Amazon Squares Off Against Advertisers’ Biggest Challenge: Streaming Commercials That Run Over and Over

After elbowing its way into the fight for TV’s billions of advertising dollars, Amazon now wants to battle one of the most dire threats to commercials.

One of the biggest problems consumers have with ads in the streaming era isn’t that they see too many, but rather the same ones multiple times. Approximately 68% of more than 500 respondents to a 2025 survey by market-researcher Epsilon said they most frequently notice repeating advertisements on streaming services — well above what they see on their social-media feeds, mobile apps, websites, TV screens, radio and podcasts.

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To help vanquish what is known in the industry as “ad fatigue,” Amazon on Monday said it would work with advertisers to help them make automatic tweaks to commercials, adding different messages or interactive elements to appeal to viewers at different moments. The first exposure to an ad might just consist of a subscriber seeing the basic spot, while subsequent encounters might contain messages that let viewers make an order or see a range of products tied to the pitch.

“Advertisers often use a one-size-fits-all creative, presenting the same ad to each viewer every time,” says Fabrice Rousseau, director of CreativeX, a unit at Amazon Ads that provides support to marketers, during a recent interview. “We want to allow advertisers” to use technology to unleash “creative variants.”

The company unveils the offering on the first day of what is known in the industry as “Upfront Week,” when U.S. video outlets start efforts to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory ahead of the debut of their next cycle of programming.

Amazon’s technology, dubbed “dynamic TV creative,” can call upon factors such as shopping and browsing history, activity on Prime Video, product availability, and geography to adjust product details, on-screen headlines, and interactive options. The Amazon technology will not change the basic creative concept of the commercial itself.

The technology is currently available to select U.S. advertisers that  sell on Amazon and are running campaigns on Prime Video across categories such as consumer-packaged goods, fashion, and electronics. The company plans to expand the offer to more customers in the third quarter and make more ad inventory available, including in live sports and Prime Video Channels.

“With streaming TV becoming larger than traditional TV, I think this is a moment when we are starting to reinvent TV advertising for connected TV,” says Rousseau.  

The media industry has long tried to “tweak” commercials, so viewers won’t mind seeing them again, but without sponsors having to create dozens of new ads all at once. In 2005, the Fox broadcast network offered technology that allowed a marketer to alter TV ads, changing voiceovers, scripts, graphic elements or other images – all performed by uploading different elements to digital files.

Such concepts aren’t nearly as cumbersome now. In 2021, CBS began to experiment with technology that would allow certain advertisers to code their commercials in such a way that they reached only certain subsets of consumers: people believed to be interested in buying a truck; executives who make decisions about business software; or families expecting their first child.

Amazon’s technology would let advertisers pick from different interactive options such as “Add to Cart,” “Send to Phone,” “Save to Cart,” or “Visit Brand Store” or let advertisers make use of a format known as a “squeezeback,” in which viewers watch a commercial even as they can still see live action from the show they were already watching.

The Amazon technology “allows us to deliver the right message at the right moment, turning a single creative asset into a more personalized experience,” says Megan Daly, manager and video lead at The Hershey Company, in a statement.

Complaints about repeating ads is high, says Rousseau. “We hear it from viewers. We hear it from publishers. We hear it from advertisers,” he says. But tweaking commercials may help to tamp down the problem. “Each time the ad is different, it captures more attention.”