On June 17, 2025, at the Cannes Lions Festival, Disney and Amazon unveiled a far-reaching partnership that could reshape the balance of power in connected TV (CTV) advertising. The deal integrates Disney’s Real-Time Ad Exchange (DRAX) directly with Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP), granting advertisers programmatic access to Disney’s premium inventory – including Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ – using Amazon’s powerful audience and commerce data.
What It Means for Amazon Advertising
This deal is Amazon Advertising’s biggest swing yet at solidifying its position as a full-stack powerhouse in streaming media. It now makes Disney’s ad inventory available via Amazon’s DSP, significantly expanding its supply-side reach.
Amazon can now match its deep consumer data – shopping, browsing, streaming – with Disney’s massive audience footprint across its streaming portfolio. The result? Unmatched targeting precision. A brand selling dog food can now reach audiences that both shop for pet supplies on Amazon and stream NatGeo dog documentaries on Disney+. The ability to close the loop between media exposure and commerce behavior – all within the Amazon ecosystem – puts Amazon DSP in rarefied air. It also strengthens Amazon’s pitch as a full-funnel advertising platform that goes beyond just being a retail media network (RMN).
The Trade Desk and Other DSPs: Pressured but Not Out
For The Trade Desk, Amazon’s new alignment with Disney represents a growing threat. Amazon now has programmatic access to the most coveted brand-safe CTV environments – Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ – using first-party data that no-one else can match.
TTD’s longstanding integration with Disney’s DRAX remains intact, but it is no longer unique. The Amazon integration could redirect a significant portion of spend, particularly from endemic brands already advertising on Amazon. Worse still, Amazon DSP’s role in international markets – where Disney+ inventory will be made available across France, Germany, Spain, and more – could siphon spend from The Trade Desk’s global accounts as well, in a situation where TTD is looking to international markets for revenue growth.
Other DSPs – especially smaller independents – may find themselves increasingly boxed out. As Amazon uses clean rooms (via AWS and Publisher Cloud) to offer closed-loop measurement and curated deal packaging, the bar for competitive parity rises. Those without their own commerce signals or robust identity solutions may struggle to keep pace.
For Disney, a Strategic Flex in a Crowded CTV Market
Disney, facing margin pressure across its direct-to-consumer businesses, gains immediate monetization upside by making its inventory more accessible to demand. Amazon DSP covers over 80% of U.S. CTV households, thanks to integrations with platforms like Roku and now Disney. That’s reach Disney alone cannot replicate.
More importantly, Disney leverages Amazon’s commerce intelligence to enrich its own data collaboration stack – notably through Disney Compass and Disney Select. These tools offer brands curated audience segments and campaign planning capabilities. In an era where measurement, planning, and targeting are converging, this makes Disney a more formidable programmatic seller.
The move also accelerates Disney’s effort to future-proof its streaming stack. With ESPN poised to spin off as a standalone DTC service later this year and continued subscriber churn across Hulu and Disney+, programmatic monetization is a necessity.
Implications for Other Publishers: Collaborate or Consolidate
This deal sends a clear message to other CTV publishers: scale is not enough. To remain competitive, publishers must either forge similar data-rich alliances or build deeper activation pipelines themselves. Without the commerce insights Amazon offers, it becomes increasingly difficult to deliver the kind of closed-loop, high-ROI campaigns that brands expect.
For Netflix, which just expanded its own ad partnership with Yahoo, the pressure is on to level up targeting capabilities and international scale. For NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery, it may be time to rethink data-sharing and partnerships in ways that weren’t palatable even a year ago.
CTV publishers who resist deeper integrations – whether for data privacy reasons or to preserve control – may find themselves unable to command the same CPMs or buyer interest. This deal effectively raises the floor for what “premium programmatic” means in 2025.
What This Means for Advertisers
For advertisers, especially CPG, entertainment, and DTC brands, this is a game-changer. Campaigns that used to rely on behavioral proxies or lookalike modeling can now activate on actual purchase intent. Instead of “TV-like” advertising, marketers get commerce-connected, data-verified activation inside premium storytelling environments.
It also streamlines what has long been a fragmented, manual process. Through Amazon’s DSP, buyers can access curated Disney inventory, layer on Amazon’s first-party audience insights, activate in clean rooms, and measure performance – all in one place.
And while it further consolidates media power into a handful of dominant players, it delivers what brands have been demanding: relevance, transparency, and results.
Final Thoughts
The Disney–Amazon partnership shows what CTV advertising looks like when commerce, content, and clean room data intersect. It vaults Amazon into a new competitive tier, pressures The Trade Desk to accelerate innovation, gives Disney sharper monetization tools, and forces the rest of the ecosystem to evolve or risk being left behind.
About Disney: Disney is one of the world’s largest entertainment companies, known for its iconic storytelling across franchises like Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, ESPN, and Disney+, and a pioneer in direct-to-consumer streaming platforms.
About Amazon Advertising: Amazon Advertising is a global full-funnel marketing platform that combines commerce data, streaming content, and AI to help brands reach audiences across Amazon properties and third-party media through its demand-side platform.
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