Amazon vs TTD - who’s winning?
I think a lot of people would agree that one of the biggest themes this year (aside from AI) has been the battle of the DSPs - Amazon vs. The Trade Desk. It’s also funny how quickly everyone seems to have forgotten about DV360 (and Google overall).
I’ve said it a few times already, but this is probably the most packed year we’ve ever had in terms of new features and major announcements.
What are the main changes?
1. Amazon announced lower PG fees - Amazon DSP accelerated its Partner program use in late 2025, allowing lower minimum spends and reduced DSP fees for participating managed service partners.
2. TTD OpenAds and PubDesk - In October 2025, The Trade Desk officially launched OpenAds, its auction wrapper platform designed to ensure greater transparency, independent verification, and protection against supply chain manipulation. With OpenAds, TTD also introduced PubDesk, a dedicated platform for publishers. It automates insights on advertiser demand and suggests optimizations based on the auction signals most valued by TTD, driving improved revenue strategies for publishers
3. Amazon Ads Agent - This AI-powered feature acts as a campaign co-pilot by translating natural language commands into actions and complex SQL queries for Amazon Marketing Cloud and DSP.
4. TTD Audience Unlimited - New agentic adaptive trading modes. These leverage Koa’s AI to dynamically adjust audience segments and bidding in real time, increasing campaign flexibility and effectiveness for buyers
5. Amazon Unified Campaign Manager - Unified Campaign Manager: Amazon merged the Amazon Advertising Console (Sponsored Ads) and Amazon DSP into a single interface. This unified platform allows advertisers to manage Sponsored Ads and DSP campaigns in one place, removing fragmentation and streamlining workflow
6. TTD Deal Desk - feature aimed at supporting forward-market buying and modernizing legacy Upfront structures, helping advertisers plan campaigns with more predictability.
7. Amazon & Roku - Amazon Ads and Roku announced an exclusive partnership that will provide advertisers access to the largest authenticated CTVfootprint in the U.S. through Amazon DSP.
On top of that, there have been countless smaller updates across inventory partnerships, UI/UX improvements, and quality-of-life enhancements.
So who’s winning this battle? Buyers.
This year’s competition has been genuinely exciting, and all of these updates ultimately benefit brands, agencies, and traders - giving them more control, more transparency, greater efficiency, better inventory quality, and in some cases, lower costs. Hopefully 2026 keeps up the same pace of innovation.
What’s also interesting is how clearly DV360 has fallen out of the DSP race. Industry observers have been expecting this for a while, but this year made it even more obvious: DV360, and Google’s display business overall, simply isn’t an area of strategic focus for Google.
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