When people talk about advertising on Amazon, they usually mean the sponsored products you see when you’re shopping. This article is about something different, which is running a proper TV advert in the programmes and films on Prime Video. That has been possible in the UK since early 2024, and in a short time Prime Video has become one of the largest audiences an advertiser can reach on a streaming service.
How adverts work on Prime Video
The size of that audience comes down to the way Amazon brought adverts in. Other services launched a cheaper subscription that included adverts and left people to choose it, whereas Amazon made adverts the standard for every Prime member and gave them the option of paying a little extra each month to remove them. Most people have left things as they were, so the audience arrived more or less overnight and it has stayed. Barb, the body that measures TV viewing in the UK, reported that in the first three months of 2026 around 12 million UK homes had Prime Video with adverts, which was 88% of all the homes that had the service.
The adverts appear before a programme starts and, on many titles, part of the way through. When it introduced them, Amazon said it was aiming to show meaningfully fewer adverts than traditional TV and other streaming services, which is good for viewers and good for the advertisers who are in there, because each advert has less competition for attention.
As with Netflix, most of the viewing happens on a television, so your advert gets the full screen and the sound, in front of people who’ve chosen to sit down and watch. In the way it’s seen, it has far more in common with an advert on ITV than with anything that plays on a phone.
Why advertisers are interested
Part of the appeal is the company your advert keeps. Prime Video’s big budget dramas, films and live sport, which currently includes Champions League football, bring in large audiences, and your advert sits right alongside them.
Then there’s the choice of who sees it. Everybody watching is signed in to an Amazon account, so advertisers can choose the kind of people and households they want to reach, and aren’t limited to buying everyone who happens to be watching a particular programme. Most streaming services can offer something along those lines, but Amazon has an advantage the others don’t, because it’s also where a great many of those households do their shopping.
That link to shopping is what makes Prime Video different from everything else on the television. Amazon knows a great deal about what people buy, and it can use that knowledge to decide which households are shown an advert. If you sold a premium dog food, for example, a broadcaster could put your advert in the break of a programme that dog owners are likely to be watching, whereas Amazon could aim it at households whose shopping suggests they’ve got a dog to feed.
Amazon has also introduced interactive adverts, which let viewers find out more or shop using their remote control or their phone, along with adverts that appear when somebody pauses what they’re watching. For a business that sells products to consumers, and particularly one whose products are on Amazon already, that connection between watching and buying is very appealing, because the gap between seeing the advert and placing the order can shrink to a few presses of a button.
If you run a law firm or a car dealership, the shopping side matters much less, and Prime Video is better thought of as what it also is, which is a very large audience watching on the biggest screen in the house. Where people live can be part of the targeting as well. How tightly a campaign can be drawn around the area you serve changes quickly on every streaming service, though, so it’s a question to put to the media buyers when the time comes. If you only trade locally, there are also well-established ways of buying TV by postcode.
What you’ll need
Whoever you’re trying to reach, what you’ll need above all is an advert of TV quality. Your thirty seconds will be shown in the middle of programmes that cost millions to make, on a large screen, so it has to look and sound as though it belongs there.
It doesn’t need to be made specially, though. The same advert that runs on ITV or Sky can run on Prime Video, as long as it’s prepared to Amazon’s specifications and meets its advertising policies, and we look after that side of things when we deliver the finished advert. If it has already been approved by Clearcast for broadcast TV, so much the better, because every claim in it has been checked once already.
How it’s booked and measured
Booking a campaign on Prime Video is specialist work, and it isn’t something we’d expect you to get to grips with yourself, so our media buying partners handle it. They’ll work out whether Prime Video is right for what you’re trying to achieve, how it should fit with the rest of your campaign and what it needs to deliver. Our part is making an advert that’s worth putting there, so you get one team for the creative and the production, and experienced media buyers for the planning and booking, working together from the start.
A sensible question to ask about any streaming service is whether its figures can be set beside the broadcasters’ own, or whether you’re taking the platform’s word for it. Prime Video has been part of Barb’s campaign planning tools since 2024. In October 2026 Barb and Amazon announced that it will also be the first streaming service added to the system the industry uses to check what a finished campaign delivered, which is expected to happen during 2027. Once that’s in place, a media buyer should be able to report on the Prime Video part of a plan using the same measures as the ITV and Channel 4 parts, so you can compare like with like.
Is it right for you?
It depends on who you’re trying to reach and what you want them to do. Prime Video can be a strong addition to a TV campaign, but as with Netflix, we’d normally see it as one part of the plan and not the whole of it. The broadcasters’ channels still bring very large audiences together at the same moment, and what a streaming service adds is the households who watch less of those channels than they used to, so a good plan uses each for what it does best. There’s more on how the different options fit together in TV advertising in 2027.
To find out whether Prime Video deserves a place in your own plan, get in touch and we’ll set up a conversation.