you think the biggest area of growth will be?

There’s no doubt I see a lot of growth across the board. You’re still seeing advertisers catching up with the consumer, who’s streaming a lot more and moving platforms. Last year marked our first multisport upfront, and now we’re very much focused on delivering against that strategy. We’re bringing together premium content across owned and third-party supply through Amazon DSP. I expect that to be an area of growth, of being able to combine that supply and helping advertisers see how their investments are working across the full funnel to drive outcomes.

Amazon is doing a lot with AI offerings, including your campaign planning tools. What’s been sticky for advertisers? What are they gravitating towards?

They’re looking not only to drive business results for their brands but to make it easier. And AI is definitely providing those capabilities in multiple parts of the execution process, from how they plan campaigns, how they choose audiences, how you optimize during the campaign, and ultimately measure it.

We’re talking a lot about agentic shopping. AI is no doubt changing how customers discover and buy, and brands need to be ready. Agentic shopping is not just the new frontier. It’s happening now, and so Amazon is uniquely positioned because we sit at the intersection of content, deterministic signals, and commerce. The brands that are going to win will be the ones that show up in the right moments with the right message as AI-driven shopping experiences evolve.

We’ve already seen contextual, AI-based ads from Amazon. What can we expect moving forward?

In terms of AI, I continue to believe in the creative space that it’s transformational, that you can take some base assets from a brand, and it just allows those assets to now be able to be applied to a whole bunch of other surfaces and placements. That provides a scalability for businesses that hasn’t existed in the past.

Also, pause ads and other formats where we can better use AI to, in real time, link the content with a relevant ad on the fly is something we continue to be excited about. Interactive for us and native formats continue to be an area of focus, having ads that are more engaging, relevant experiences for viewers is no doubt key. We feel like we have been at the forefront of expanding interactive video ads, and now we’re bringing them to premium, third-party streaming environments. For the first time, we’ve started with Samsung TV Plus. And looking ahead, we’ll have more to say here, so stay tuned.

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