If you’ve ever felt like you just didn’t see enough advertising from Amazon, you’re about to have the opportunity for a lot more – at least if you have an Amazon Fire device.
Starting soon, Amazon will actually start showing advertisements alongside search results when you search for content on a Fire TV television, tablet, or streaming stick. In addition, you’ll start seeing advertisements for physical products included in the top carousel beside shows and movies, a spot that virtually every streaming service uses to promote content.
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The move comes not long after Amazon announced “limited” ads would soon be appearing on Prime content.
While advertisements are ever-present on most streaming services, Fire TV devices are already pretty packed with a mix of self-promoting and outside ads, including sponsored screensavers, backgrounds, and banner ads.
The featured rotator spot, usually reserved for whatever programming Amazon is promoting at the moment, takes up quite a bit of screen real estate both when you first turn on the device and when scrolling up. Some of these spots are indeed sold as advertisements, but they’re still actual movies and shows.
Soon though, you’ll start seeing promotions for things like airlines, fast food, clothes, cars, and electronics. And many of these ads, Amazon says, will have a video component that starts playing as soon as it scrolls onto the screen. Fortunately, the autoplay part can be turned off by heading to settings, preferences, and featured content.
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Ads will also start being intermingled in search results, with a special “sponsored tile” appearing beside the top search result. Those ads can be purchased based on a genre search or a search for a specific show. The sponsored content will have a tag denoting it as such, helping users tell it apart from the content they were looking for.
Charlotte Maines, the director of Fire TV Advertising, Monetization and Engagement, spoke to StreamTV Insider about the new ads, where she called them “the highest impact native ad placement option we have.” The new ads are “right at the top of Fire TV’s home screen,” she said. They “take up half the screen. It’s persistent, so as a customer browses around they continue to see it.”
“It’s basically like getting your video commercial in front of the Fire TV user the minute they turn on the TV, no matter what they go on to watch,” she added. That sounds like a great thing for advertisers and Amazon but maybe not so much for users.
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