Let’s stop pretending this is normal.

What Amazon just did to the DSP landscape isn’t evolution.

It’s controlled demolition, politely marketed as “platform unification.”

While the rest of the adtech industry was hosting webinars about “signal loss” and “data collaboration,” Amazon was in the lab building a vertically-integrated, AI-fueled, data-soaked death machine.

And they didn’t just launch features.
They created an adtech OS.
One login. One system. All your audiences—ruthlessly optimized by AI.

The result?
Half the indie DSPs just quietly updated their LinkedIn titles to “Strategic Growth Consultant.”

Amazon DSP isn’t competing anymore. It’s absorbing.

📈 First-party data?
Integrated. Live. Connected through Ads Data Manager with a CDP pipeline cleaner than your morning cold brew. Salesforce, Treasure Data, doesn’t matter. Upload once, use it everywhere—DSP, AMC, APC. No more CSV uploads at 2am.

🧠 Optimization?
Performance+ is out here running campaigns for you.
Not “helping” you. Not “suggesting” edits.
It’s actually reading behavioral signals, analyzing purchase intent, and automatically adjusting spend, creative, and targeting before your media buyer finishes their first bagel.

🔍 Insights?
“Insight cards” now tell you not just what’s broken, but why it’s broken, what it means, and what you should do about it. In real time. With visuals. Yes, visuals. The kind your CMO can read without calling the analytics team for translation.

🎯 Relevance?
Let’s talk about Ad Relevance™, because this is where it gets biblical.

Amazon is done with “addressability.”
They’ve left the building. Packed up the buzzwords.
Now it’s about whether someone is actually worth the ad impression.
Not can you reach them, but should you?

That subtle difference?
That’s the divide between every other DSP and this monolith Amazon just quietly built under your nose.

CTV isn’t a “channel” anymore. It’s the spine of the stack.
Prime Video isn’t just another content property. It’s the delivery system.

And when you plug Amazon Publisher Cloud into that?
It gets even weirder—and smarter.

Publishers now layer Amazon’s behavioral signals onto their own traffic. Suddenly, a streaming network finds out their Tuesday-night viewers are also bulk buyers of organic dog food. And boom—those segments are now available as precision-targeted packages in the DSP.

Ad sales used to be guesswork.
Now it’s predictive commerce at scale.

Let’s recap:

No other DSP can pull off that kind of synaptic connection between shopper intent and ad delivery. Google’s still unpacking cookie deprecation. The Trade Desk is pushing OpenPath like it’s a life raft. Amazon? They’re too busy making the ad platform that sells your product before you even build the landing page.

It ends the way all walled gardens do.
Not with fire and fury, but with comfort.
With dashboards that work.
With clean integrations.
With AI that quietly makes your campaigns smarter while you’re watching old reruns on Freevee.

You won’t even notice when the middle disappears.
When your indie DSP doesn’t get renewed.
When your attribution vendor quietly exits the category.
When your agency stops pretending to manage “omnichannel” and just hands you a Performance+ report instead.

This isn’t just “better targeting.”
It’s total media convergence, backed by first-party commerce data and turbocharged by machine learning models trained on actual shopper behavior.

And here’s the real kicker:

You’ll like it.
Your clients will like it.
Your CFO will love it.

And by the time you realize you’re inside the walls, there’s no incentive to leave.

So sure, The Trade Desk is still playing chess.
But Amazon built the board, sold the pieces, mined the plastic, and monetized the instructions.

And they did it all while serving you an ad for the exact protein bar you didn’t know you needed… on your Fire TV… during Thursday Night Football… optimized for your mood.

That’s not the future.
That’s today.

A grandma-proof primer (but your CMO should read it too).

Once upon a time, Amazon DSP was a niche tool to boost toilet paper sales during a Prime Day frenzy.

Now? It’s become the cool kids’ table of programmatic buying — and your nephew’s dropshipping hustle doesn’t qualify for a seat.

Welcome to 2025, where Amazon DSP isn't just a retail booster rocket — it’s a full-blown, cross-channel performance machine that’s gunning for DV360’s lunch, The Trade Desk’s coffee, and every indie DSP’s dignity.

More advertisers are quietly making Amazon’s DSP their go-to ad-buying platform — not just for Amazon properties, but across the wider web.

“The biggest shift we’ve seen,” says Kelly MacLean, VP of Amazon Ads, “is that advertisers are now using Amazon DSP as their primary DSP.”

Sure, it’s anecdotal — but talk to any agency worth its spreadsheet, and you’ll hear the same thing:
💸 Amazon’s CPMs are tight.
📊 The data is scary good.
🧠 And Performance+ might just replace your programmatic team.

Once, Amazon DSP was a tool for sellers trying to juice their ASINs. But today, non-endemic brands — think auto, travel, and even insurance — are testing and scaling campaigns through it.

Why? Because Amazon quietly rebuilt the entire DSP.

They integrated Amazon Marketing Cloud and Publisher Cloud. They simplified setup. They automated optimization with AI (hello, Performance+). And yes, they made it usable without requiring a PhD in media math.

“Eventually, we want it to be the largest AI-driven buying platform for all digital marketers,” MacLean said.
Not just Amazon sellers. Everyone.

While the rest of the ecosystem hoards hashed emails and cries over crumbling cookie jars, Amazon is… calm.

MacLean puts it bluntly:
“Too many marketers became overly reliant on the false precision of cookies. We’re focusing on real-time signals rooted in our expertise with shopping journeys.”

It’s not about identity.
It’s about behavior.
Amazon sees what people search, click, watch, and buy. And it can model intent off-site — without needing to ask you for your mother’s maiden name.

Let’s talk about the power play no one saw coming: Amazon DSP’s expansion into open-web inventory.

Marketers have used Amazon DSP to run off-Amazon display for years. But now, it’s sharper. Intentional. Strategically aggressive.

“We’ve made significant investments in our supply desk,” MacLean said. “We want to make it easy to transition dual libraries and create custom deals for marketers to get access to any type of supply they want.”

Translation: Amazon doesn’t just want you on Prime Video. They want your media budget everywhere — and they’ll build the pipes to make it happen.

Here’s the final piece of the puzzle: closing the loop between brand exposure and purchase outcomes — even off Amazon.

"Amazon can't lift the search model off-site," said one exec. "So they’re working with ad tech partners to replicate intent signals in the wild."

That means building new contextual targeting infrastructure that mimics shopping behavior — blending relevance, media signals, and Amazon’s own data firehose.

MacLean says it best:
“This is really helping marketers access a broader audience across the web in a cross-channel way. They don’t need to work with multiple providers.”

Retail media isn’t creeping into the marketing mainstream anymore.
It is the mainstream.

And Amazon DSP is the connective tissue — the platform that finally blends performance and brand, sales and reach, CTV and click-throughs, search and strategy.

It’s not perfect yet. Display still lags behind its product listing dominance. But with each upgrade, Amazon’s closing the gap — and grabbing share from Google and The Trade Desk in the process.

If you’re not paying attention, your competitors probably are.

Welcome to the royal rumble of programmatic.
🥊 One sells Prime subscriptions.
🧠 One sells ad tech cool factor.
Both are selling the future of advertising.
But only one promises to do it without picking your pocket twice.

This isn’t a friendly handshake across a conference table. It’s a full-blown cloud-based street fight between two giants: Amazon DSP and The Trade Desk. One’s got the world’s largest commerce engine. The other owns the open web’s trust.

And in 2025? The gloves are absolutely off.

Amazon DSP:
🛒 Think purchase history, browsing behavior, Alexa voice commands, what you binged on Prime, and even what aisle you walked past at Whole Foods. It's first-party data that doesn’t just guess — it knows.

The Trade Desk (TTD):
🧬 Leverages Unified ID 2.0, third-party data partnerships, and premium publisher signals. It doesn’t have Amazon’s checkout data, but it knows what you’re reading, watching, and ignoring across the open internet.

💥 The Knockout?
Amazon wins on precision. TTD wins on breadth. Amazon knows your intent. TTD knows your attention span.

Amazon DSP:
Heavy on Amazon-owned properties — Prime Video, Fire TV, Twitch, IMDb — with a growing footprint in open-web exchanges via the Amazon Publisher Cloud. But it’s still walled, and you feel it.

The Trade Desk:
The king of the open web. Hulu, Disney+, Spotify, NBCU, even Digital Out-of-Home. Everywhere Amazon isn’t? TTD probably is.

🔥 The Real Deal:
TTD is your go-to if you want omnichannel scale without a Bezos-sized shadow looming over your creative briefs.

Amazon DSP:
🚚 Closed-loop attribution. Serve an ad, see the sale. Especially valuable for brands selling on Amazon’s platform. No guesswork, no gaps. As Kelly MacLean says, “We bridge the gap between ad dollars and sales outcomes.”

The Trade Desk:
More transparency, more reporting options, better optimization levers — but lacks the built-in commerce funnel. It sees reach. Amazon sees revenue.

⚖️ The Verdict:
Amazon delivers ROI receipts. TTD delivers insights — and lets you build your own damn dashboards.

Amazon DSP:
Low take rates (as little as 1% on guaranteed deals), but high minimums. You need budget, a seat, and usually a friendly agency middleman.

The Trade Desk:
No minimums. No walled contracts. You can test and learn without blowing through your quarterly spend. Pricing is flexible: CPM or % of media — whichever’s lower.

🏆 Who Wins?
TTD for budget-conscious buyers. Amazon for brands that know what they’re hunting (and already have a credit line open with AWS).

Amazon DSP:
📺 275 million Prime subscribers. Thursday Night Football. Fire TV. Freevee. They’ve built a full-stack CTV empire — and they control the pipes.

The Trade Desk:
Still dominant in open-web CTV. Partners with Hulu, Roku, and Disney. UID2 tracks users across devices without cookies — and it’s becoming the standard.

👊 What’s the Move?
Amazon owns the screen. TTD owns the ecosystem. But Amazon is catching up fast — and they don’t need third-party cookies to do it.

Amazon DSP has the retail media flywheel.
The Trade Desk has the independent media buyer’s loyalty.
One is a walled garden with floodlights and facial recognition.
The other is a sleek, data-agnostic command center for the open web.

But here’s the twist: they’re both right.

Kelly MacLean says Amazon is building “the largest AI-driven buying platform for all digital marketers.”
Jeff Green says The Trade Desk is “making the open web competitive again.”
They’re not competing for the same turf — they’re redefining the turf.

Choose Amazon DSP if…
You want closed-loop attribution, sell on Amazon, or are ready to buy ads with shopper intent built in.

Choose The Trade Desk if…
You want full-funnel reach, maximum flexibility, and a partner that doesn’t also own your storefront.

But let’s be real: you might need both.
And the real loser? Any platform pretending Google’s ecosystem is still the center of the universe.

Let’s be real: if you’re still reading free versions of ADOTAT while the industry burns, morphs, and gets swallowed whole by Bezos’ ever-expanding algorithmic empire… you’re doing adtech like it’s 2016.

ADOTAT+ isn’t a newsletter. It’s a survival guide disguised as snark.

Want to know which DSP is circling the drain quietly while their LinkedIn page insists they’re “empowering marketers”?
Curious which SSP just lost 40% of its supply and isn’t telling anyone?
Wondering which agency is flipping to Amazon behind closed doors, while pretending to be “channel agnostic” on panels?

Yeah, we name names.

And while everyone else is spoon-feeding you press releases repackaged as thought leadership, we’re breaking down the actual strategy, the real fallout, and who’s profiting while everyone else is pivoting straight into irrelevance.

With ADOTAT+, you get:

So unless you like being the last to know (in which case, bless your heart), join ADOTAT+.

Because when the indie DSP market dies and everyone acts shocked, you’ll be the one saying, “ADOTAT told me in Q1.”

Stay bold. Stay curious. And know more than you did yesterday.
Now go hit that upgrade button like it’s the last working SSP in 2025.