Selecting the right inventory for your STV strategy is critical to maximizing the impact of your campaigns. However, many marketers fail to execute this correctly. Without using private marketplace deals (PMP) and programmatic guaranteed (PG) deals to curate inventory, campaigns may deliver across unwanted publishers and lead to misaligned campaign objectives.

First, a quick primer on deals:

PMP deals function as invite-only auctions where select buyers can access high-quality inventory at set rates. For example, many people who have specifically targeted Prime Video inventory for their TV campaigns have done so with PMP deals. PG deals, on the other hand, guarantee specific inventory and pricing upfront.

Deals dominate the way premium TV inventory is bought and sold. According to The Trade Desk’s CEO, over 75% of CTV inventory is transacted on non-biddable inventory (i.e. deals) rather than in an open auction. That means the most valuable placements aren’t necessarily available through standard programmatic buying; they require navigating a complex PMP and PG deals network.

Strategically, these deals exist because premium publishers want to maintain control over their inventory, ensuring their most valuable ad slots are sold at predictable prices while benefiting from automation. For marketers, PMP and PG deals offer greater brand safety, transparency, and premium placement—a critical factor in high-stakes environments like TV, where open-market bidding can lead to inconsistent quality and lack of control over where ads appear.

How should you know which type of deal is right for your TV strategy?

It depends on what you value as part of your media plan. PMP deals are ideal for brands that want to execute sophisticated audience strategies while targeting specific inventory. As an example, if you run a TV campaign on Prime Video and build an AMC lookalike audience based off of your 1P data and Amazon data of your highest spending customers while negating past purchasers and past product viewers on Amazon and 1P signals, then PMP deals are an ideal fit. The risk, however, is that PMP deals do not guarantee delivery. If inventory is limited or demand is higher than the supply, this may impact spend, and marketers will have to adjust inventory strategies accordingly throughout the campaign. This was a particularly acute issue for Prime Video inventory in Q4.

PG deals, on the other hand, guarantee inventory and delivery. While this can be beneficial, there are tradeoffs. With PG deals, you’re limited in your audience-building strategies. You cannot layer exclusion audiences (like past purchasers on PG deals) or add AMC audiences onto PG deals (which means you cannot collaborate 1P data for audiences on PG deals). You’re also locked into your price and budget commitments; if you choose a PG deal, you cannot change the deal mid flight. Amazon provides incentives for selecting PG deals, namely they reduce the DSP platform fee (typically 7%-10%) to only 1% on PG deals.

We’ve broken down everything you need to know about PMP and PG deals within the Amazon DSP in the table below:

What do we recommend?

PMP deals. Aside from inventory and delivery risk during peak periods, PMP deals are by far the most advantageous way to buy TV inventory in the Amaozn DSP. PMP deals are: often cheaper (on a CPM basis), offer better audience building tactics, are self serve, and offer greater flexibility.

The question isn’t “if” you should be using PMP deals, the question is “which ones”. The Amazon DSP offers an expansive selection of PMP deals, organized in a cumbersome text-only list of 4,000 options. It can be a challenge to understand which PMP deal to select as part of your media strategy. This lack of clarity and accessibility in deal selection has been a limiting factor—until now.

At Gigi, we’re solving this problem by curating the best PMP deals across both Amazon’s and third-party publishers’ premium TV inventory, making it easier than ever for marketers to tap into Amazon DSP’s STV capabilities without the frustration of sifting through thousands of deals. We thought it was essential to highlight premium 3P inventory like Disney and Paramount so our customers were abundantly aware of the newfound opportunities presented by the Amazon DSP and took advantage of these opportunities by diversifying supply and consolidating their brand budgets into Amazon’s ad environment.

Agencies are also able to bring in their own deals into Gigi (as they can in the Amazon DSP), and we’ll surface those front and centre in a “your deals” section (we can even add an agency logo, if you’d like).

We believe that deals are foundational to a sophisticated TV media buying strategy at Gigi, and want to ensure that our customers are leveraging the breadth of deals available within the Amazon DSP.

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