How to turn siloed execution into a signal-driven strategy

Streaming TV (STV), a demand-side platform, and retail media are now essential parts of the modern media mix, but for many advertisers, they still operate in silos. Campaigns are planned channel by channel, measured in isolation, and optimized toward short-term metrics that don’t reflect how audiences actually move from discovery to purchase. The result is familiar: wasted impressions, overlapping audiences, and upper-funnel investments that appear inefficient under last-touch attribution.

At its core, this isn’t a channel problem—it’s a signal fragmentation problem. The insights needed to understand performance exist, but are disconnected across formats, making it difficult to see how awareness drives consideration or how mid-funnel engagement translates into conversion. In practice, this fragmentation creates a compounding cost across the business: sales risk, inefficient spend, labor drag, and ongoing profit leakage. At Pacvue, we refer to this as the “SILO tax,” and it’s one of the most persistent challenges we see brands facing today. And the cost isn’t limited to audience planning and measurement; when signals don’t flow across channels, creative can’t adapt to where a shopper actually is in their journey, making every ad less relevant than it could be.

The following five tactics outline how to turn siloed streaming TV execution into a signal-driven system, drawing on real-world results from leading advertisers.

1. Build a foundation with first-party signals

Default audience presets like “in-market” or “lookalike” are built for scale, not precision. As budgets grow, so does overlap with existing audiences, causing performance to plateau.

A more effective approach is to combine first-party behavioral signals from sources like your CRM or website activity with unique signals from Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)—like purchase intent, browsing signals, and cross-channel ad exposure. It’s this combined foundation that will enable you to do two things at once: define which audiences to reach and which to exclude.

When first-party insights power both audience expansion and exclusion, acquisition efficiency improves in two ways: expansion reaches new audiences who mirror high-value customer behavior, and exclusion keeps paid media from being spent on audiences likely to convert organically.

In practice, this looks like building AMC audiences from rich shopping and browsing signals (e.g., purchase patterns, interests) rather than recency or affinity. Then apply those audiences for both expansion and exclusion across Amazon DSP and search, and refresh the segments continuously as audience signals evolve. For one beauty brand, this approach drove a 17x increase in new-to-brand ROAS and an 87% lower cost per branded search compared to standard display awareness campaigns.¹

Pro tip: First-party insights are most powerful when used as a refinement layer, not a replacement. Overlaying an AMC-derived signal (such as audiences who viewed your product detail page but haven’t yet purchased) on top of a standard in-market audience sharpens precision without sacrificing scale.

2. Sequence audiences instead of running parallel channels

Activating across channels is relatively straightforward. Orchestrating them as a sequence is the harder (and more valuable) lift.

When each channel optimizes independently, audience exposure fragments. Shoppers might see sponsored ads three times without ever being exposed to the upper-funnel story that helps make those ads feel credible. Sequencing solves this by allowing signals from one stage to inform the next.

In practice, this looks like coordinating exposure across media types and channels. When AMC identifies which ad format combinations and exposure paths drive the highest downstream engagement, those combinations can become the blueprint for how audiences should be sequenced, rather than optimizing channel by channel. Brands can then build remarketing pools from upper-funnel engagement (e.g., Prime Video ad viewers) and align creative so each interaction reinforces the previous one. This is where Amazon Ads dynamic creative optimization (DCO) and Responsive eCommerce Creative (REC) become part of the signal story: when AMC reveals which exposure paths drive the strongest downstream results, that should inform not just who gets remarketed, but what they see. In one pet brand’s campaign, AMC path analysis revealed that audiences who encountered coordinated, multi-format exposure were 290x more likely to search for the brand than audiences exposed to a single format.²

3. Treat streaming TV as a signal engine

Streaming TV is often evaluated on impressions, completion rates, or brand lift. These metrics rarely connect to what matters downstream: search, conversion, and new customer acquisition. The opportunity is to treat streaming TV as a signal generator that strengthens lower-funnel performance. When streaming TV audience signals are captured in AMC and activated across lower-funnel channels, upper-funnel exposure stops being a standalone reach and awareness play and starts compounding performance downstream. Video viewers become actionable audience segments that sponsored ads and Amazon DSP can help convert, and every downstream impression benefits from warmer, higher-intent audiences. Multi-touch attribution allows brands to measure how upper-funnel exposure affects the efficiency of lower-funnel channels.

Those same signals can also inform creative. When AMC identifies audiences who have been exposed to STV, DCO can serve ads downstream that reflect that prior engagement, moving from broad brand messaging to more conversion-oriented creative based on where audiences are in the sequence.

One leading health and wellness brand illustrates the impact of this approach: after consolidating previously siloed insights from streaming TV and Prime Video ads in Pacvue and activating overlap audiences through sponsored ads and Amazon DSP, they drove a 58% year-over-year increase in ROAS and a 45% lift in new-to-brand sales with Amazon DSP.³

Pro tip: Two KPIs tell the real streaming TV story: indirect-impact purchases, which measure how often streaming TV exposure initiates conversions in a lower-funnel channel, and multi-touch ROAS, which measures whether STV-first audiences convert more efficiently downstream.

5. Close the loop with signal-driven optimization

Even the most sophisticated strategy can stall when insights don’t flow back into execution. AMC, commerce insights, and channel performance generate signals constantly, but without a loop back to the execution layer, those signals stay stuck in dashboards. To drive success, brands need to reassess exposure paths regularly, not just at campaign close, and reallocate budgets based on full-funnel performance rather than just channel-level. Use automation and rules-based optimization for tactical adjustments like bids and budgets and reserve multi-touch path analysis for disciplined monthly reviews.

Our advertisers who operationalize full-funnel insights through ongoing testing and optimization outperform those with static strategies. In practice, this has led to measurable efficiency gains, including a leading haircare brand that saw 27% lower cost per detail page view and significantly improved new-to-brand performance when scaling optimized approaches.

Connecting signals, not just channels

The “SILO tax” is both a measurement challenge and a performance constraint. Reducing it requires connecting the signals behind your media, not just the channels themselves. When those signals are unified, streaming TV can drive measurable demand, exposure paths become coordinated sequences, and insights continuously inform where budgets flow.

Amazon Ads provides the solutions to make that possible: AMC as the measurement layer, Amazon DSP and STV as activation channels, and DCO and REC as the creative layer ensuring every signal translates into a more relevant ad. Reducing the SILO tax doesn’t come from doing more—it will come from doing things in a more connected way.

Anne Harrell, Sr. Director of Strategic Projects, Pacvue

Anne Harrell is the head of Pacvue's Product Evangelism & Enablement team, utilizing over a decade of experience in digital and retail media to drive innovation through collaboration with Pacvue's largest enterprise brand and agency partners.