Amazon is pushing deeper into the middle of TV and audio ad deals, rolling out a new measurement tool for streamers while tapping iHeartMedia’s 1,000-plus sellers to put its streaming inventory on more media plans. In the past week, iHeartMedia has expanded its relationship with Amazon Ads to resell inventory across Twitch, Amazon Music, Fire TV and Alexa, on top of the Prime video slots it already resells. At the same time, Amazon has launched Outcome Optimizer, a tool that uses Amazon’s shopping, browsing and streaming data to tune programmatic guaranteed campaigns in Freewheel, with media partners including Warner Bros. Discovery and A+E Global Media using it at launch, according to Sharmilan Rayer, director of Amazon Publisher Cloud.
Together, the two moves mark the latest step in Amazon’s years-long push to build direct data-driven ties with premium publishers – and to sit at the center of both how TV and audio inventory is sold and how its performance is measured.
“Our strategy is to work directly with the world’s premium publishers, and to use technology as a bridge so that what our advertisers are trying to achieve can happen more successfully on all the publishers that we work with,” Rayer said. “That’s very much core to our strategy and I think these types of product releases are really a reflection of that.”
