An anatomy of the trust fault line running through Amazon’s ad ambitions

Trust remains the fault line running through Amazon’s ad ambitions.

It has been there from the start. Marketers learned early that partnering with Amazon meant buying media from a company that not only set the marketplace’s rules but also stocked the shelves and sold competing products. The tradeoff was efficiency. The tension never disappeared. 

In fact, it has intensified as Amazon pushes its ad business beyond its own walls and deeper into the broader web. The pitch is performance at scale. The concern is whether those ad dollars are being steered to the best outcomes or toward the parts of the ecosystem Amazon controls. It’s the familiar strain of any platform that sells ads inside their own gardens while extending their reach across the open internet. Google faced these suspicions. Amazon is confronting it now, at a moment when automated buying and real-time optimization send more dollars through tech as influential as the Amazon DSP.

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