Amazon’s $70 billion ad run rate sharpens the retail-media fight

74

TL;DR
Amazon said on April 29, 2026 that advertising now exceeds a $70 billion trailing-12-month revenue run rate. That matters because the company is no longer just monetising its own store traffic. It is using shopping, streaming, and browsing signals to influence media buying elsewhere, including inventory bought on Netflix through Amazon Ads tools. For marketers, the big lesson is that retail media is becoming broader, more integrated, and more data-led, with Amazon trying to position itself as both media owner and buying infrastructure.

Article body

Retail media keeps escaping the store aisle

Amazon’s earnings release put a blunt number on the trend: advertising is now above a $70 billion trailing-12-month run rate. That alone makes Amazon one of the most consequential advertising businesses in the world. But the more important part of the release was strategic rather than financial. Amazon highlighted that advertisers using Amazon Ads to buy Netflix inventory can now use Amazon Audiences, built from shopping, streaming, and browsing signals, to reach more relevant viewers.

Why marketers should pay attention

This turns retail media into something bigger than sponsored product placement. It becomes a wider data-and-distribution layer that can travel into streaming and other off-site environments. For brands, that can improve targeting and closed-loop reporting. It also concentrates more market power inside one company’s signal stack. The smart marketer response is to take advantage of the efficiency while staying disciplined about measurement independence and partner concentration.