Amazon's bold new CTV bet

🦁 Gupta Media’s Mariya Samardzhieva is live at Cannes Lions this week. Follow along on LinkedIn and Instagram!

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are on a boat:

↘️ META: $8.02 CPM | ↗️ TIKTOK: $6.17 CPM | ↘️ SNAPCHAT: $8.29 CPM

In this week’s edition: 

• 🤳 YouTube, Snapchat double down on creator marketplaces

• Ads are coming to WhatsApp Updates 💬

• 🤝 How Pinterest and Instacart are making pins more shoppable

But first…

📺 Amazon’s CTV play: Big deals, bigger data

Amazon Ads is making an aggressive push to become the dominant force in connected TV—and it’s not being subtle about it. In two blockbuster announcements out of Cannes Lions this week, Amazon revealed major new partnerships with Roku and Disney that supercharge its DSP’s access to premium inventory and precision targeting data.  

First, Amazon and Roku are linking up to create what they claim will be the “largest authenticated TV footprint” in the U.S.—giving advertisers the ability to reach up to 80 million CTV households through Amazon’s DSP. The secret sauce? A new service that allows Amazon to identify logged-in Roku viewers, improving everything from frequency capping to purchase attribution. That kind of identity resolution has long been a missing piece in CTV, where household-level targeting often falls short.  

But Amazon didn’t stop there. It also became the third DSP (joining Google and The Trade Desk) to gain direct access to Disney’s Real-Time Ad Exchange (DRAX)—which unlocks programmatic inventory across Disney+, ESPN, Hulu, and more. Not only does this move bring more high-value CTV placements into Amazon’s DSP ecosystem, it also enables richer data-sharing between Disney and Amazon, allowing for more refined targeting and (presumably) better performance.  

⚡ The takeaway: Amazon isn’t just scaling up its CTV inventory: it’s trying to outflank Google and The Trade Desk and competing DSPs by combining exclusive data, premium access, and closed-loop measurement into a single DSP offering. For advertisers, the CTV landscape is consolidating. And Amazon is making bold moves to become the default platform of choice.

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

♾️ Meta announced at Cannes Lions that it will introduce ads in the WhatsApp Updates tab in the next few months. This will be the first time ever running ads for the app, which has more than 1.5 billion global daily users. Meta also announced that WhatsApp Channels will soon be able to offer paid subscriptions, allowing creators to charge for exclusive updates, similar to what platforms like YouTube and Twitch already offer.

📽️ Everything is Reel: Meta is officially phasing out traditional Facebook video formats, signaling a major shift in how video will work—and be measured—on the platform. “In the coming months,” Meta announced this week, “all videos on Facebook will be shared as Reels, eliminating the need to choose between uploading a video or Reel.” That means no more length or format restrictions—even livestreams will now fall under the Reels umbrella. The update also comes with a metrics revamp: organic video and Reels analytics will be consolidated into one streamlined reporting system. Meta’s full announcement is here.

🔎 Google has opened up beta testing of 30-second non-skippable ad inventory to standard YouTube campaigns. Previously, it was reserved for premium campaigns placed via YouTube reservation buys:

🧪 Meanwhile, Google is testing video ads in Search, Image, and Shopping results in the U.S. and Canada, as part of PMax campaigns. Here’s what that looks like:

📊 As of this week, Google says it is shifting focus from conversion volume to higher-quality offline actions across PMax, Omnichannel Goals, and Smart Campaigns. Google will now optimize more aggressively for users interacting with local surfaces, especially Maps and Search. According to Google, these platforms are the strongest drivers of in-store actions.

📺 YouTube is opening to door to more creator collabs. At Cannes Lions, YouTube announced “Open Call,” a new feature that makes it easier for brands to collaborate with creators at scale. Housed within the Creator Partnerships hub, Open Call lets advertisers publish a campaign brief that eligible creators in the YouTube Partner Program can respond to with video submissions. You review, approve, and—if you like what you see—run their content as partnership ads. Open Call is currently rolling out to select partners, with broader access coming soon.

👀 If that sounds familiar, it’s because other platforms are already playing in that space—notably TikTok One. But they’re not alone: Snapchat is doubling down on its own Creator Marketplace, and rolling out new initiatives to recruit creators to the platform:

⏰ TikTok is alpha testing post-roll ads, which appear at the end of a 60-second organic video. These are available to book through managed service using a 15-second focused view optimization. TikTok is positioning them as a natural complement to TV advertising and claims early results show lower CPV and higher view-through rates than standard ads. The fine print: 

• Subject to minimums, with incentives available

• U.S. only, limited availability

• Nielsen measurement included and BLS supported  

🎸 Earlier this month, TikTok launched its global “TikTok for Artists” platform to help musicians manage their presence on TikTok. The new hub offers: 

• Daily analytics on song performance, post engagement, and follower demographics

• Curated guidance on TikTok’s tools and best practices

• A new Pre‑Release feature that enables artists to share upcoming music and let fans pre‑save tracks on Spotify and Apple Music

👽 Reddit used Cannes to introduce Reddit Community Intelligence, an AI-powered engine that converts its 22+ billion posts and comments into structured insights for advertisers. The alpha-release of Reddit Insights offers real-time, trend-driven, dataset-backed listen‑and‑learn capabilities, helping brands validate creative ideas, perform competitive analysis, and map consumer sentiment at scale. 

In a separate release, Reddit rolled out Conversation Summary Add‑Ons, a new ad feature that highlights short, positive Reddit comments directly beneath promoted posts. In early testing, ads using this feature saw a 19% lift in click-through rate compared to standard image ads, giving brands an easy way to tap into authentic community sentiment and boost engagement.

• 🚨 While Reddit is only supposed to be highlighting positive discussions, there is a risk that their sentiment analysis gets it wrong.

⚡ Newsflash: Comments are content. Reddit has rolled out a new way to turn comments into organic posts, and they’ve also rolled out comment insights, which show real time data such as how many upvotes your comment received.

📌 Pinterest and Instacart are partnering to make Pinterest ads more effective and shoppable. Advertisers on Pinterest will now be able to target users based on Instacart shopping behavior, and shoppers on Instacart will be able to buy products directly from Pinterest ads.  

🛒 Pinterest also partnered with affiliate shopping platform LTK. The partnership will allow Pinterest to automatically cross-posts the best-performing image posts from LTK to Pinterest as well.

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next week to fill your inbox with more tips, tricks, and treats from the addressable universe.

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