Samsung Ads and Amazon Ads today named the first brands to go live with remote-enabled interactive video ads on Samsung TV Plus, enabling viewers to add products to an Amazon cart, receive offers on their phone, or respond to a call-to-action without leaving their couch.

Samsung Ads, the advanced advertising division of Samsung Electronics, today announced the inaugural group of brands and agencies activating Amazon Ads' interactive video ad (IVA) technology across Samsung TV Plus inventory. The announcement, made on June 22, 2026, marks the first time viewers watching FAST (free ad-supported streaming television) content on Samsung TV Plus can use their remote control to take a commerce action directly within an ad. The capability itself was first disclosed at Samsung's NewFronts stage in March 2026. What today's announcement adds is the rollout of live brand campaigns.

The five inaugural partners are Boiron USA, Logitech, PLAION, PMG, and Reckitt. They span consumer health, technology, gaming, and entertainment categories, suggesting Samsung and Amazon are seeding the format across diverse verticals from the outset rather than limiting it to a single sector.

How the technology works

The IVA format is a remote-enabled interactive layer placed on top of a standard streaming television advertisement. According to Samsung Ads, viewers watching premium FAST content on Samsung TV Plus can interact with ads using their existing TV remote - no separate device, no QR code scan, no requirement to pick up a phone.

For brands that sell on Amazon, the primary call-to-action is "Add to Cart". A viewer watching a Logitech ad, for example, can press a button on the remote to place the featured product directly into their Amazon shopping cart. The cart action happens within the Amazon storefront. Samsung and Amazon have not disclosed how the session handoff between the television ad and the Amazon cart is authenticated, but the mechanism relies on Amazon DSP - advertisers activate Samsung TV Plus inventory through Amazon DSP, pairing Samsung's FAST environment with Amazon's browsing, streaming, and shopping signals.

For brands that do not sell on Amazon, the format supports different outcome-oriented calls-to-action. According to Samsung Ads, options include "Send to Phone" - which delivers an offer or link to the viewer's mobile device - and headline-driven prompts such as "Sign Up Today." These CTAs extend engagement beyond the television screen rather than routing it through Amazon's commerce infrastructure. Reckitt, a consumer goods company, and Boiron USA, a wellness brand, both fall into this second category given their broader retail distribution outside Amazon.

The technical infrastructure running underneath the experience is Amazon DSP. Advertisers gain access to Samsung TV Plus inventory through this DSP layer, which means campaign targeting draws on Amazon's authenticated signals - purchase history, browsing behavior, streaming patterns - rather than relying on probabilistic household matching alone. That combination of premium FAST inventory with a first-party commerce signal graph is the structural differentiator Samsung and Amazon are positioning against standard streaming ad products.

The data behind the format

Samsung Ads reports that Samsung TV Plus surpassed 100 million monthly active users (MAUs) worldwide this year, a figure the company says underscores the platform's growing scale as a premium advertising environment. That number represents a meaningful increase from the 88 million MAUs cited in the September 2025 renewal of the Samsung Ads and Publica partnership and in several programmatic infrastructure announcements through late 2025.

According to Amazon Ads, interactive video can drive 6X higher brand search, 4X more detailed page views, 4X more add-to-cart actions, and 5X higher purchase rates compared with standard streaming TV campaigns. Samsung Ads cites those figures as evidence that the shoppable format does more than add novelty - it creates measurable downstream purchase behavior. These performance claims come from Amazon's own data and have not been independently verified.

Earlier Amazon research supports the directional pattern. The company published findings in January 2026, drawn from a survey of more than 7,800 consumers conducted with Publicis Media and research firm Latitude, showing that 79% of respondents considered interactive video ads more engaging than standard video ads, while 78% described them as more attention-grabbing. For brands specifically using "Add to Cart" calls-to-action, the same research found 7-percentage-point lifts in noticeability, 9 points in convenience perception, and 11 points in perceived innovation versus standard formats.

Amazon first introduced interactive and shoppable ad formats for Prime Video - including pause ads, brand trivia ads, and remote-activated shopping - in May 2024. That original deployment on Prime Video reported 10X increases in product page views and conversions for participating brands. The Samsung TV Plus activation today extends the same IVA infrastructure beyond Prime Video for the first time, applying it to a FAST environment with a different audience profile and content mix.

What brands are saying

The launch partners have described the format in terms of reducing friction between content discovery and commerce action. Reckitt's Investment, Performance, and Trading Lead, Ryan McGowan, is quoted in the announcement: "Consumers are finding products across screens, searches, and digital experiences, and we need to meet them there. This partnership gives us a powerful way to reach digital-first viewers in high-attention TV moments and make it easier for them to move from interest to action."

Logitech's Head of North America Consumer Business, Rob Richardson, framed the technology in terms of the discovery context its products already inhabit: "Consumers increasingly discover technology products while watching creators, esports, entertainment, and gaming content. Samsung's shoppable solution brings commerce directly into the TV experience, by reducing friction between inspiration and action and creating a more seamless path from discovery to purchase."

Sha Atakhanov, VP of Marketing and eCommerce at Boiron USA, described the format's relevance to wellness discovery: "This partnership gives us a new way to meet consumers in a high-attention environment and make discovery more useful, immediate, and high-impact."

PLAION Partners' Vice President of Marketing and Communications for the Americas, Mark Goodrich, tied the format to gaming audience behavior: "Gamers are always on the lookout for what's next - whether that's a new title, franchise, or entertainment experience. Samsung's Shoppable solution makes it easier to turn that moment of curiosity into action."

Agency PMG is also a named launch partner. Mike Treon, Head of CTV and Video Strategy at PMG, addressed the measurement dimension: "At PMG, the ability for us to effectively showcase the bridge between awareness and conversion is critical for how we allocate media dollars on behalf of our customers. This partnership with Samsung gives us another powerful way to tie the growing pool of premium video inventory to measurable business impact."

Samsung Ads' Managing Director of Ad Sales for North America, Jimmy White, summarized the platform's strategic direction: "The TV has always been the entertainment center of the home. Now people are using that screen differently - to discover, search, compare, and shop. For years, CTV has been a powerful tool for building awareness, but its greatest promise lies in driving full-funnel outcomes. With Amazon Ads, we're helping brands turn attention into action and close the gap between discovery and purchase."

Samsung TV Plus in context

Samsung TV Plus is a FAST service distributed across Samsung Smart TVs globally. The platform operates as a free, ad-supported streaming service carrying live channels and on-demand content. According to Samsung Ads, the company serves over 25 countries and the Samsung TV Plus platform holds the position of the number one FAST service across hundreds of millions of Samsung TVs globally.

The 100 million MAU figure reported today reflects sustained audience growth. For comparison, the Samsung Ads and Publica CTV partnership announced in September 2025 cited 88 million MAUs. Samsung's programmatic home screen announcement on June 10, 2026, also cited 88 million MAUs - meaning the 100 million figure reflects growth confirmed in the past 12 days or reflects a different measurement methodology. Samsung has not clarified the basis for the updated count.

The FAST category itself has expanded substantially. According to Luminate Intelligence data covered by PPC Land in June 2026, the total number of US FAST channels has grown from 424 in 2020 to 1,700 in 2026, while active US FAST households have expanded from 22 million in 2020 to an estimated 54 million in 2026. Ad-supported streaming time on Samsung TVs grew 24% between Q4 2024 and Q4 2025, while ad-free streaming time fell 26%, according to Samsung Ads' own State of CTV 2026 report.

That structural shift - viewers choosing ad-supported content at an accelerating rate - is the audience foundation on which today's shoppable activation sits.

How this fits into the broader Samsung Ads strategy

The shoppable CTV activation is one of several significant announcements Samsung Ads has made in a compressed period. On June 10, 2026, Samsung Ads opened its Smart TV home screens to programmatic buying via The Trade Desk and Google DV360 for the first time, powered by Magnite's SpringServe ad server, with a global rollout planned for Q3 2026. That announcement addressed a different inventory surface - the OS-level home screen that appears before any content or app is launched - while today's announcement addresses in-stream ad formats within Samsung TV Plus content.

Together, the two moves position Samsung Ads as pursuing simultaneous upgrades across multiple layers of its advertising stack: the home screen (pre-content, highest-attention surface) and the in-stream FAST inventory (within content, commerce-enabled). The home screen inventory had previously been available only through direct deals; the in-stream shoppable format had not existed at all before today's launch.

Samsung's advertising infrastructure has been expanding progressively. In March 2026, the company launched what it called Performance TV, a full-funnel performance platform with AI-powered ad products. At NewFronts in May 2025, Samsung revealed interactive ad formats and the Samsung Television Network. The Publica partnership renewal in September 2025 addressed the programmatic ad-serving infrastructure underlying Samsung TV Plus inventory globally.

The CTV measurement gap has also been under active industry attention. IAB Tech Lab's CTV Ad Ops Workshop in August 2025 identified six critical technical barriers preventing CTV advertising from reaching full programmatic potential, including lack of standardized advanced ad formats, complex live event advertising requirements, missing universal conversion API standards, creative ID framework adoption challenges, inadequate metadata and taxonomy systems, and unclear CTV inventory ownership structures. Shoppable formats like the one announced today operate through proprietary technical methods rather than standardized protocols - a point the IAB Tech Lab workshop noted as a persistent challenge for the category.

The Amazon Ads infrastructure layer

Amazon's IVA technology is the engine underneath today's activation. The format has been developed and refined primarily on Prime Video since its introduction in May 2024. Amazon extended IVA capabilities in October 2025 with location-based interactive ads, enabling national advertisers to generate thousands of zip-code-level variants from a single campaign. In May 2026, Amazon launched Dynamic TV Creative, the first capability to automatically personalize IVAs based on viewer shopping behavior, covered in detail by PPC Land.

Bringing that IVA infrastructure to Samsung TV Plus marks the first time it has been deployed across a third-party FAST environment. The activation goes through Amazon DSP, meaning media buyers access Samsung TV Plus inventory within the same buying interface they use for Prime Video, Fire TV, and other Amazon-connected supply. The practical effect is that advertisers working with Amazon's commerce data and targeting signals can now reach Samsung TV Plus audiences without operating a separate buying workflow.

The CTV market is increasingly competitive around shoppable and interactive formats. YouTube's Brandcast in May 2026introduced "Buy with Google Pay," a two-click checkout mechanism for connected television screens. Teads launched CTV Ensemble on June 18, 2026, combining HomeScreen placements with performance measurement tools. The Samsung-Amazon activation joins a competitive field where most major streaming advertising players are now attempting to collapse the gap between awareness and purchase action.

The structural question for the industry is whether remote-enabled commerce at scale changes how budgets are allocated. CTV has historically been purchased for upper-funnel reach objectives. If add-to-cart actions are measurable and attributable at the campaign level - as Amazon's IVA data suggests they can be - the argument for moving performance budgets, not just brand budgets, into CTV formats becomes substantively stronger.

CTV ad spend is projected to reach $38 billion in 2026, representing 43% of all TV ad budgets, according to eMarketer data cited by PPC Land. The Samsung-Amazon shoppable activation enters that market at a moment when advertisers are already increasing scrutiny of CTV's measurable return relative to digital alternatives - and when the platforms building those formats have strong commercial incentives to demonstrate that television can close the loop it has historically left open.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Samsung Ads, the advanced advertising division of Samsung Electronics, and Amazon Ads. Launch brand partners include Boiron USA (consumer wellness), Logitech (technology), PLAION (gaming and entertainment), PMG (media agency), and Reckitt (consumer goods).

What: The first activation of Amazon Ads' remote-enabled interactive video ad (IVA) technology on Samsung TV Plus inventory, enabling viewers to add products to an Amazon cart, send offers to their phone, or act on calls-to-action using their TV remote. The activation is accessed through Amazon DSP, pairing Samsung's FAST environment with Amazon's commerce and audience signals.

When: Announced June 22, 2026. The underlying IVA capability was first disclosed at Samsung's NewFronts presentation in March 2026.

Where: Samsung TV Plus, the global FAST service available on Samsung Smart TVs. Samsung Ads operates in over 25 countries. No geographic restrictions on the launch have been specified, though the named brand partners are North American-facing organizations.

Why: The announcement attempts to address the longstanding gap between CTV's strength as an awareness channel and its historically limited ability to drive measurable purchase outcomes. By enabling remote-triggered commerce actions within a FAST ad, Samsung and Amazon are positioning interactive video as a full-funnel format competitive with performance-oriented digital channels. With CTV ad spend projected at $38 billion in 2026 and ad-supported streaming growing rapidly on Samsung devices, the commercial pressure to demonstrate lower-funnel outcomes from the big screen has intensified.