Amid CES Kickoff, Amazon Is Ready to Power Up Its Sports Advertising Business

This week the Consumer Electronics Show kicks off in Las Vegas, and while gadgets and gizmos might be the show’s historic lineage, everyone in the media knows that the event serves as the unofficial kick off to the advertising calendar.

CMOs converge alongside the tech titans, pitches get made, deals get struck, and the upfront gets teed up.

“It really kicks off our year and our start to the upfront planning,” the head of live sports and video for Amazon Ads, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “When do you get to see all of those customers and agencies in one place focused on how to plan for the year? And considering our sports offering has really grown so much over the last few years, we’re sitting here, you know, having multi sport conversations. Right next year we’ll have the conference finals for the NBA, which we didn’t have this year. So we’re always having and adding new content into the portfolio, whether it’s our exclusive rights or third party partnerships.”

And as Carney alluded to, no company has more to brag about these days than Amazon. The tech giant is coming off some major ratings wins: The NBA Cup final between the San Antonio Spurs and the New York Knicks topped 3 million viewers, an improvement from last year’s game, and the most-watched NBA game on Amazon all season and on TV since opening night.

Amazon’s Christmas night presentation of the Chiefs-Broncos Thursday Night Football game became its most-watched game ever, topping 21 million viewers.

And 2025 was the year that it turned Black Friday into a Prime Video TV event, with golf (The Skins Game), and Black Friday-branded NFL and NBA games. It was, in Carney’s telling, a “microcosm” of what Amazon is trying to do with media.

“We shifted from a Skins match all morning, right into an NFL game, and then into a double header of the NBA, and we had advertisers and partners like Capital One who bought across the day,” Carney says. “So when we think about what does that do in that multi sport offering, it allows them to tell that same narrative and storytelling throughout the day.”

Carney says that the company found that clients that utilized its audience creative or audience solutions across multiple sports saw a 24 percent higher interaction rate compared to marketers that only spent on one sport.

“The NFL drives such big reach, but how do you continue telling that story and interact with those fans throughout the day? And it’s proving better performance when we had multiple sports just in that one day with advertisers,” Carney says. “So I think as we think about that proof point, we’ll continue on the multi-year offering as we head into the upfront this year. And obviously, you know, that comes with a lot of premium entertainment as well, with all of our Prime Video offerings.”

That full slate of offerings, sports included, is sure to be the topic du jour of Amazon’s 2026 upfront. The company on Monday confirmed that it will once again host an upfront event on the Monday of upfront week, May 11, planning an evening at New York’s Beacon Theater that will showcase Prime Video, Prime Sports, Amazon MGM Studios, Twitch, Wondery, and Amazon Music. Amazon secured the time slot last year, taking over a window that had previously been held by Telemundo.

2026 is shaping up to be a significant year for Amazon’s ad business, with its advertising revenue topping $17.7 billion in Q3. Prime Video is now fully ad-supported (unless users pay a few dollars more to opt-out), and the company has continued rolling out that business around the world. Meanwhile, Amazon’s DSP (demand side platform) now counts essentially every streaming platform as a partner, from Netflix and Disney to Peacock and Spotify, giving it reach far beyond the Prime ecosystem. That includes a newly announced deal with NBC to offer 2026 Winter Olympics inventory.

But the in-house offering is still where much of the company’s focus is, and it has no intention of slowing down its pace of innovation. One thing executives are looking for that many competitors still lag behind on? Interactivity. If an advertiser offers their product on Amazon, the company can seamlessly drive sales. And it’s worked with other partners (like those in the services business) to find other interactive ways to engage viewers.

“I wouldn’t say we’re at full adoption, but we do have a goal to make Thursday Night Football a fully interactive game for advertisers,” Carney says. “100 percent of [ads featuring] interactivity, that’s our goal, so we’ll constantly look to improve these ad innovations, but we see how impactful they are, and they continue to grow from adoption. But it does take time to adopt, because it’s not something that everybody can do, so there is a lot of learning and trust and innovation and performance results that need to be shown.”