Disney Advertising and Amazon Ads today (June 17) integrated Disney's Real-Time Ad Exchange (DRAX) and Amazon Demand-side Platform (DSP), per details shared with Marketing Dive. The collaboration allows advertisers to leverage insights from both companies as they access the media giant’s premium inventory across platforms.

“By building a direct path connecting Amazon's commerce insights to the full scale of Disney's streaming ecosystem, we're enabling greater accessibility to inventory and audience signals that translate into meaningful results for advertisers leveraging Amazon DSP,” said Matt Barnes, vice president of programmatic sales at Disney Advertising, in a statement.

Along with supporting targeting, transparency and efficiency, the partnership will also allow advertisers to create campaigns that bring together Disney’s audience data and a wealth of insights from Amazon Ads through a collaboration between Amazon Publisher Cloud (APC) and Disney Compass, the media giant’s data collaboration platform launched in January.

In an example provided in a press release, a pet food brand could reach an audience of Disney viewers who have shown interest in pet products on Amazon, notching the higher reach and lowers costs that streaming TV advertisers have seen when using publisher-enriched deals on APC, an offering built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Clean Rooms technology.

“By connecting Disney's premium content with Amazon's deep consumer understanding, we're creating advertising that works better for everyone—brands reach the right audiences, publishers maximize their inventory value and viewers see more relevant ads,” said Kelly MacLean, vice president of Amazon DSP at Amazon Ads, in a statement.

Implementation will begin with select advertisers in the coming months before being opened to all Amazon DSP advertisers in the third quarter of 2025. The partnership also promises audience targeting and curated packages through Disney’s other ad solutions, such as Disney’s Magic Words offering (a contextual solution that is also at the heart of a just-announced partnership between Omnicom and Disney around live sports). 

A stronger Compass

The news, timed to this week’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, comes as Disney Compass crosses the five-month anniversary since its debut at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year. The data collaboration and measurement platform gives advertisers visibility into Disney’s first-party data, serves as an entry point for agency integrations and delivers interoperability with third-party data and measurement collaborators — all functions that are increasingly in-demand for data-obsessed advertisers.

Since launch, Disney Compass has been activated with all five holding companies (WPP Media, Publicis, Omnicom Media Group, Interpublic Group and Dentsu) along with leading independents Horizon and PMG. In addition, five measurement vendors — Affinity Solutions, EDO, Innovid, Snowflake and VideoAmp — have integrated in an always-on fashion. With 30 cross-sell campaign measurement vendors (including 19 supported by direct or clean room data flows), Compass has measured nearly 1,500 campaigns this fiscal year.

“It's all about offering a data collaboration and measurement platform to provide visibility for marketers so that they can do their best marketing and understand where to buy, how to buy it, and then how to measure it and what their outcomes were,” said Dana McGraw, senior vice president of data and measurement science at Disney Advertising, in an interview.

Disney Compass is the culmination of years of seeking to innovate around identity and measurement and the desire to offer both functions in one place for marketers looking to plan and measure campaigns while activating against its rich data sets. Those imperatives have become even more important amid the push to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI).

“There's a huge push around AI and understanding data and audiences, and all of that really speaks to a push for efficiency. If you think about what all of those things bring to the table, it's really about precision and efficiency for each of those innovations,” McGraw said.

Disney Compass provides an easy connection to clean room activations, as well providing information that can be seen and used equally by brands, agencies and — as with today’s Amazon news — DSPs.

“If a DSP needs to see inventory for a buyer, it looks the same as the way that a holding company needs to see inventory for a buyer,” McGraw said, adding over email, “Compass is at its heart a collaboration tool intended to enable advertisers of all sizes to access our insights and measurement capabilities across partners and platforms.”