Amazon DSP vs Halliard: Which Media Planning Tool Is Right for You? (2026)

Amazon’s advertising platform is built on an asset that Google, Meta, and every other ad platform envies: the shopping cart. Amazon knows what hundreds of millions of people have searched for, browsed, added to wishlists, and purchased — and that transactional data forms the backbone of the Amazon DSP’s audience targeting capabilities.

Halliard doesn’t compete with Amazon DSP for programmatic inventory. It sits upstream — in the planning phase where you’re deciding how much of your media budget should go to Amazon DSP, and how that investment stacks up against CTV, linear TV, paid social, audio, and programmatic in terms of cross-channel reach and frequency.

Understanding the difference in purpose changes how you evaluate both tools.

What Is Amazon DSP?

Amazon DSP is Amazon’s demand-side platform for programmatic advertising across Amazon’s owned properties and thousands of third-party publishers. The platform’s defining characteristic is its access to Amazon’s first-party data: shopping behavior, browsing history, purchase history, search intent, and streaming activity across Prime Video, Twitch, Kindle, and Alexa-connected devices.

Amazon DSP inventory spans Prime Video, Freevee, Twitch, Thursday Night Football, Amazon.com, Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods in-store digital, Fire TV, Kindle, Alexa devices, and open exchange third-party publishers. The Performance+ feature uses machine learning to automate bid and audience optimization based on purchase intent signals.

Amazon DSP operates in two modes: managed service (requiring approximately $50K/month minimum) and self-service (available through agency partners). The managed service includes Amazon’s team handling campaign execution; self-service puts the controls directly in buyers’ hands.

What Is Halliard?

Halliard is a media planning and buying platform built for independent agencies and in-house teams managing $10M to $500M+ in annual spend. The platform was built by Matthew Jacobs — whose background includes Starcom, Dentsu (SVP Product), Amazon DSP (Senior PM), and Paramount (Senior Director). That Amazon DSP background is relevant context: Halliard’s founder built the product with direct knowledge of what the Amazon platform can and can’t do.

Halliard provides visual flowchart planning, budget allocation, cross-channel reach and frequency analysis via a proprietary 10,000-person panel across 210 DMAs, and real-time spend tracking. Native integrations cover 18+ channels: Google, Meta, TikTok, Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, Twitch, Hulu, and more. In December 2025, Halliard completed the first fully autonomous media buy via Model Context Protocol (MCP) with PubMatic.

Halliard starts free with no credit card required.

Comparison Table

Where Amazon DSP Wins

The data no one else has. Amazon’s first-party shopping data is the platform’s core moat. Unlike behavioral or contextual targeting that infers intent from browsing signals, Amazon’s purchase data reflects what people actually buy. An in-market signal built from cart additions, product category browsing history, and purchase frequency is a fundamentally stronger signal than cookie-based behavioral data.

Amazon-exclusive inventory. Prime Video is one of the most-watched streaming platforms in the US. Thursday Night Football delivers live sports audiences at scale. Twitch reaches gaming and entertainment audiences that traditional TV buys miss entirely. Amazon.com’s own display inventory reaches users in active shopping mode. None of these inventory environments are accessible through other DSPs.

Shopping intent without cookies. As third-party cookies deprecate, Amazon’s first-party data becomes more — not less — valuable. The platform’s cookieless targeting model, built on deterministic transaction data, is privacy-compliant by design rather than adaptation.

Direct attribution for e-commerce. For brands selling on Amazon, the DSP’s closed-loop attribution connects ad impressions to Amazon purchases with precision that off-Amazon attribution models approximate. If you’re an Amazon seller running a DSP campaign, the attribution data is definitive.

Performance+ automation. The machine learning models in Performance+ build bidding strategies based on Amazon’s purchase intent signals — automatically optimizing campaigns toward audiences most likely to convert. For campaigns with clear conversion KPIs, this automation reduces manual optimization overhead.

Where Halliard Wins

Planning the whole portfolio, not just Amazon. Amazon DSP is excellent at what it does within its ecosystem. It doesn’t help you decide whether to put 30% or 15% of your annual budget into Amazon advertising versus CTV, linear TV, paid social, and audio. Halliard is built for exactly that strategic allocation question.

Cross-channel reach and frequency that crosses the Amazon wall. Amazon DSP can tell you how many Amazon customers your campaign will reach. Halliard’s proprietary panel tells you how many unique people your combined Amazon DSP + Netflix + linear TV + paid social + audio campaign will reach, at what frequency, without double-counting. That’s the insight that determines whether your media mix is working efficiently or just running parallel campaigns with significant audience overlap.

No $50K monthly minimum. Amazon DSP’s managed service requires approximately $50K/month to get started. Self-serve requires an agency partner relationship. Halliard offers a free plan for individual media planners. The access economics are entirely different.

Founder-level Amazon DSP knowledge. Halliard was built by someone who was a Senior Product Manager at Amazon DSP. The platform is designed with clear-eyed awareness of what Amazon’s platform does well and where it needs external planning support. That context shapes Halliard’s integrations and workflow in ways that matter for teams using both tools.

Multi-channel approval workflows. Getting a $10M media plan approved — including the Amazon DSP allocation alongside CTV, linear, search, and social — requires documentation, version history, and structured review that Amazon DSP doesn’t provide. Halliard’s approval workflow handles the organizational governance layer of multi-channel planning.

Feature-by-Feature Breakdown

Audience Targeting

Amazon DSP uses first-party Amazon shopping data — purchase history, browsing behavior, search intent, and streaming activity — to build purchase intent audiences. This is deterministic, transaction-verified data.

Halliard models cross-channel reach and frequency using its 10,000-person panel across 210 DMAs, and connects to platform-specific audiences (including Amazon audiences) through integrations for execution.

Inventory Access

Amazon DSP provides exclusive access to Prime Video, Twitch, Thursday Night Football, Amazon.com, Freevee, Fire TV, Kindle, and Alexa devices, alongside open exchange third-party publishers.

Halliard connects to 18+ channels via native integrations: Google, Meta, TikTok, Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, Twitch, and Hulu — a broader multi-channel scope, though without Amazon’s exclusive shopping intent data layer.

Measurement

Amazon DSP provides closed-loop attribution for Amazon purchases, plus standard programmatic metrics (impressions, CTR, view rate, VCTR) across all inventory.

Halliard provides real-time plan-to-delivered spend tracking across all channel integrations, with historical benchmarking and budget variance reporting.

Pricing

Amazon DSP managed service requires approximately $50K/month. Self-serve is available through agency partners. Pricing scales with media spend.

Halliard offers a free plan for individual planners, with premium tiers for teams and agencies.

Best Fit Scenarios

Choose Amazon DSP if:

• You’re an Amazon seller or e-commerce brand where Amazon purchase intent data directly supports your campaign goals
• You need access to Prime Video, Twitch, or Thursday Night Football inventory at scale
• Your attribution strategy requires closed-loop measurement connecting ads to Amazon purchases
• You have the budget to justify managed service (~$50K/month minimum)
• Cookieless, privacy-compliant targeting using deterministic first-party data is a priority

Choose Halliard if:

• You’re planning a multi-channel media budget where Amazon is one component among many
• Cross-channel reach and frequency analysis matters for your planning process
• You need a free or lower-cost entry point to start planning
• Approval workflows, budget visibility, and institutional knowledge retention are operational priorities
• You want to plan your Amazon DSP investment alongside everything else in a single workspace

How Amazon Experts Use Halliard

For agencies and in-house teams that use Amazon DSP as a core execution platform, Halliard solves a consistent upstream problem: how do you justify the Amazon DSP investment in the context of the full media plan?

The typical workflow looks like this:

• Halliard models the full media plan — how much Amazon DSP, how much streaming (non-Amazon), how much paid social, how much linear — and runs the cross-channel R+F analysis to validate the reach efficiency of the proposed allocation
• Amazon DSP executes the Amazon-specific programmatic campaigns within the validated budget
• Halliard tracks actual spend against plan across all channels, including Amazon, in real time

This isn’t a competition between the two tools — it’s a sequence.

FAQ

What is Amazon DSP’s minimum spend? Amazon DSP managed service requires approximately $50,000/month in media spend to qualify. Self-service access is available through approved agency partners without a direct minimum, though the agency relationship has its own requirements.

Does Halliard integrate with Amazon advertising? Halliard integrates with multiple channel platforms for planning and spend tracking. For specific Amazon DSP integration details, explore the platform at halliardmedia.com/trytoday.

Is Amazon DSP only for Amazon sellers? No. Amazon DSP is available to any advertiser — you don’t need to sell on Amazon to access Amazon’s first-party audience data and inventory. However, the closed-loop attribution and purchase intent data is most powerful for brands whose customers shop on Amazon.

What makes Halliard’s R+F panel different from Amazon’s audience data? Amazon’s first-party data is a transactional signal — who bought what. Halliard’s 10,000-person panel is a media consumption panel — who saw what, across which channels, at what frequency. These answer different questions: Amazon’s data answers “who is in-market to buy?” and Halliard’s panel answers “how many unique people will my proposed media mix reach, and how often?”

How does Halliard’s founder background in Amazon DSP affect the platform? Matthew Jacobs (Halliard’s founder) was a Senior PM at Amazon DSP before building Halliard. That background informed Halliard’s architecture around the limitations of channel-specific platforms — and the need for a planning layer that sits above individual DSPs to coordinate cross-channel strategy.

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• Full Media Planning Tools Directory — All platforms rated and compared

Planning a media mix that includes Amazon DSP? See how cross-channel R+F analysis works at halliardmedia.com/trytoday.