At the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s 2023 NewFronts, held on May 1 in New York City, Amazon executives and a slew of celebrity guests unveiled a slate of streaming content and associated advertising capabilities.

New and upcoming opportunities span Prime Video, Amazon Freevee, Fire TV, Twitch, Amazon Music, Wondery, Amazon Live, and Thursday Night Football, demonstrating how Amazon has truly become a one-stop shop for customers to discover and stream content they love, as well as for brands to connect content to measurable commerce outcomes at scale.

Colleen Aubrey, SVP of Ad Products and Tech, Amazon Ads, said, “Advertisers are navigating a myriad of challenges—media fragmentation, ad identifier loss, incomplete insights, measurement complexity. At Amazon, we’re inventing solutions rooted in our differentiated content, insights, and capabilities to help brands easily reach the right audiences and accurately measure outcomes—all within a single ad buy.

“Tonight, our NewFront illustrated how our premium content across a wide range of Amazon properties, combined with advanced campaign planning and measurement solutions, bridges content to commerce—so that customers can easily move from enjoying their favorite movie or music to buying their favorite product or service,” Aubrey said.

Premium, ad-supported content across channels

Aubrey announced at the event that brands in the United States using Amazon’s ad-supported streaming TV solutions—across Amazon properties and Amazon Publisher Direct—can now reach an average monthly audience of more than 155 million.

This breadth of reach was highlighted by an exciting new content lineup across its streaming services and devices, which included movies, TV series, music events, shoppable live streams, and theme-based channels.
Amazon Freevee has announced a new slate of premium, ad-supported Originals, as well as new greenlights and season orders for returning favorites.

• The free streaming service introduced new Originals to debut in 2024, including Mock the Week, a half-hour topical and satirical panel show executive produced by Emmy-winning comedian Trevor Noah and BAFTA Award–winning executive producer Dan Patterson; The Goat, a new reality competition series hosted by Daniel Tosh featuring 14 of the biggest names in reality TV competing in mental, physical, and social challenges; and Justice on Trial, a new court program featuring the iconic Judge Judy Sheindlin and a formidable ensemble of legal talent examining pivotal court cases, past and present, that have had a long-lasting impact on society.
• Amazon Freevee also picked up a third season of the crime drama ‘Bosch: Legacy’, ahead of the Season 2 debut this fall, and two more seasons of Judy Justice.
• Additionally, throughout the year, Amazon Freevee will bring over 100 Amazon Original series and movies from Prime Video, including titles such as ‘Reacher’, ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’, ‘The Wheel of Time’, ‘Troop Zero’, and ‘Late Night’, which will be available for customers to stream for free.

Amazon Music has announced the return of Amazon Music Live for a second season, in which sports and music collide in a live concert series airing weekly after Thursday Night Football on Prime Video, and fans can hear some of music’s biggest names perform their new releases for the first time.

Last year, millions of fans tuned in to see some of the world’s biggest artists, including A$AP Rocky, Lil Wayne, Kanye West, Anitta, and Megan Thee Stallion, perform new music each week.

Fire TV, which recently surpassed 200 million units in global sales, unveiled Fire TV Channels, its new, ad-supported TV experience available for free to all Fire TV device owners. Customers will have access to topical and timely content, allowing them to go deep into the genres they care about most.

In addition to consolidating access to categories like news, sports, and lifestyle, Fire TV Channels are adding a dedicated travel category, as well as new content from the NHL, Xbox, and TMZ.

Amazon Live will now produce shoppable livestream content with publishers and media brands, in addition to its popular influencer content. Customers can currently watch exclusive shoppable content from Tastemade, including episodes of Struggle Meals, and starting in late May, viewers will be able to shop live while watching exclusive content from REVOLT, the multi-platform media company from Sean “Diddy” Combs.

New content-to-commerce solutions and powerful measurement capabilities
Amazon Ads highlighted several new and upcoming capabilities for brands, designed to continually make it easier to reach the right audiences with the right messages at the right times and help create seamless content-to-commerce experiences.

• VideoAmp and iSpot were announced as new streaming TV measurement providers. Advertisers can use these solutions to measure cross-screen impressions and reach, including out-of-home and local stations, complementing the first-party measurement solutions of Amazon Ads.
• Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) Audiences is launching worldwide. AMC is a secure, privacy-safe clean room in which advertisers can combine their inputs with Amazon signals to create a full picture of customer journeys across channels and buying stages. With AMC Audiences, brands can create and update their Amazon DSP audiences within AMC, and activate them in Amazon DSP with just a few clicks. The agency Buy Box Experts, a third-party agency, used the feature to help their client SimpliSafe refine its audience strategy, which helped grow the brand’s return on ad spend by 109% and reduce the brand’s cost-per-unit-sold by 65%.
• New audience-based creative within Thursday Night Football will bring advertisers the unprecedented capability to segment NFL-viewing audiences into custom cohorts and increase ad relevance, which will be particularly impactful for advertisers in the NFL’s first Black Friday Game, set for Friday, November 24. Advertisers can present creative that is tailored to each cohort based on geographic, demographic, and behavioral signals. For example, an automotive brand could run a sports-car ad to a younger-adult audience, an SUV spot to a sports and outdoors audience, and an overarching brand spot to all other Thursday Night Football viewers—all simultaneously within the same 30-second ad position.
• Also new for NFL advertisers, Amazon Ads is launching more ways for fans to interact with an ad without leaving their Thursday Night Football stream. In 2023, interactive video ads will include new clickable ad formats on Fire TV devices. Fire TV viewers can click a “Send to Phone” or “Send to Email” button with their remote, triggering a push notification or email that links directly to the brand’s Amazon store or product page.

• Omnichannel metrics will expand beyond CPG to auto, Softline, and hardline advertisers in 2023, helping more brands plan, optimize, and measure campaign outcomes holistically across Amazon properties and third-party stores. For example, a beverage brand learned that 81% of its attributed sales were made outside of Amazon and that one ad creative was driving higher engagement. They optimized their campaign mid-flight and were able to increase return on ad spend by 30%.
• Also in 2023, new brand storytelling ads will launch in beta on Amazon Freevee, enabling advertisers to tell a more immersive story over multiple, sequential commercial breaks.

Featured guests and performers at the Amazon NewFront
A host of actors, creators, streamers, and award-winning artists also joined Amazon’s NewFront stage Monday night to share their latest Amazon projects.

James Marsden, star of the Amazon Freevee Original Jury Duty, talked about the hit docu-comedy series and introduced platinum-selling recording artist, songwriter, and producer Marcus Mumford. Mumford performed a solo version of his stunning new Amazon Music Original song, “Look at Us Now (Honeycomb),” a reimagined version of the single that appeared on Aurora, the debut album from the limited series Daisy Jones & The Six on Prime Video.

Award-winning singer-songwriter, producer, and streamer T-Pain shared how he’s built a thriving and supportive community on Twitch—where viewers watched 1.3 trillion minutes of content across the service last year.

Tracee Ellis Ross, actor, producer, and CEO of Pattern Beauty, discussed her work with Amazon and Mastercard on the “She Runs This” campaign—a series of Amazon Live streams that highlighted the stories behind Black-women-owned small businesses that are participating in Amazon’s Black Business Accelerator (BBA).

Also appearing were former NBA sharpshooter JJ Redick and Tommy Alter from The Old Man & the Three podcast on the Wondery network; host Charissa Thompson and former gridiron stars Ryan Fitzpatrick, Andrew Whitworth, and Tony Gonzalez from the Thursday Night Football on-air team; and longtime Amazon friend Martha Stewart, with a video message about Fire TV Channels.