Amazon DSP Emerges as CTV's Measurement Backbone at NewFronts 2026

The 2026 IAB NewFronts ran March 23–26 in New York, and one company threaded through nearly every major CTV measurement announcement: Amazon. While individual platforms pitched their own audiences and ad formats, the structural story was how many of them chose Amazon DSP and its Authenticated Graph as the distribution and measurement layer connecting their inventory to advertiser outcomes.

Samsung, Tubi, and Comcast Advertising each announced distinct Amazon DSP partnerships during the week. Taken individually, these are standard ad tech deals. Taken together, they signal that Amazon is building something closer to measurement infrastructure for the CTV ecosystem — and that platforms are opting in because the alternative is selling impressions without proving they work.

The Authenticated Graph Advantage

At the center of Amazon's pitch is its Authenticated Graph, a deterministic identity system built on verified signals like residential addresses and logged-in Amazon accounts. Unlike probabilistic matching — which infers identity from device fingerprints and IP addresses — the Authenticated Graph connects real people to real devices with high confidence.

Amazon's Kelly MacLean presented the performance data at NewFronts: advertisers using the Authenticated Graph are seeing a 42% increase in unique audience reach, a 3x increase in ROAS, and a 27% reduction in frequency per user. Those numbers matter because they address three of CTV's most persistent measurement problems simultaneously — undercounting reach, overstating frequency, and struggling to connect exposure to action.

The graph works across display, video, audio, and streaming, which means an advertiser buying CTV through Amazon DSP can deduplicate audiences and measure outcomes across formats rather than treating each channel as a separate silo.

Samsung: Interactive Ads Meet Authenticated Measurement

Samsung announced that Samsung TV Plus will be the first external CTV platform to support Amazon's interactive video ad technology through Amazon DSP, launching in July 2026. The integration enables viewers to interact with ads using their remote controls — browsing products, adding items to cart, or requesting more information without leaving the TV screen.

This is a measurement play as much as a creative one. Interactive ads generate deterministic engagement signals — a remote click is unambiguous in a way that a completed view is not. When those signals flow through Amazon's Authenticated Graph, advertisers get a clean attribution chain: authenticated viewer sees ad, interacts with it, and that interaction connects to downstream purchase data in Amazon's ecosystem.

Samsung brings scale to the equation. Samsung TV Plus reaches over 230 million registered users globally, making it one of the largest FAST platforms. For measurement teams, the combination of Samsung's reach and Amazon's identity resolution creates a dataset large enough to support meaningful incrementality analysis, not just last-touch attribution.

Tubi: 85% Match Rate Sets a New Bar

Tubi expanded its Amazon DSP partnership with a new offering called Tubi Priority Access, powered by Amazon's Authenticated Graph. The headline number: Amazon can match 85% of Tubi's audience to Amazon user data, one of the highest match rates of any publisher across Amazon's third-party CTV supply.

An 85% match rate is significant because it means the vast majority of Tubi impressions can be tied to known users with purchase history, browsing behavior, and demographic data. For advertisers, that transforms Tubi from a reach play into a measurable performance channel. For measurement teams, it means campaign analysis on Tubi inventory bought through Amazon DSP can use deterministic data rather than modeled estimates.

Tubi also expanded outcome measurement through partnerships with InMarket and Kochava, allowing brands to measure sales performance and ticket sales conversion activity. Combined with the Amazon identity layer, this creates a multi-signal attribution framework — Amazon data for online purchase attribution, InMarket for in-store visits, and Kochava for app-based conversions.

Tubi's scale makes these partnerships material. The platform reaches over 100 million monthly active users and accounts for 6.2% of ad-supported streaming, according to Nielsen data from Q4 2025. Between November 2020 and November 2025, Tubi's adults 18–49 audience grew by 973%.

Comcast: Outcomes+ and the Amazon Pipeline for Local Advertisers

Comcast Advertising launched Outcomes+ at NewFronts, a targeting and attribution solution spanning traditional TV and streaming. The platform is built on deterministic data from more than 30 million Comcast households — representing over 100 million authenticated viewers — with extended reach through partnerships covering more than 300 million viewers.

Outcomes+ includes attribution partnerships with Mastercard, Clarivoy, DISQO, Dynata, Fandango, and S&P Global Mobility, enabling measurement across brand lift, visitation, and transaction metrics. A new myResults dashboard provides campaign performance and attribution data in a single view across TV, streaming, addressable, and sports inventory.

The Amazon angle: Comcast Advertising partnered with Amazon Ads to give local and small-to-medium advertisers access to Prime Video inventory for the first time. Amazon's ad-supported Prime Video reaches an average of 200 million U.S. monthly viewers. By using Amazon DSP for programmatic buying and geographic targeting, Comcast is extending Amazon's measurement infrastructure to a segment of the market — local advertisers — that has historically been locked out of CTV's most measurable inventory.

Comcast Advertising President James Rooke framed the launch as a correction: "For too long, outcomes driven by premium TV have been credited to digital platforms because of insufficient and outdated attribution approaches." Early results suggest the approach works — a MINI USA campaign run through the new system delivered a 300% increase in brand favorability and a 200% increase in brand recommendation intent.

Amazon's Quiet Attribution Overhaul

These NewFronts partnerships arrived alongside a quieter but arguably more consequential change. On January 1, 2026, Amazon retired its 14-day view-through attribution window and replaced it with a machine learning-driven attribution model that evaluates whether an ad actually influenced a purchase.

The old model credited any purchase within 14 days of an ad view to the campaign, regardless of whether the ad played a role. The new model is more conservative — fewer purchases qualify as attributed conversions, which means DSP revenue attribution appears lower and ROAS may look worse on paper. But the data is more honest, and for measurement teams running incrementality tests alongside DSP campaigns, the ML-driven model should produce results that are more consistent with lift-based measurement.

This is a bet that advertisers will pay for accurate measurement even if the numbers look smaller. It also makes Amazon's position as CTV measurement infrastructure more credible — an identity graph paired with inflated attribution is a liability, not an asset.

What This Means for Measurement Teams

Amazon DSP is becoming a de facto measurement standard for CTV. When Samsung, Tubi, and Comcast all route inventory through the same identity graph, they create a common measurement denominator. This simplifies cross-platform frequency management and reach deduplication, two of CTV's most stubborn measurement problems.

The 85% match rate benchmark will pressure other publishers. Tubi's match rate with Amazon sets expectations for what authenticated CTV measurement should look like. Publishers with lower match rates — or those relying on probabilistic matching — will face harder questions from buyers about data quality.

Local advertisers now have a CTV measurement path. The Comcast-Amazon partnership is the first scaled solution giving local and SMB advertisers access to both premium streaming inventory and deterministic attribution. Previously, outcome-based CTV measurement was effectively reserved for national brands with direct publisher relationships.

Watch for consolidation around a few identity graphs. NewFronts 2026 showed three competing identity strategies: Amazon's Authenticated Graph, Walmart's unified login system, and Google's Confidential Publisher Match. Each has different strengths — Amazon in e-commerce, Walmart in retail, Google in search and programmatic. The question for measurement teams is not which one wins, but how to build attribution frameworks that work across all three without double-counting or losing signal at the boundaries.

IAB CEO David Cohen captured the shift: "Every facet of the business is being reinvented and the days of impressions as a proxy for results are fading. Streaming and CTV are now performance-driven channels, directly accountable for business outcomes." Amazon's NewFronts strategy suggests it intends to be the infrastructure that makes that accountability possible.