‘TV to till’: Amazon to bring new shoppable formats to UK in H2
Connected TV World Summit 2025
Amazon Prime Video will be bringing a number of new ad formats to the UK market in H2.
David Amodio, Amazon’s head of video sales specialists, Northern Europe, revealed at Connected TV World Summit in London that advertisers will soon be able to buy against pause ads, a “sophisticated” shoppable carousel format and another interactive format that allows users to shop for advertised items without being taken out of the Prime Video player.
“What we’re bringing to the table is a layer of shoppability that hasn’t really existed at this scale before,” he said, noting the formats are already being tested in the US.
Amazon will also be “supercharging” its partnership offering this year to “bring to life ways in which advertisers and brands can amplify their content partnerships with us”, be it through product placement, working with intellectual property or more.
Partnerships can be activated “across our entire canvas”, according to Amodio, including Amazon’s retail site, Fire TV, Prime Video and Twitch.
He also highlighted this month’s launch of Amazon’s streaming TV+ offering, which brings together all of Amazon’s connected TV products in one place to make it easier for advertisers to transact across the whole of Amazon’s video inventory.
“We’re constantly looking to innovate and iterate for our advertising customers, but also for our viewers,” Amodio told The Media Leader deputy editor Maria Iu. “We’re quite obsessed with making advertising as relevant and engaging as possible.”
Truncating the funnel
Amodio joined Amazon in May 2024 after nearly 18 years at Channel 4, soon after the streaming giant launched its default ad tier globally.
He shared that Prime Video now counts 200m monthly active users for its ad tier, including over 19m monthly active users in the UK. The latter figure is consistent from Amazon’s upfronts in October.
Laying out the retail giant’s “TV to till” strategy (“that’s kind of our territory”), Amodio explained that, by expanding Prime Video’s ad proposition, Amazon can now offer brand campaigns at the top of the funnel and “move the dial” at the bottom of the funnel via advertising on the retail site and, soon, more shoppable TV formats.
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“All we’re really trying to do at Amazon is make sure we deliver for our customers at whatever point they are in the purchase journey,” Amodio said.
Accordingly, 98% of Prime Video viewers also shop on Amazon’s retail site.
For advertisers, Amodio echoed the sentiment of rival streaming service Netflix by telling the crowd his goal is to “try and make it really simple and easy to buy advertising from us […] and measure the outcomes”.
Amodio said the strategy appears to be well-received from the market; 80% of advertisers in the EU that booked a campaign via Prime Video in the first six months of its ad tier launch came back for repeat business.
Hard-to-reach audiences
According to Amodio, part of the reason why advertisers feel confident in working with Amazon as a TV partner is because of its relationship with the likes of Barb and Thinkbox, which has given marketers an “impartial read” on the effectiveness of the platform.
Pointing to Amazon’s mix of live sport streaming as well as global (Fallout, Rings of Power) and local (Clarkson’s Farm) tentpole programmes, Amodio said premium content is driving a uniquely high-quality audience for advertisers.
“Some of those really hard-to-reach audiences — the younger demographic, the upmarket demographic, the primary shopper — that’s really important for advertisers to reach,” he explained. “Barb data is showing how effective we are at driving incremental reach for those audiences.”
That includes new-to-Amazon advertisers that previously would not have considered advertising against Amazon’s retail site, such as brands in financial, travel and automotive sectors.
“We’re very humble at Amazon,” Amodio added. “We’re always talking to our customers and trying to learn as much as possible and trying to work backwards from their challenges or their needs.”