Part of this whole saga is genuinely fascinating — and, yes, a little funny.

Not in a cynical way, but in the way that makes you marvel at how predictable power always looks in hindsight. Give it another quarter and one of these companies will likely accuse the other of trying to monopolize something, which is a bit like two sharks debating who invented the ocean.

For years, Amazon Ads perfected the art of restraint. It was the polite guest at the programmatic dinner, smiling through conferences, nodding to “open internet” ideals, and leaving the impression that it wanted to collaborate, not compete. That politeness has evaporated. What’s left isn’t aggression—it’s ambition on a planetary scale.

Inside Amazon’s ad business, the energy feels different. Less startup swagger, more strategic precision. One senior executive described Q4 as “a once-in-a-decade opportunity,” not because of seasonality, but because “our clients are seeing what happens when efficiency meets scale.” Another laughed and said, “We’re not taking share — we’re absorbing inefficiency.” It’s less about conquest, more about inevitability.

Amazon has moved from participation to orchestration.

The evolution has been quiet but decisive. Amazon is no longer selling ad products — it’s selling an operating system for advertising.

Their 2025 materials read less like pitch decks and more like a unified field theory of media economics: Prime Video, Retail Media, CTV, all linked through the same data infrastructure and measured in the same place.

One invoice, one view of performance, one accountable system of record.

There’s something both elegant and terrifying about that simplicity. For CFOs, it’s irresistible. For CMOs, it’s permission to stop guessing. Agencies, meanwhile, are adapting rather than resisting—leaning into the efficiencies because clients are demanding proof, not philosophy.

The message is subtle but clear: the market no longer rewards independence; it rewards integration.

While Amazon builds a full-stack system, The Trade Desk remains loyal to the open internet. Jeff Green continues to argue that The Trade Desk’s neutrality—its refusal to own inventory—keeps the ecosystem healthy. His line, now famous, is that “Amazon isn’t a competitor. We’re trying to buy the open internet.”

It’s an admirable conviction, and there’s truth in it. The open internet does need independent infrastructure. But the commercial reality is shifting toward ecosystems that bundle access, data, and attribution. The Trade Desk’s version of neutrality is beginning to feel more like governance than growth.

It’s not that Green is wrong—it’s that Amazon is defining the market while others are defining principles.

Amazon’s current strategy is built on measurable efficiency, not undercutting. The company is offering “bake-offs” to agencies—funded performance tests comparing its DSP to competitors—and letting the numbers make the argument.

What those numbers show is consistent: lower CPMs, higher verified reach, and direct attribution to sales. It’s not about flash or aggression; it’s about aligning incentives. Advertisers aren’t being asked to believe in Amazon’s model; they’re being shown what it delivers.

Underpinning it all is Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)—a clean-room environment that connects ad exposure to retail activity with deterministic accuracy. Every click, every stream, every purchase becomes part of a feedback system. In effect, Amazon is turning advertising into a closed-loop performance marketplace.

That’s not dominance. It’s design.

The industry’s reaction shouldn’t be to vilify Amazon or mourn The Trade Desk. This is the natural outcome of a decade-long tension between scale and independence.

Amazon is proving that when data, inventory, and attribution live in one place, efficiency compounds exponentially.

The Trade Desk, meanwhile, still provides critical balance—a reminder that transparency and openness remain valuable, even if the market is currently favoring speed and certainty.

If anything, this rivalry should push every player—DSPs, agencies, brands—to rethink how value is created in a post-cookie, post-fragmentation world.

In the end, this isn’t a story of predators and prey. It’s a story about who defines performance—and whether independence can evolve fast enough to stay relevant in a world that increasingly believes in ecosystems over intermediaries.

Amazon’s advantage isn’t technology or pricing—it’s unification.

In a single system, it now controls data, media, measurement, and transaction, collapsing what used to be separate markets into one seamless economic loop.

Every impression becomes a data point, every click a transaction, every sale a signal that refines the next campaign. Data feeds media, media drives commerce, commerce creates new data.

The loop tightens, and efficiency compounds.

This is not a walled garden—it’s a self-sustaining field, powered by deterministic truth. Once a brand enters it, leaving feels irrational.

Amazon hasn’t just integrated advertising.
It has collapsed the distance between attention and purchase—and in doing so, rewritten the laws of media economics.

There are market corrections — and then there’s what Amazon is doing.

This isn’t a competitive adjustment.

It’s a strategic decapitation of the DSP ecosystem, carried out with the kind of efficiency that would make a hedge fund blush.

Amazon’s DSP now charges 4–8% platform fees, and sometimes waives them entirely just to prove a point. Meanwhile, The Trade Desk still sits in the 15–20% range, like an artisanal bakery wondering why everyone’s suddenly at Costco. CFOs love the math. CMOs pretend “independence” still matters. Agencies just follow the smell of savings.

This is not competition. It’s a hostile takeover disguised as efficiency.

Amazon’s latest move sounds like a gift but functions like a guillotine. The pitch: “Run your next campaign with us — we’ll pay for it.”
It’s the most seductive four words a procurement officer can hear.

Once agencies see the results — cheaper CPMs, real attribution, and conversions backed by retail receipts — the debate ends. CFOs see performance. CMOs see plausible deniability. The Trade Desk sees erosion.

What Amazon has done isn’t create a pricing advantage. It’s created a psychological dependency. When “free” delivers better results than “premium,” the market’s moral compass starts spinning like a slot machine.

When Jeff Green was asked how The Trade Desk plans to compete with Amazon’s assassination-level pricing, he didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink.

He said what everyone in adtech suspected but no one wanted to hear.

“If you go to buyers and say, ‘We’ll do it for free,’ doesn’t that make it more obvious that there’s something in it for them another way?” Green explained.

“Doesn’t it mean they’ve made money some other way, or do we just think they’re migrating to a nonprofit model?”

He went further, saying the few percentage points separating TTD from Amazon aren’t what matter. “If the disparity in our platform fee to theirs is three, four, even five percent, and that’s all that’s left in the supply chain, then sure — let’s talk about it,” he said. “But what we’re seeing is triple-digit percentage increases in efficiency. In that world, arguing about a few rate points gets our eye off the ball. They’re giving it to you for free in exchange for something much more expensive — control over where your money gets spent.”

In other words: The Trade Desk won’t play the price game because Amazon isn’t actually playing one.

It’s a principled stance — and also the kind of stance you take when you’ve run out of cheaper options.

Let’s not pretend Amazon started this.

Adtech has been quietly bleeding integrity for years.

The entire supply chain is riddled with tollbooth intermediaries, each clipping their 20%, 30%, or 50% “optimization” fee before passing impressions along like marked-up merchandise.

The Trade Desk was supposed to be the antidote — a clean, transparent broker for the open internet. But even that purity looks expensive when Amazon bundles retail, data, and CTV into one sleek dashboard and sells it for less than the industry tip jar.

Amazon didn’t disrupt the system. It audited it — and sent everyone the invoice.

Fee compression isn’t coming. It’s already here. Agencies are running bake-offs between platforms, CFOs are whispering about consolidating DSPs, and investors are calling this what it is: a reckoning.

The Trade Desk’s “premium independence” story — once the industry’s North Star — now reads like a fairy tale written in better times. Amazon’s fee structure is exposing what many didn’t want to admit: most adtech platforms are charging champagne prices for tap water.

Independence doesn’t move Q4 budgets. ROI does.

We tried to ask our friend Jed Dederick, The Trade Desk’s Chief Revenue Officer at the time, how the company planned to respond to Amazon’s encroachment. He never got back to us — though, in a possibly unrelated twist, he quit his job shortly after.

We’re not saying our question caused it.
We’re just saying the timing was... spectacular.

Jeff Green isn’t wrong. Free is never free. But Amazon isn’t trying to be free. It’s trying to be inescapable — the gravitational center of digital advertising.

What we’re witnessing isn’t a fee war. It’s a controlled demolition of adtech’s middle class.

Amazon is betting that every CFO on the planet would rather save 10% now and deal with monopolistic regret later. And if history tells us anything — they’re right.

Let’s be real — if you’re still hanging out in the free feed, you’re basically reading the kids’ menu.
ADOTAT+ is where the adults sit, drink too much coffee, and name names.

Subscribers already got the full story:

If you’re reading the free stuff, you’re getting the press release.
If you’re on ADOTAT+, you’re getting the autopsy.

This week alone, subscribers saw how Amazon turned “efficiency” into an extinction event, how agencies are surrendering faster than they can rebrand “partnerships,” and how adtech’s open-web heroes are quietly negotiating their obituaries.

Because by the time the LinkedIn thought-leaders start quoting it next week, you’ll already know what happens after the Ferrari jokes.

#AdTech #AmazonAds #TheTradeDesk #RetailMedia #CTV #Programmatic #ADOTAT #ADOTATPlus