Amazon is expanding its ad platform with a new data clean room for publishers, including NBCUniversal, Dotdash Meredith and DirecTV, the e-commerce giant announced. Amazon launched a series of updates today to its ad tech systems, including the Amazon Publisher Cloud, which could give the platform an edge in competing against rival internet ad companies, including Google and The Trade Desk, according to advertisers.

“This is really bringing the power of clean room technology to publishers, paired with Amazon audiences,” said Kelly MacLean, VP of Amazon DSP. “And this is enabling publishers to now have the ability and insights to activate more interesting deals. So, it’s connecting them better with advertisers.”

How it works is that publishing partners, many of which already receive ad demand from Amazon’s DSP on the web and connected TVs, can take data from their audiences into the clean room environment. Clean rooms are considered safer for data and privacy, and the publishers use what they know about their audiences and match it with advertisers’ and Amazon’s data to target and measure ads.

“A publisher can understand how its contextual signals index against Amazon Ads audiences that are in-market for products such as pet food or cookware and package a deal for a brand that wants reach those in-market customers,” Amazon shared in an announcement.

Amazon already has a data clean room service through Amazon Marketing Cloud, which is for advertisers. Amazon announced other updates to its DSP and to its marketing APIs—application programming interface—which were all part of UnBoxed, the yearly ad conference the company holds in New York.

For instance, Amazon is making it easier for advertisers to take data from the marketing cloud and turn that into custom audiences, which are target groups for ads. “Basically, we’re enabling marketers to build more custom audiences where they can quickly activate these in the Amazon DSP,” MacLean said.

The advertisers can also get measurement and analytics more easily in the DSP, MacLean said. “It’s a much simpler way for analysts to pull insights without writing code,” MacLean said.

Advertisers get to see how their ads work through the DSP, while the publisher cloud could help drive revenue for the media partners, said Patrick Miller, co-founder of Flywheel, a digital commerce agency and Amazon marketing tech partner.

“As Amazon wants to grow their advertising business, publishing partners are critical. Not all the traffic online is Amazon,” Miller said.

Amazon’s ad updates are part of broader industry shifts, as cookies deprecate online and data becomes harder to share. Google plans to sunset cookies in Chrome web browsers next year, eliminating one of the last easy data tools that marketers use for programmatic advertising.

Meanwhile, Google is in the middle of an antitrust trial over how its ad tech is ubiquitous in programmatic advertising. Amazon could see an opening to strengthen its ad business and work closer with publishers. Amazon’s retail media data and insights into customers are powerful enticements. Brands use that data to find new customers and then measure when they purchased products.

Amazon’s ad revenue hit $10.7 billion in the second quarter of 2023, up from $8.8 billion a year earlier. The company is also the world’s largest advertiser, according to the Ad Age Datacenter.

Clean rooms

A number of publishers and retailers have been developing clean room services, too, as a way to activate first-party data, including Disney, NBCUniversal and Walmart.

Amazon has been working more closely with publishers to grow its footprint in programmatic, and it has been developing its own ad offerings. Last month, Amazon announced it will start running ads in Prime Video; it also has Freevee, Thursday Night Football games and Fire TV. Of course, it has Amazon.com with sponsored placements for brands that sell on and off Amazon.

“Amazon sees an opening in the market,” said one advertising executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss Amazon’s new publisher cloud. “They see what’s going on at Google and The Trade Desk, and there is an opportunity to get more inventory for its DSP.”

Publishers are turning to clean rooms to increase the value of their programmatic ad inventory, while staying within the latest privacy constraints on data. Publishers have first-party data relationships with their audiences, which they obtain approval to use for ad targeting. That has given publishers more power in the ad tech market. Meanwhile, Amazon has its own relationship and data with shoppers and Prime Video subscribers.

“Amazon’s recent clean room efforts signal that there’s still opportunity to deliver a buy-side solution that really unlocks this next generation of data-enriched supply,” said Mark Wagman, managing director at consulting firm MediaLink. “One of the trends we’ve observed is a greater need for more seamless sharing of data between platforms and third-party publishers, and leading DSPs are in an arms race now to achieve that.”

Working with smaller brands

Amazon also announced a new connected TV ad unit today, designed for small- and medium-size brands that don’t have vast resources to build video campaigns. The new ad format, called “sponsored TV,” is available within the Amazon Ads console and through marketing tech partners using Amazon’s API. The ads do not run through the Amazon DSP, but they can appear on Freevee, Twitch and Fire TV.

Amazon has been offering smaller brands creative services to build the connected TV spots, according to Ruslana Zbagerska, VP of Amazon Ads. Sponsored TV campaigns come with no minimum spend and no upfront commitments.

“We are removing the barriers to help brands engage on large screens in the home,” Zbagerska said in an interview.

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The TV ads offering is another hook for Amazon to go after direct-to-consumer brands and smaller marketers, which may already use Amazon ad products to sell on the e-commerce site, Flywheel’s Miller said.

“All of a sudden insurgent brands can get the same reach as a larger brand,” Miller said, “which they’ve never been able to do that before on connected TV and tie it back to deterministic measurement.”