Amazon’s 2026 Upfront reinforced what’s becoming increasingly clear: Amazon is no longer operating solely as a retail media platform. It’s building a full-funnel advertising ecosystem that blends premium entertainment, live sports, AI-powered personalization, and commerce-driven measurement at massive scale.
For brands, the biggest takeaway is this: Amazon continues to close the gap between media exposure and measurable business outcomes.
Here are the announcements most relevant to brands.
Amazon’s Authenticated Reach Is Its Biggest Differentiator
You’ve probably seen this stat already all over the headlines: Amazon emphasized the scale and strength of its authenticated audience graph, which now reaches 90% of U.S. households. This officially makes Amazon the industry’s largest authenticated reach ecosystem.
Beyond being a mind-blowing stat, for brands, this matters because Amazon’s ability to connect streaming behavior, shopping activity, and purchase signals across devices continues to set it apart from traditional media platforms. The company is positioning this identity graph as the foundation for smarter targeting, stronger measurement, and more efficient media investment.
For advertisers, this creates more opportunities to:
- Reach highly qualified audiences
- Improve audience accuracy across channels
- Connect upper-funnel exposure directly to retail outcomes
- Reduce wasted media spend
Prime Video and Live Sports Continue to Expand
Amazon doubled down on Prime Video and live sports as core growth drivers for advertisers. The company highlighted record-breaking audiences across its growing sports portfolio, including:
- Thursday Night Football
- NBA
- WNBA
- NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600
- The Masters Tournament
- NWSL
- Duke Men’s Basketball
- Exclusive coverage of the 2027 NBA Eastern Conference Finals
Amazon continues to position live sports as a premium environment that delivers highly engaged, leaned-in audiences, while also offering the measurement and attribution capabilities advertisers increasingly expect from digital media.
For brands, streaming TV is no longer just a brand awareness play. Amazon is making a strong case for streaming media as a measurable performance channel.
Interactive Creative Is Becoming More Personalized
One of the most important product announcements was Dynamic TV Creative, which automatically personalizes interactive Prime Video ads in real time.
Amazon says the solution can customize creative elements at the moment of impression, allowing advertisers to dynamically tailor messaging, products, and experiences based on audience signals.
This is another step toward making connected TV more shoppable, personalized, and performance-oriented.
Amazon also continued highlighting interactive ad formats including:
- Shoppable TV ads
- Pause ads
- Voice-enabled experiences
- Add-to-cart functionality directly from streaming environments
For advertisers, creative strategy for streaming media is evolving quickly. Static TV creative is giving way to adaptive experiences built around audience relevance and commerce action.
Amazon DSP Is Expanding Beyond Retail Media
Amazon continued positioning Amazon DSP as the center of its omnichannel advertising ecosystem.
The company highlighted expanded premium inventory access, deeper audience capabilities, and AI-powered optimization tools designed to simplify cross-channel media buying.
A major theme throughout the presentation was full-funnel advertising at scale. Amazon pointed to Forrester’s latest Wave report, which named Amazon Ads the only leader in omnichannel advertising.
The message was clear: Amazon wants brands to think about its ecosystem as a unified platform for awareness, consideration, conversion, and measurement — not just an ecommerce advertising channel.
Creator and Cultural Partnerships Are Growing
Amazon also leaned heavily into creator-driven content and cultural influence.
One standout announcement was Oprah revealing that The Oprah Podcast is joining Amazon. The partnership gives advertisers access to one of the most trusted voices in media while reinforcing Amazon’s broader investment in creator-led programming and premium content environments.
For brands, these partnerships create new opportunities to connect with audiences through trusted personalities and culturally relevant content, especially within streaming and audio environments.
Amazon’s Upfront made one thing clear: the company is building an advertising ecosystem where entertainment, shopping, AI, and measurement work together seamlessly.
For brands, that means:
- Streaming TV is becoming increasingly performance-driven
- Interactive and personalized creative will continue to evolve rapidly
- Live sports inventory remains one of the strongest engagement opportunities available
- Amazon’s data and measurement capabilities are becoming central to full-funnel media strategy
As Amazon continues expanding its premium content portfolio and advertising technology stack, brands that align media, creative, and retail strategy will be best positioned to drive incremental growth across the funnel.
Code3’s POV: Why This Matters for Brands
The Upfronts Are No Longer Just for Brand Marketers
With this year’s Upfronts, it’s official: the conversation has shifted. Performance marketing agencies are no longer questioning whether they should have a seat at the Upfronts, the question now is how to navigate these increasingly complex ecosystems in a way that drives measurable business outcomes.
That evolution is especially clear with Amazon.
Amazon’s full-funnel advertising capabilities are forcing a convergence between brand and performance marketing. Streaming TV, live sports, creator partnerships, and commerce signals are no longer operating independently. They’re becoming part of a unified performance engine that allows brands to move consumers from awareness to conversion inside a single ecosystem.
The Upfronts are no longer reserved for traditional brand advertisers focused purely on reach. They’ve become essential territory for marketers focused on measurable outcomes.
Code3 Hot Take: You Don’t Need a Massive Budget to Win in Streaming
One of the biggest misconceptions around Amazon’s premium inventory is that brands need enormous budgets or exclusive sports sponsorships to participate meaningfully. That’s simply not true anymore.
At Code3, we’ve seen smaller-scale streaming and upper-funnel tests generate measurable outcomes long before brands significantly expand investment. That’s what makes this moment so exciting: Amazon’s evolving measurement capabilities are making upper-funnel media increasingly accessible, allowing brands to validate impact before committing to larger buys. Streaming media is becoming more democratized, and that opens the door for more brands to participate strategically.
The Opportunity Is Massive, But KPIs Need to Evolve
Of course, new doors mean new challenges, and navigating KPIs just became more difficult. The single biggest thing brands need to do right now is rethink how they evaluate media performance.
For years, performance marketers have been trained to optimize almost exclusively toward immediate sales outcomes. But the growing role of streaming, live sports, and upper-funnel media inside platforms like Amazon requires a more nuanced approach to measurement. Not every media dollar needs to drive an immediate transaction.
Some media investments are designed to grow awareness. Others are meant to build familiarity, influence consideration, or improve branded search demand later in the funnel. The key is understanding the role each tactic plays, and measuring success accordingly.
As Amazon continues integrating awareness and commerce signals within one ecosystem, brands have a much greater ability to understand how upper-funnel media contributes to downstream performance. But taking advantage of that opportunity requires marketers to evolve beyond purely last-click thinking.
At Code3, our approach to this challenge starts with helping brands define the role each media dollar needs to play. We work closely with teams to reframe the expectation that all media should be an immediate sales driver, because it doesn't have to be. Every portion of the funnel contributes to that end goal, but each does so in its own unique and measurable way.
Why Oprah’s Podcast Partnership Matters
One exciting announcement that stood out immediately to our team was Oprah bringing her podcast to Amazon.
The audience reach alone is significant, but what makes this especially compelling is the level of trust and cultural relevance Oprah brings to the platform. For brands, this creates opportunities to align with premium, highly trusted content environments that foster deeper engagement than traditional advertising placements alone.
As Amazon continues investing in creator-led programming and culturally influential voices, advertisers gain more opportunities to connect with audiences through environments that feel authentic, credible, and highly engaged.
That combination of scale and trust is incredibly powerful.
Amazon’s 2026 Upfront reinforced a reality the industry is rapidly moving toward: the lines between brand marketing, performance marketing, entertainment, and commerce are disappearing. The brands that succeed will be the ones that stop treating these channels separately, and start building strategies that connect them together.