unBoxed 2023: Amazon Ads announces Amazon Publisher Cloud, a new clean room service for publishers

Today, at the unBoxed 2023 conference, we announced Amazon Publisher Cloud, a new collaboration service that enables publishers to plan programmatic deals and activate them in Amazon DSP, informed by the ability to analyze their first-party signals together with insights from Amazon Ads. With the rapidly evolving addressability landscape, publishers and advertisers increasingly require interoperable audience- and context-aware planning and measurement solutions that will be durable over time. Amazon Ads is building clean room capabilities that enable this, leveraging AWS Clean Rooms to facilitate secure and streamlined collaboration between Amazon Ads and its publisher and advertiser customers.

“Amazon Publisher Cloud is purpose-built to provide publishers with durable addressability of their supply,” said Steve Rabuchin, vice president of third-party supply at Amazon Ads. “We built Amazon Publisher Cloud to ensure publishers securely maintain control of their first-party signals with the ability to analyze them alongside Amazon Ads insights, create customized and more effective deals, and easily make them available in Amazon DSP. We’re excited to connect publishers and advertisers and help them deliver more relevant customer experiences.”

Amazon Publisher Cloud is the first and only clean room solution that enables a publisher to analyze its first-party signals with Amazon Ads insights to create deals optimized for reach. Publisher deals are made available for activation in Amazon DSP through a single, streamlined workflow. For example, a publisher can understand how its contextual signals index against Amazon Ads audiences that are in-market for products, such as pet food or cookware, and package a deal for a brand that wants to reach those in-market customers. Amazon Publisher Cloud–based programmatic deals are available with beta launch partners NBCUniversal, DirecTV, Dotdash Meredith, TelevisaUnivision, Fandom, and other premium publishers.

“By analyzing our first-party signals with Amazon Ads audience insights through Amazon Publisher Cloud, we’re able to map intent-to-buy signals to our more than 1.5 million articles across Dotdash Meredith, making the content you read a stronger and more durable predictor of what you are likely to buy than any cookie signal,” said Dr. Jon Roberts, chief innovation officer at Dotdash Meredith. “We’re excited to deepen the collaboration with Amazon Publisher Services and build a robust future that unlocks previously unaddressable audiences, drives advertiser performance, and enhances the consumer experience.”

In the closed beta period, Amazon activated an Amazon Prime campaign with NBCUniversal via Amazon DSP that reached more than 3.5x the desired audience compared to unoptimized campaigns.

“Our expanded partnership with Amazon Publisher Services is a demonstration of how NBCUniversal is committed to using data to understand what resonates with our audiences and providing them with more relevant advertising experiences,” said Ryan McConville, EVP of advertising platforms and operations at NBCUniversal. “Our collaboration enabled us to deliver significantly more effective advertising, specifically by reaching in-market viewers at scale, all in a privacy-minded way. The performance of this initial work shows what’s possible when we have rich insights into our viewers and package our media accordingly.”

Amazon Publisher Cloud is built on AWS Clean Rooms to provide publishers with flexible interoperability. AWS Clean Rooms is a service that helps companies and their partners more easily and securely analyze and collaborate on their collective signals —without sharing or copying one another’s underlying datasets. With AWS Clean Rooms, customers can create a secure clean room in minutes, and collaborate with any other company in the AWS Cloud to generate unique insights about advertising campaigns, investment decisions, and research and development.