Viewers don't move in straight lines. Your media buying shouldn't either.

Today's audiences are constantly moving. They jump between screens, moments, and moods—sometimes all at once. Someone watching Thursday Night Football on Prime Video might simultaneously be active in the game thread on Twitch. During the big game this year, players were going live on Twitch to debate gameday looks while millions were tuned into the broadcast. Or consider a viewer who starts a drama series on a connected TV in the living room, picks it up on a tablet before bed, and catches up on their phone the next morning—the same story, seamlessly reaching them across every screen.

Successful advertisers have stopped buying channels and started buying audiences—across the full arc of their day, with the infrastructure to prove it's working. Fragmentation is the defining challenge, and solving it means reaching audiences wherever they are, measuring what actually happens, and connecting every touchpoint back to outcomes that matter.

The fragmentation challenge, defined

For years, reaching audiences across streaming, live sports, social, and audio meant managing a patchwork of disconnected buys—each with its own planning tools, reporting dashboards, and measurement logic. Campaigns that looked cohesive in a media plan often became complicated in execution, with signals that couldn't talk to each other and results that were difficult to reconcile.

The cost isn't just operational. When media buying is fragmented, so is your understanding of what's actually working. Reach gets double-counted. Frequency goes unmanaged. And the moments where brand and performance could reinforce each other get lost entirely.

"Managing fragmentation across formats, services, and reporting takes real time and resources," said Sarah Iooss, Director of Global Agency & Global Twitch Ads. "Our focus is on simplifying that—from planning through measurement—so agencies can put that energy back into driving results."

Meeting audiences where they actually are

The answer to fragmentation isn't consolidating to fewer channels. Audiences are genuinely spread across premium streaming, live sports, connected TV, audio, and more—and the brands that show up across those environments are the ones that stay top of mind through the full arc of a purchase decision.

What's changed is the infrastructure available to plan and measure across them. With Amazon Ads, advertisers can now reach audiences across owned-and-operated services and virtually all other premium publishers—anywhere audiences go—in one place. Amazon DSP brings together Prime Video, Twitch, Fire TV, and premium third-party publishers including Netflix, Disney, Spotify, and Roku in one buying environment, enabling agencies to plan, activate, and measure holistic streaming TV campaigns rather than managing supply in isolation. Complete TV goes further still: advertisers can optimize streaming investments across Amazon and third-party publishers together, treating the full landscape as one.

Powering all of it is Amazon's authenticated graph, which connects advertisers to 90% of U.S. households.¹ That's what makes the measurement story real. When a streaming TV impression, a live sports sponsorship, and a display ad are all running through the same environment, you can connect them to each other and to the outcomes that follow.

"You're not piecing together a story from five different dashboards and hoping it adds up," Iooss said. "Verified signals make that possible—and it's a very different conversation to have with a customer than 'here's our best estimate.'"

Moving with your audience

The brands navigating this well aren't thinking in channels. They're thinking in moments: when is my audience most engaged, what are they doing, and how do I show up in a way that's relevant to that context?

Live sports is a useful lens here. The audience watching a Thursday Night Football game on Prime Video is also, in many cases, the same audience active on Twitch, streaming audio during the commute, and browsing connected TV later that evening. A media strategy that treats those as separate buys misses the cumulative effect of reaching the same audiences across the arc of their day.

"Tapping into Amazon’s vast owned and third-party inventory allows us to maintain a single, cohesive conversation with audiences across their entire journey,” said Kevin Weiss, VP of Commerce Media, Skai. “By unifying everything with one 'language,' we’ve stripped away the usual operational complexity, making it much easier to show our clients the deterministic, provable impact of every touchpoint across the full funnel."

Unified buying environments make it possible to plan for that arc—not just individual placements—and to measure the full journey rather than isolated moments.

What this means now

Fragmentation isn't going away. If anything, the premium streaming landscape is expanding, with more inventory, more formats, and more moments competing for audience attention. The question for advertisers isn't whether to be present across those environments—it's whether the infrastructure exists to do it efficiently.

"When you bring it all together, you're not just making buying easier—you're building a more direct line between media investment and business outcomes," Iooss said. "That's the kind of partnership that actually moves the needle for our shared customers."

The tools now exist to plan holistically, activate across owned and third-party supply, and measure outcomes in one place. For marketers who've spent years reconciling disconnected reports and approximating reach, that's not a small thing. Audiences move fast—and the gap between brands that can move with them and those still managing silos is only getting wider.

Sources

¹ Amazon Internal Data, 2025