Speaking with Digiday, Elton argued that Amazon is now a fully-fledged member of the upfronts set, capable of going toe-to-toe with the likes of CBS, NBC, Fox or Disney with an entire portfolio of live sports rights.

38% of marketers expect deals struck during upfront negotiations to claim at least half of their media budgets, according to an iSpot survey. But that market has become a tougher place for media companies as the pendulum has swung farther and farther in favor of buyers and brands. At last year’s upfront, advertisers prolonged negotiations as they pushed for flexibility in the form of contractual opt-outs. Elton expects similar demands from marketers this season.

He’s got an angle, though. Amazon always does. 

Where traditional broadcasters might point to the depth, breadth and brand safety of their output, Elton emphasizes the commerce giant’s wealth of audience and targeting data as a means of prising open ad budgets. The latter is a guiding priority among marketers today; according to a recent IAB survey — 49% list it as their top criterion when deciding where to spend video dollars.

“We want to make sure that every dollar we’re spending has [an] impact and that we can connect what we’re doing at the broadest awareness level all the way down to what conversions are really driving business results that we need,” he said. “For us, that’s our sweet spot.”

Amazon’s ad business brought in $68 billion last year, though Elton declined to break down how much of that went toward live sports inventory. It’s clearly a key part of the market pitch, though — especially now that concerns over streamers’ ability to host live games have subsided.

“In the past there’s been slight issues with marquee streaming events,” said Sam Nursall, research manager at Ampere Analysis. “Amazon clearly does it with the NBA.”

Over the past year, Amazon has been courting advertisers with a year-round portfolio of live sports options spanning the NFL, NBA, NWSL and NASCAR. Its coverage of the WNBA, one of the final pieces to settle into place following its landmark 2024 NBA rights deal, begins this week (May 14). Ad units are already sold out, as they are for its NBA regular season and playoff coverage.

Brands know that Amazon can’t yet match more established peers for sheer broadcast hours and that viewers still look to their cable packages first when they’re following their team or league. In third quarter 2025, 12.3% of time spent watching sports occurred on streaming services, per Inscape.

eMarketer analyst Ross Benes argued the company stood a good chance to lead the streaming sports segment as it continues to develop.

“Amazon has one of the strongest positions in streaming sports. But the vast majority of sports ad spending is still going to go toward TV networks,” said Benes. “There is no legit streaming alternative to ESPN and Fox Sports right now. But once there is, Amazon will be in position to lead the category.”

In the meantime, Amazon’s doing everything it can to outflank traditional market conventions. Elton said the company began courting advertisers as early as January’s CES conference in Las Vegas, and agency holding companies beginning in February. “Those conversations take more meaningful time to make sure that we’re getting it right,” he said.

Partially that’s due to agencies’ increased hunger to secure principal media deals. “It’s [principal media buying] definitely something that we discuss in terms of the value it can bring back to customers,” he said, without sharing further details.

Another factor has been the conveyor belt of partnerships and format announcements Amazon has rolled out. At its upfronts presentation this week the firm unveiled an AI tool dubbed Dynamic TV Creative, which will allow advertisers to run ads that change creative based on whether a Prime user has already seen an ad for the brand. It also struck a fresh deal with LinkedIn that enabled brands to target programmatic ads based on the social networks’ user data. It plans to further develop its suite of shoppable ad formats, he added.

Those hooks serve to underline Elton’s pitch of Amazon’s sporting portfolio as a bridge between awareness and commerce efforts. If brands want to hedge their bets across upper- and lower-funnel budgets or run campaigns across sporting properties without getting tied down in season-long commitments, that’s just fine. 

Amazon’s first foray into college basketball offers a good window on how that might play out in practice. Come autumn, the service will stream three Duke games in the days leading into the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, when Amazon Prime will also be debuting a biopic of legendary football coach John Madden. The combination of entertainment, sports and e-commerce represents an “incredible opportunity for brands to engage across arguably the biggest shopping event of the year,” he argued. 

State Farm and Wing Stop are among the advertisers that have adopted a cross-sports strategy via Prime so far. Advertisers running spots across more than one sport increase unduplicated reach by 2.3x, generating a 12% increase in consumer spending and a 17% increase in unit orders, according to an Amazon spokesperson.

The company’s enthusiasm for crossing the streams mirrors the approach taken by its broadcast peers, who’ve taken to using live sports rights as a lure to shift more entertainment or news programming to advertisers – locking access to moments like the Super Bowl or Olympic Games behind match spending deals in inventory lacking the same demand.

“Bundling entertainment inventory with sports is a good way to secure more upfront commitments and offload larger swaths of inventory. If streamers sold sports mostly a la carte right now they would run through their inventory quickly,” said Benes.

Behind the scenes, it also serves to drive reliance upon its adtech architecture. Amazon now offers unified direct and programmatic buying across live sports, granting access to the same targeting, signals and optimization tools to buyers operating in the upfronts or scatter market.

It’s this combined philosophy, Elton said, that has allowed Amazon to tempt just under 80 brands new to the NFL and over 30 new to the NBA into sports advertising.

“As soon as you start connecting the performance to it and the conversion to [live sports], it opens the aperture,” he said.