Amazon did not come to CES 2026 to sell another ad product. It came to make a power grab.

For more than a decade, Amazon's Ads business has been framed as an add-on to retail media: search ads on product pages, sponsored listings, and display units tucked neatly around the shopping experience. That story no longer matches the ambition. What Amazon is now building—loudly in Las Vegas and quietly in product roadmaps—is nothing less than an operating system for premium advertising across screens.

At the centre of this bet sits Prime Video, not as a streaming app chasing subscribers, but as a monetisation engine in a broader, interconnected media network. The numbers tell the story: U.S. Prime Video ad revenue is projected to more than double from about $1.6 billion in 2024 to roughly $3.6 billion by 2027, even as the ad-supported audience barely nudges upward. Growth is no longer about piling on more viewers; it is about extracting more value from the ones Amazon already has. 

The real innovation, however, is not just the video inventory—it is the identity layer underneath it. Amazon’s Authenticated Graph now reaches an estimated 90% of U.S. households, stitched together by something every other media company envies: logged‑in relationships and transaction data at staggering scale. In a world where third‑party cookies are fading and probabilistic IDs are increasingly distrusted, Amazon is quietly turning identity into a competitive moat. This is less about targeting as advertisers used to know it, and more about deterministically connecting what people watch to what they buy.

That context makes Amazon’s rapidly expanding partnership ecosystem look very different. Deals with Netflix, Disney, Roku, NBCUniversal, Paramount+ and others are often framed as a way to unlock more CTV impressions. In reality, they are doing something more strategic: routing rival streamers through Amazon’s pipes. When Netflix opens its ad-supported tier to Amazon’s demand, or Disney Advertising brings Disney+, Hulu and ESPN inventory into the orbit of Amazon DSP's, they tacitly acknowledge that Amazon’s infrastructure—and its identity graph—have become too valuable to ignore. The company that once threatened to disrupt Hollywood is increasingly becoming its nervous system.

Nowhere is that more evident than in live sports. Thursday Night Football, Black Friday’s multi-sport block, and a growing slate of live events have become Amazon’s sharpest weapons in the attention economy. Live sports remain one of the last truly communal viewing experiences, and Amazon is determined to make them programmatic without making them feel commoditised. The new Live Events Optimiser is a statement of intent: sports will not just be another line item in a media plan, but a finely tuned, data-driven asset class. Early results—more advertisers, especially non-endemic categories, higher interaction rates for multi-sport buys—suggest that marketers are willing to follow if someone can finally bring rigour to live moments that once felt unpredictable.

Behind the scenes, Amazon is rewriting what it means to “run campaigns.” The company is rebuilding its ad stack around AI agents, splitting the experience into a “Smart Mode” for automation-first advertisers and an “Expert Mode” for those who still want their hands on the dials. This is not just UI design; it is a philosophical bet that the operational complexity of modern advertising—fragmented channels, endless optimisation levers, opaque measurement—is unsustainable. If Amazon can get this right, the real product is not impressions, but relief: a system that lets marketers focus on strategy while software handles the grind.

This strategy resonates far beyond the U.S. In markets like India, where subscription fatigue is real and price sensitivity is high, Prime Video’s hybrid model—paid tiers coexisting with ad-supported options—offers a pragmatic answer. Advertising becomes the bridge that funds local content, keeps price points accessible, and still satisfies Wall Street’s appetite for growth. The same logic will extend across Asia-Pacific, where video revenue is forecast to surge and where platforms that balance ARPU with accessibility will win the long game.

Taken together, Amazon’s 2026 posture is unambiguous. This is no longer a “third player” nibbling at the edges of Google and Meta’s dominance. It is a bid to redefine the market around a different centre of gravity: identity‑rich, commerce‑linked, cross‑screen media that can prove its impact in the cart, not just in the brand tracker. Google has intent, Meta has social reach, Netflix has prestige content—but only Amazon can credibly link premium video, live sports, shopping signals, and closed‑loop measurement at this scale.

The irony is striking. A company that once treated advertising as a side business to retail now asks brands to treat retail as the proof point for advertising. In doing so, Amazon is forcing a hard question onto the industry: in a world of fragmented screens and fragile attention, who should own the spine of advertising—the publishers with the shows, or the platforms with the data?

At CES 2026, Amazon’s answer is clear. It does not just want to be another network in the media plan. It wants to be the infrastructure for the media plan.