Alan Moss, VP of Global Advertising Sales at Amazon Ads, sat down this week with Mike Shields on the Next in Media podcast to describe how Amazon has reshaped its advertising business since 2020 - and why, heading into the 2026 upfront season, he considers live sports, streaming, retail media, and AI-driven campaign tools as parts of a single offering rather than separate lines of business.

The episode, published on May 12, 2026, runs through Amazon's advertising trajectory from the early days of sponsored listings to an 11-year NFL deal, the January 2024 launch of Prime Video ads, an NBA partnership, and the growing role of durable AI agents in campaign execution. Moss joined Amazon in July 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the conversation covers the six years of structural change that followed.

From Thursday Night Football to a year-round sports network

The pace of Amazon's sports rights expansion emerges as one of the more striking elements of the conversation. According to Moss, work on the Thursday Night Football bid with the NFL began early in his tenure, and within nine months the deal was signed. "Within nine months, we had landed it, a 10-year deal," he said. "Very quickly, it actually became an 11-year deal, and we started a year early."

The first season required the team to figure out production, graphics, and booth staffing simultaneously. By the second Thursday Night Football season - fall of 2023 - Amazon announced that it would introduce advertising into Prime Video more broadly, a decision that would transform the platform's scale. Then in 2024, the NBA deal closed. "And really with that, we became full year-round sports network," Moss said.

The NBA partnership is tracked across multiple timelines on PPC Land, which has documented how Amazon built out interactive features, betting integration, and AI-powered highlights for basketball coverage ahead of the October 2025 season start. For the 2025-2026 season, Prime Video secured exclusive rights to the NBA play-in tournament. According to Moss, the play-in games drew over three million viewers, outperforming the equivalent games on traditional broadcast the prior year.

During the NFL partnership, Amazon brought 80 net new advertisers into the league's advertising ecosystem. In just the first year of the NBA deal, 30 new advertisers joined. "I think it's new advertisers realizing that this premium media can really perform for them too, by connecting it to actual top-line performance for them," Moss said. The implication is that live sports inventory on streaming platforms is no longer the exclusive preserve of a fixed group of large brand advertisers that have historically dominated upfront negotiations.

Prime Video ads: the January 2024 launch and what came after

The scale of Prime Video's advertising launch in late January 2024 comes through clearly in the conversation. Amazon had long fielded requests from agencies and brands about when advertising would come to the platform. "In my role the prior two years, the most frequently asked question I got from advertisers and agencies was, 'When are you gonna allow ads in Prime Video?'" Moss said. The concern on his end was different: Amazon had missed the upfront buying window. The late January 2024 launch landed outside the period when agencies had already committed budgets for premium inventory.

The team had to find what Moss called "scatter dollars" - money not locked into upfront deals. Yet the agencies and advertisers who had encouraged Amazon to introduce ads were willing to test the new inventory anyway. According to Moss, "when we announced that we were introducing ads into Prime Video, immediately with our launch, we became the largest premium ad-supported streaming solution out there. Not only in the US, but in a number of the major markets that we launched."

That claim has been substantiated by subsequent reporting. Prime Video's global ad-supported audience stood at 315 million viewers as of Q4 2025, up from approximately 200 million disclosed in April 2024. Amazon's advertising services generated $21.3 billion in Q4 2025 alone, representing 23% year-over-year growth. For context, Amazon's full-year 2025 advertising revenue reached $68.6 billion.

The product development around Prime Video ads has continued at pace. Amazon introduced programmatic guaranteed deals for Prime Video in August 2024, allowing self-service advertisers to run guaranteed delivery campaigns. In October 2025, Amazon enabled zip code-level ad targeting for Prime Video, letting national advertisers customize messaging down to local market details. Most recently, on May 11, 2026, Amazon launched Dynamic TV Creative - the platform's first capability to automatically personalize interactive video ads based on viewer shopping behavior.

Retail media and streaming: one business, not two

One of the more pointed arguments Moss makes in the conversation concerns the relationship between Amazon's retail media side and its streaming and sports inventory. The two are often treated by media buyers as distinct buying contexts with different audiences, different KPIs, and different internal teams. Moss rejects that framing. "I don't think of those as separate worlds," he said. "Our viewpoint is it's the same business, because our offering is really about full funnel capabilities."

The underlying logic is that agencies have told Amazon they need help navigating fragmentation and delivering measurable outcomes year-round across a complete funnel - not just within streaming, but across digital media and open internet inventory as well. "Our approach really with buyers is combining premium content, digital media with AI-driven solutions that optimize outcomes and deliver throughout the year," Moss said.

This integration of retail signals with streaming audiences is central to Amazon's competitive differentiation. The company's first-party data - purchase histories, browsing behavior, search intent - connects directly to the audiences watching NFL Thursday Night Football or NBA playoff games on Prime Video. Advertisers are not just buying reach; they are buying reach against audiences whose commercial behavior Amazon can observe and measure at a transactional level. Moss put it plainly: "Amazon's not guessing, we're knowing."

The Amazon DSP and a 90% household reach claim

The Amazon DSP sits at the technical center of this full-funnel argument. According to Moss, partnerships with Netflix, Roku, Disney, Spotify, and SiriusXM - combined with Amazon's own authenticated graph technology - allow the DSP to reach 90% of household audiences in the United States.

Several of these partnerships have been documented separately on PPC Land. The Amazon and Roku partnership, announced June 16, 2025, created what the companies described as the largest authenticated CTV footprint in the United States, covering an estimated 80 million households - more than 80% of all CTV households according to ComScore data. The technical foundation is a shared ad identifier system that delivers logged-in reach across both platforms. Netflix became available in Amazon DSP starting Q4 2025 across 11 markets, marking Netflix's fifth major programmatic partnership. Spotify's global audio and video inventory joined Amazon DSP in October 2025, extending the platform's reach to 696 million monthly ad-supported listeners across nine markets.

For agencies, the argument is straightforward: Amazon DSP enables access to Amazon-owned inventory and open internet premium supply in one buy. "ADSP enables agencies to not only access Amazon-owned and operated content, but also open internet premium supply all in one place, in one buy and ultimately maximize reach and efficiency across all of their upfront," Moss said.

Twitch: 105 million viewers and a mid-funnel repositioning

Twitch, Amazon's live streaming platform, receives specific attention in the conversation. Moss described it as a "core part" of how Amazon thinks about reaching audiences across live sports and entertainment, noting that five million streamers go live each month to a global audience of over 105 million viewers. "That was the case in 2025 alone," he said, adding that the scale produces "literally billions of hours of content."

What has changed is how advertisers are using Twitch relative to other Amazon inventory. Rather than treating it as a separate buy for a gaming or youth audience, brands are increasingly wrapping Twitch into broader campaigns alongside Prime Video and Fire TV. "We see great commitments from advertisers on Twitch during the upfront season as well," Moss said. Creators are being reframed as a mid-funnel marketing lever - a way to generate activation and commercial outcomes rather than simply brand awareness.

Moss cited Kai Cenat and Keke Palmer as examples of streamers whose cultural influence has grown to the point where branded partnerships carry meaningful commercial weight. The move toward holistic campaigns that span Twitch, Prime Video, and Fire TV reflects a broader industry pattern. All advertising on Twitch runs through Amazon DSP - there is no separate platform - making the integration technically straightforward for advertisers already operating within Amazon's ecosystem.

Prime Video Signature and custom sponsorships

Alongside the programmatic and data-driven elements of Amazon's pitch, Moss described a more traditional sponsorship product. Prime Video Signature is described as the most premium sponsorship offering available through Amazon, placing brands at the center of high-viewership moments.

The format encompasses custom creatives and brand partnerships that are, according to Moss, "a significant part of our upfront deals." For brands wanting to go beyond standard commercial placement and become part of content itself, the Signature offering allows for what Moss described as "a really authentic custom way" to bring brands forward during big cultural moments.

The framing sits alongside an observation Moss makes about the fragmented media landscape: brands are competing for cultural relevance in an environment where audiences are scattered across dozens of platforms. Owning a moment - a playoff game, a season premiere - provides a kind of concentrated attention that programmatic reach alone cannot replicate.

AI agents: creative adaptation and campaign orchestration

The conversation's final substantive section covers durable AI agents, which Moss identified as the answer to the question he hears most often from brands: how to make marketing dollars work harder and more accountably.

Amazon's Ads Agent, announced at the unBoxed conference on November 11, 2025, automates campaign management tasks across Amazon Marketing Cloud and Amazon DSP, processing natural language instructions to create campaign structures, recommend audience segments, and build analytics queries without requiring SQL expertise. The Amazon Ads MCP Server, launched in open beta on February 2, 2026, at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, extends this further by allowing external AI platforms - including Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini - to interact with Amazon's advertising APIs through natural language.

In the podcast conversation, Moss describes two dimensions of the current AI impact. The first is creative adaptation - taking base creative and making it applicable across multiple surfaces and formats. "Video content that can become audio content on streaming audio providers, different custom formats," he said. "There's a whole bunch of very heavy lifting, and when we've done work with advertisers in our creative agent, we've seen that it's really made a big difference."

The second dimension is orchestration - the ability to interact with a chat-based agent and have it execute campaign instructions directly. "The ability now to be able to interact with a chat agent and have it execute your campaign per your instructions... is pretty exciting," Moss said. The practical effect is a reduction in the gap between strategic intent and campaign execution, particularly for advertisers managing complex, multi-format campaigns across streaming, display, and search simultaneously.

Moss was asked whether agents might eventually handle upfront negotiations autonomously. He was clear: "Never. I think it will still be very much about relationships, about great content, and about the opportunity to really help advertisers drive their business."

The 2026 upfront market

Despite visible macroeconomic uncertainty - Moss acknowledged "a lot going on" in the broader economy - his read on the 2026 upfront market is positive. "When I'm talking to agency leaders and brand marketers, what I'm hearing from them is not anxiety, it's really focus," he said. The scarcity of premium inventory, particularly live sports and custom sponsorships, is driving competitive demand among buyers seeking to lock in high-value positions before scatter market pricing takes over.

The upfront season represents, in Moss's framing, a planning and partnership cycle more than simply a buying transaction. He acknowledged that calls for greater flexibility from buyers are inevitable, but that the upfront remains "a key moment for planning and partnership for the coming broadcast year."

Heading into that season, Amazon's inventory portfolio spans Thursday Night Football, NBA games including playoff and play-in tournament rights, UEFA Champions League coverage extended through 2031, Twitch's live streaming community, and a rapidly expanding CTV supply network through Amazon DSP partnerships. For media buyers, the practical question is no longer whether Prime Video belongs in a streaming TV plan, but how to structure full-year commitments across a platform that now touches sports, entertainment, audio, retail search, and agentic campaign management from a single buying relationship.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Alan Moss, VP of Global Advertising Sales at Amazon Ads, speaking with host Mike Shields on the Next in Media podcast.

What: Moss described how Amazon has built a unified full-funnel advertising business spanning live sports (NFL, NBA, UEFA Champions League), Prime Video streaming, Twitch, retail media signals, and AI-driven campaign tools including durable AI agents and the Amazon DSP, which now claims 90% household reach through partnerships with Netflix, Roku, Disney, Spotify, and SiriusXM. He also discussed the 2026 upfront market, reporting positive signals from agency conversations despite broader macroeconomic uncertainty.

When: The podcast episode was published on May 12, 2026, during the lead-up to the 2026 upfront season.

Where: The Next in Media podcast, with the conversation taking place in the context of New York's upfront season period and Amazon's broader advertising position across US and international markets.

Why: The interview provides a detailed account of Amazon's advertising strategy at a moment when the company's ad business has grown to $68.6 billion in annual revenue, Prime Video carries 315 million global ad-supported viewers, and AI agents are shifting from pilot programs to production campaign tools. For the marketing community, the conversation maps how a platform that began as a sponsored listings marketplace has structured itself into a direct competitor to traditional television networks and major DSPs for full-year upfront commitments.

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