Amazon, which has focused its efforts on fighting for billions of dollars in advertising dollars on television, now wants to fight one of the most formidable threats to commercials.
One of the biggest problems consumers have with advertising in the streaming era isn’t that there are too many ads, it’s that they see the same ads over and over again. In a 2025 study by market research firm Epsilon, about 68% of more than 500 respondents said they most often see repeat ads on streaming services. This is much more than the ads you see on your social media feeds, mobile apps, websites, TV screens, radio, and podcasts.
To overcome a phenomenon known in the industry as “ad fatigue,” Amazon said Monday it will work with advertisers to automatically adjust commercials and add different messages and interactive elements to appeal to viewers at different moments. The first exposure to your ad may consist of a subscriber viewing a basic spot, but subsequent ads may include messages that encourage the viewer to place an order or view different products related to your pitch.
“Advertisers often use one-size-fits-all creatives, showing each viewer the same ad every time,” Fabrice Rousseau, director of CreativeX, the division that supports marketers at Amazon Ads, said in a recent interview. We want to allow “advertisers” to use technology to unleash “creative variations.”
The company is announcing the service on the first day of what is known in the industry as “Upfront Week.” This week marks the start of an effort by U.S. video broadcasters to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory ahead of the debut of the next programming cycle.
Amazon’s technology, called Dynamic TV Creative, can use factors such as your shopping and browsing history, Prime Video activity, product availability, and geography to tailor product details, on-screen headlines, and interactive options. Amazon’s technology does not change the basic creative concept of the commercial itself.
The technology is currently available to select U.S. advertisers who sell on Amazon and run campaigns on Prime Video across categories such as consumer packaged goods, fashion and electronics. The company plans to expand the service to more customers in the third quarter and make more ad inventory available, including live sports and Prime Video channels.
“Now that streaming TV is bigger than traditional TV, I think it’s time to start reinventing TV advertising for connected TV,” Rousseau says.
The media industry has long tried to “tweak” commercials so that sponsors don’t have to create dozens of new ads at once and viewers don’t want to watch them again. In 2005, the Fox broadcast network offered technology that allowed marketers to modify television ads and change voiceovers, scripts, graphic elements, and other images. All these operations are performed by uploading various elements into digital files.
Such concepts are now less cumbersome. In 2021, CBS began experimenting with technology that would allow certain advertisers to code commercials to reach only specific subsets of consumers. Executives making decisions about business software. Or a family expecting their first child.
Amazon’s technology allows advertisers to choose from a variety of interactive options such as “Add to Cart,” “Send to Phone,” “Save to Cart,” and “Visit Brand Store,” as well as a format called “squeezeback,” which allows viewers to watch commercials while watching live-action footage of the show they were already watching.
Amazon’s technology “enables us to deliver the right message at the right time, turning a single creative asset into a more personalized experience,” Megan Daly, manager and video lead at The Hershey Company, said in a statement.
Rousseau said he gets a lot of complaints about repeat ads. “We hear it from viewers, we hear it from publishers, we hear it from advertisers,” he says. But tweaking the commercials could quell the problem. “Every time you change your ad, you can get more attention.”
