Amazon Prime Video today started displaying advertising on the streaming platform.
Movies and TV shows will include "limited" advertisements that run before and during playback in 10 countries, including Australia, the UK and the US.
Ads will also be shown for Prime Video users in Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Germany and Austria, unless they upgrade to the ad-free tier of the streaming service. In Australia, this costs an extra $2.99 a month.
Paul Kent, managing director at Amazon Ads partner Deep Media, said that the launch is a smart decision given that 30% of subscriber households shopped on Amazon within the last month.
"By combining Prime Video’s premium content with Amazon's powerful first-party targeting and ad tech capabilities, brands can now achieve significant reach and engagement," he said.
"In addition, where this could become particularly disruptive is by being able to tie back to e-commerce/retail metrics in a traditionally hard to track area like Streaming TV, which for so long has mostly been used similar to TV with basic awareness and reach goals."
Back in May, Amazon president and CEO Andy Jassy said that Prime Video ads offers brands value as the tech company can better link the impact of streaming TV advertising to business outcomes like product sales or subscription sign-ups, whether the brands sell on Amazon or not.
“It's very early for streaming TV ads but we're encouraged by the early response," he said.
Kent said that Amazon can utilise past purchase behaviours and product searches to better inform the viewing experience via hyper relevant ads.
"As an Amazon Ads verified partner, we explain to many of our clients that the strength of first party data - from the car you drive to telco you use - that Amazon has, takes them well beyond e-commerce. Overlaying this data with the Prime Video opportunity opens up the business to an even broader range of advertisers," he told AdNews.
"Amazon approaches every decision working backwards from the customer and appears to be going for a less is more approach with regards to the volume of ads. A positive side-effect of this 'customer obsession' will be to provide advertisers with cut-through, via strict frequency capping and monitoring of repetitive ads."
Bench Media co-founder and CEO Ori Gold told AdNews back in May that Amazon could bundle Prime Video with its Prime Shopping offers and would be likely to "continue to combine an additional pay-per-view on top of the subscription for some specific events and titles".
Kent said that the launch of Prime Video's ad offering brings even more competition within the streaming TV landscape, where 81% of watch time happens on CTV.
"Additional ad revenue will allow them to continue to invest in premium content such as Clarkson’s Farm, The Boys and Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power," he said,
"Combine that with their access to some of the world's most valuable sporting content including the NFL Thursday Night Football, English Premier League, UEFA Champions League and T20 and you have a very compelling proposition that will only get stronger,"
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