How to Run Prime Video Ads with Amazon DSP [5 Steps]

Most brands hit a ceiling with Sponsored Products. Costs climb, the same shoppers see your ads on repeat, and growing past your existing audience gets harder every quarter. The missing piece is usually upper-funnel reach: getting in front of new customers before they start searching for you. Traditional TV can do that, but you can rarely prove it worked.

Prime Video ads through Amazon DSP solve both problems at once. You reach new streaming audiences at scale, and because it runs on Amazon's data, you can measure what that exposure does downstream.

This guide covers how Prime Video ads work, how to set them up in DSP, the specs and targeting options, how to measure performance, and the creative practices that move the numbers.

What are Prime Video ads?

Prime Video ads are video advertisements that run inside the Prime Video streaming experience, across movies, TV shows, Amazon Originals, and live sports. Amazon shifted Prime Video to an ad-supported model by default in early 2024, which created one of the largest ad-supported streaming audiences anywhere. In the US alone, Prime Video reaches an average of more than 130 million ad-supported viewers a month.

Live sports is a big part of the draw. Prime Video now carries NFL Thursday Night Football, the NBA, WNBA, and NASCAR, and those audiences tend to skew younger and more engaged than linear TV. If sports is your angle, Amazon's live sports on Prime hub covers the schedule and audience data.

These ads show up across the full range of devices people stream on:

• Connected TVs and smart TVs

• Fire TV devices

• Mobile devices

• Desktop

• Gaming consoles

The defining trait is that Prime Video advertising is audience-driven, not channel-driven. Instead of buying a program and taking whoever shows up, you reach viewers based on Amazon's shopping signals, streaming behavior, interests, demographics, and lifestyle audiences, all through Amazon DSP.

One more point worth stating plainly: you do not need to sell on Amazon to advertise here. Prime Video inventory is open to both endemic advertisers (brands that sell on Amazon) and non-endemic advertisers (brands that do not).

As of now, it is available across markets including the US, UK, Canada, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, India, Japan, Australia, and Brazil, with availability varying by locale.

Why Prime Video ads matter

(1.) A premium streaming environment

Prime Video runs professionally produced, long-form content that people choose to watch and sit through. The ads are full-screen, sound-on, and non-skippable, appearing before or during the content. That combination tends to mean stronger attention, higher video completion rates, and far less of the background-noise problem you get with skippable or muted formats.

(2.) Audience buying through DSP

Rather than spraying a broad audience, you can layer Amazon DSP's audiences on top of Prime Video supply: in-market shoppers, lifestyle segments, behavioral signals, and your own first-party audiences. The inventory is premium, but the targeting is what makes it efficient. Your ad reaches people with a real reason to care, which lifts relevance and, usually, results.

(3.) Full-funnel measurement

This is where Prime Video pulls ahead of traditional TV. Beyond engagement metrics like reach and video completion rate, you can connect upper-funnel exposure to downstream actions: detail page views, add-to-cart, and purchases. You are not guessing whether the TV spend worked. You can see how streaming exposure feeds the rest of the funnel, which is exactly the kind of question Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) was built to answer.

How to activate Prime Video ads with Amazon DSP

You can run Prime Video ads two ways: work directly with Amazon Ads (or your Amazon account executive), or work through a third-party service provider like Adbrew that offers a DSP solution.

The campaign build itself is close to setting up any online video campaign in Amazon DSP. The one step that is specific to Prime Video is the deal.

Step 1: Activate a deal

Prime Video inventory is bought through deals on Amazon DSP, not the open auction. You have a couple of paths here. Since August 2024, self-service advertisers can create Programmatic Guaranteed deals for Prime Video directly inside Amazon DSP, alongside Preferred Deals and Private Auctions.

You can also contact your Amazon representative to set up a managed deal, which is often the simplest route for your first campaign. Either way, the deal defines the terms: flight duration, CPM, and targeting parameters like location, audience, and genre, depending on the deal type. If you want the full picture on how these deals differ, see our companion guide on Amazon DSP Deals.

If you do not have a DSP seat yet, you can run all of this through Adbrew. We provide Amazon DSP access with no minimum spend to get started, set up your DSP account, and manage campaigns end to end.

For Prime Video deals specifically, email us at hello@adbrew.io, and we coordinate directly with Amazon to secure the Prime Video deal and activate your campaign, so you skip the setup back-and-forth.

Step 2: Create your order and set the goal

Create your order and choose a campaign goal. For Prime Video, awareness is usually the right call, with video completion rate (VCR) as your primary KPI. If you are unsure which goal fits, our breakdown of Amazon DSP campaign goals walks through each one.

Step 3: Build your line item

Set the media type to Video. Under Inventory Targeting, open the Deals section and select the Prime Video deal you activated in Step 1. From there, refine the rest of your targeting to match your objective. Amazon DSP gives you a deep set of options here, which our DSP targeting guide covers in full.

Step 4: Upload your creative

Upload your ad two to three days before launch so there is time for review. Use a minimum resolution of 1920 x 1080, submit an MP4, and aim for a video bitrate of at least 15 Mbps to maximize supply coverage.

Select Streaming TV as the ad experience. Because creative specs change, it is worth checking Amazon's official streaming TV and Prime Video ad specs before you finalize anything.

Step 5: Launch

Once everything is approved and the creative is in place, launch the campaign and start monitoring delivery and VCR from day one.

Prime Video ad formats and specs

Prime Video ads are full-screen, sound-on, and non-skippable, and they run as pre-roll or mid-roll breaks depending on the title. Standard durations are 15, 20, or 30 seconds.

Amazon has also expanded interactive formats on Prime Video, including shoppable carousel ads, interactive pause ads, and brand trivia, which let viewers engage with a remote or QR code without leaving the content. Interactive versions tend to drive higher engagement than standard video meaningfully, so they are worth testing once your baseline campaign is running.

A small but useful brand-safety note: ads do not run against Prime Video Kids profiles, so your spend stays in front of the right audiences.

Measuring Prime Video campaigns

Amazon gives you several ways to understand what a streaming campaign actually did. You can pair Amazon's own measurement tools with third-party partners like Nielsen, Kantar, Innovid, and Lucid to look past raw reach and impressions into brand lift, audience engagement, and conversions tied to your campaign goal.

The reporting gets a lot more powerful once you have Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC).

With AMC you can analyze cross-channel performance, conversion paths, attribution, and media mix in one place. For setting up that side of things, our guide to reading Amazon DSP reports is a good starting point.

Here is a concrete example of why this matters. At Adbrew, we used path-to-conversion and multi-touch attribution reports in AMC to measure how DSP affected overall brand performance.

The data showed that shoppers who were exposed to upper-funnel DSP awareness campaigns before interacting with Sponsored Ads converted at a significantly higher ROAS than shoppers who converted with no prior DSP exposure. That is the kind of insight that turns a "branding" line item into a defensible investment.

Who should run Prime Video ads?

The honest answer is that Prime Video is not only for the biggest brands, but it does demand a real commitment. Streaming TV ads on Amazon carry no fixed minimum spend requirement, so the barrier is lower than it used to be. The practical consideration is CPM: premium streaming inventory costs more per impression than standard display, so you want enough budget to reach a meaningful audience at a useful frequency.

That makes Prime Video a strong fit for product launches, seasonal pushes, category expansion, and any brand trying to build upper-funnel visibility while still tracking performance downstream. Mid-sized brands can absolutely use it strategically; they just need to be deliberate about timing and budget rather than treating it as an always-on channel.

Final thoughts

Prime Video has become one of the more important pieces of the Amazon advertising ecosystem, especially for brands that want to strengthen upper-funnel visibility without giving up measurable outcomes. For advertisers already investing in Amazon DSP, it brings together premium streaming inventory, audience-driven targeting, cross-device reach, retail-aware measurement, and a genuinely full-funnel strategy in one place.

As streaming keeps taking share from linear TV, connected TV and premium video will only get more central to media planning. The brands that align strong creative, a clear audience strategy, and a real measurement framework early will be the ones positioned to scale. If you want help running and measuring Prime Video campaigns without managing every line item by hand, see how Adbrew's Amazon DSP platform supports brands and agencies across setup, optimization, and reporting.