Amazon expands media footprint with iHeart sales deal and new TV outcome tool 

Together, the two moves mark the latest step in Amazon’s years-long push to build direct data-driven ties with premium publishers – and to sit at the center of both how TV and audio inventory is sold and how its performance is measured. 

“Our strategy is to work directly with the world’s premium publishers, and to use technology as a bridge so that what our advertisers are trying to achieve can happen more successfully on all the publishers that we work with,” Rayer said. “That’s very much core to our strategy and I think these types of product releases are really a reflection of that.” 

iHeartMedia has sold streaming ad inventory for Amazon Prime for the past three years, but the new deal broadens that relationship, according to Mike Biondo, president of iHeartMedia. 

The partnership now opens up Amazon’s audience data to iHeartMedia’s clients, letting advertisers access Amazon’s shopping, browsing and streaming signals to reach people on iHeartMedia’s digital platforms, including audio, podcasts and creator-led content. Biondo said that can translate into better outcomes, such as higher renewal and retention rates. He and Coffey declined to share how much revenue the deal could generate.

The shared data is meant to tie together audiences across both platforms. “The same consumer that is buying a product or intending to buy a product, we could match up and marry it to our own owned and operated assets, so that the advertiser can find that consumer not only on Amazon’s platform but also on iHeart’s platform too,” Biondo said. 

Advertisers will also be able to transact through Amazon’s DSP and buy broadcast radio ad inventory with iHeartMedia’s new broadcast audience digital measurement tool, AudioGraph, which launched last week, Coffey said.

Scott Messer, principal and founder of Messer Media, said audio has always been a tough channel for driving measurable conversions, but tying iHeart into larger platforms gives it the “data spine” and attribution it needs to monetize its huge audience, particularly in local markets. “Big win for iHeart and I’m sure Amazon will love having the iHeart sales team pumping dollars into the platform,” he said.

Others see the deal as a simple way for both sides to solace basic supply and demand issues. “Presumably, Amazon isn’t able to fill all of their inventory currently and need other strong partners to help increase fill and strong revenues,” said Ameet Shah, partner and global svp of publisher operations and tech strategy, at Prohaska Consulting. “In the case of iHeart they come with some of the highest scale of inventory and sales team, highly focused on audio. It’s a great partnership which is complementary to both. iHeart needs more inventory and Amazon needs more deal flow,” he said. 

This deal gives iHeartMedia access to Amazon’s premium streaming inventory at competitive rates that allow it to earn a margin on resold inventory, said Vasilios Lambos, CEO of Lambos Digital, an Amazon DSP partner that develops AI-driven tools and workflow automations that provide advertisers solutions to scale their media buys.

It also reflects Amazon Ads’ broader shift toward becoming a media sales business and expanding distribution through third-party partners, he noted.

“From a lot of my internal conversations with employees at Amazon, the business of Amazon Ads is adapting away from that entrepreneur kind of company and more towards just pure media sales. It’s definitely more of a play on [the] distribution of access to media at competitive rates. They’re obviously growing at an amazing clip, and iHeartMedia can tap [into] that,” he said.

Amazon as “the outcome” brain behind TV buys 

If the iHeart deal extends Amazon’s reach on the sell side, Outcome Optimizer is about tightening its grip on how streaming and TV inventory is valued and bought. The new tool, launched through Amazon Publisher Cloud, uses Amazon’s shopping, browsing and streaming signals to help optimize programmatic guaranteed campaigns running through Freewheel’s ad server. 

“We can now not only generate plans and optimize what we do for advertising outcomes but optimize the campaign throughout the course of the flight… and can update targeting on a daily basis based on the performance we’re seeing on delivery,” Rayer said. 

In practice, that means Amazon’s data is increasingly the decision engine behind whether an ad impression clears, at what price and against which audience – even when the underlying inventory sits with another premium media owner.  

“We can leverage any signals advertisers onboarded into Amazon Ads and Amazon’s DSP, such as proprietary audiences, and audiences custom-built using our tools,” Rayer said. “Guaranteed campaigns are not bidded on, they are set up in publishers’ own ad stack… We are moving beyond this notion of success is just delivery, to now success is based on delivering against an outcome.”

Shah called the Outcome Optimizer an “evolution of publisher facing solutions.” 

“This helps take their integrations with publishers already – [such as Amazon’s header bidding platform TAM] – for an additional outlet on CTV transactions. And since this also originates from Amazon DSP, it still keeps Amazon as central to the buyer relationship (or publishers that may buy audience extension). Overall, a win for both publishers and Amazon,” Shah said.

The new tool is about a push for advertisers’ outcomes, Lambos said. “Amazon, from an advertising perspective, is trying to make it easier to activate towards outcomes and goals for businesses,” he said.

For advertisers, the pitch is increasingly hard to ignore: plug into Amazon’s clean rooms and, in some cases, its inventory, and we’ll help you prove outcomes for streaming and TV buys. The question now is how many are willing to let Amazon sit at the center of both what they sell and how they sell it.

“Amazon definitely wants its data to be the oil across the machines, if not the machine itself.  While this will clearly give Freewheel a good boost here, it requires teams to use parts of the Amazon pipe – and data – to pull it off,” Messer said. He noted that Amazon has been moving towards becoming an embedded infrastructure for some time now. “It’s a smart move to play the long game and be both platform and infrastructure… When you’re that big, you don’t need to tip the table very far to get all of the chips to eventually roll towards you.”