Retail Media and Amazon DSP Squeeze the Generalist Programmatic DSPs
Amazon is pitching its DSP as a full-funnel replacement, not a retail media add-on, and independent platforms are feeling the pressure.
Mariano De Vitto · August 2026
Amazon's demand-side platform is no longer a side door into retail media inventory. It is emerging as a genuine substitute for the generalist programmatic DSPs that agencies have relied on for a decade, and the shift is forcing marketers to rethink how they buy display, video, and connected TV. Marketing Dive's reporting on Amazon DSP's growing ambitions makes clear that this is not a marginal trend: it is a structural challenge to the business model of independent DSPs such as The Trade Desk and Magnite.
For most of its history, Amazon DSP was treated by agencies as a supplementary tool, useful for retargeting shoppers who had already interacted with a product page but rarely central to a brand's overall media plan. That framing is changing quickly. Amazon is increasingly positioning its DSP as a full-funnel buy, capable of driving awareness, consideration, and conversion in a single platform, and marketers are responding by reallocating budgets toward platforms tied directly to retail media inventory and first-party purchase data.
According to Marketing Dive's reporting, Amazon is actively courting agencies and brands to run more of their programmatic spend through its DSP. The pitch leans heavily on Amazon's access to shopper signals gathered at the point of purchase, its expanding streaming inventory through Prime Video, and its ability to extend reach off-Amazon across the open web. That combination gives Amazon a pitch that few generalist DSPs can match on paper: closed-loop measurement from ad impression all the way through to a completed transaction.
From Retail Media to Full Funnel
This is not a niche retail media story anymore. It is a direct challenge to the generalist DSP model that agencies have relied on for years to manage cross-channel display, video, and connected TV buys. Platforms like The Trade Desk built their reputation on being neutral, walled-garden-free infrastructure that could unify buying across publishers and channels without pushing an owned media agenda. Amazon's pitch inverts that logic, trading neutrality for a tightly integrated loop between commerce data and ad delivery.
As retail media budgets continue to grow across the industry, marketers are actively testing whether Amazon DSP can replace, rather than simply supplement, their existing DSP relationships. The addition of Prime Video ad inventory matters here, since it gives Amazon a credible upper-funnel video product to pair with its lower-funnel shopper data, blurring the line between a retail media network and a full-service programmatic buying platform.
Multi-DSP Portfolios Become the Norm
For growth teams, this shift is already reshaping media plans on the ground. Buyers who once ran a single generalist DSP for the sake of efficiency are now maintaining multi-DSP portfolios, splitting spend between platforms like The Trade Desk and retail-owned DSPs such as Amazon's, alongside emerging entrants from Walmart Connect and Instacart. Each of these retail DSPs brings its own data environment, identity graph, and reporting logic, which is exactly the kind of complexity that consolidated buying was originally designed to avoid.
That fragmentation adds real complexity to measurement and attribution, since marketers now need frameworks that can reconcile performance signals across platforms that were not built to talk to each other. At the same time, it gives marketers meaningful leverage to negotiate better terms and gain access to unique inventory pools that no single DSP can offer on its own, turning what looks like added operational burden into a source of buying power for teams willing to invest in the coordination it requires.
Auditing Your DSP Mix
Why it matters: marketers should treat this as a signal to audit their DSP mix now, rather than defaulting to legacy vendor relationships built on past efficiency assumptions. That audit should include a candid look at how much of current spend is genuinely benefiting from Amazon's shopper and streaming data, versus spend that is on Amazon DSP by default rather than by design.
Building fluency across at least one retail media DSP and one generalist platform will be table stakes for teams that want both scale and negotiating power heading into 2025 planning cycles. Practical next steps include running side-by-side pilot budgets, requesting comparable reporting formats from each platform, and training buying teams to move fluidly between retail-owned and independent DSPs as the fastest-growing pockets of media spend continue to migrate toward retail media.
The Signal Brief · Mariano De Vitto — Head of Marketing, Barcelona