AI powered pause ads on Amazon

On selling tissues when a tearjerker is paused

This week, Amazon unveiled its latest ad innovation: AI-powered “pause ads” on Prime Video. Imagine watching The Summer I Turned Pretty, hitting pause, and being served a travel ad for the exact type of destination featured in the show ( I know, a bit harder to imagine with Fallout). Or pausing during a heart-wrenching emotional scene and being offered tissues — not metaphorically, but literally. These ads aim to extend the entertainment experience rather than interrupt it.

Amazon isn’t new to pause ads — they’ve been testing them since 2018 — but this latest move leverages AI to make them contextually aware, scene-sensitive, and potentially shoppable. As my former colleague Alan Moss of Amazon Ads put it, these are not just placements; they’re "extensions of the entertainment experience." With 130 million Americans reached by Prime Video’s ad-supported tier, Amazon is a large- scale test of how consumers and advertisers will react to such ads.

So how will they? You already know from my research that contextual ads perform substantially better than other (digital) ads: about 3x better for the studied online retailer. Moreover, shoppable ads reduce friction to actually buy something. So by extension, we would expect content-integrated shoppable ads to excel. However, it all depends on how the consumer perceives them: as a helpful assist with the right product at the right time, or as a cynical ploy to exploit their current sensitivities and vulnerabilities. Remember Meta targeting suicide-curious teenage girls with beauty products to feel better about themselves?

Does Amazon have a competitive advantage in such ads?

I always asked my colleagues coming from other big tech companies how Amazon compared…the answers were a variation of ‘harder working, but less creative, especially on the emotional side’. Indeed, while I was hired to upgrade the science at Amazon ads, I found myself more often explaining marketing and (emotional) advertising to my colleagues - typical with software engineering backgrounds.

Despite its full-funnel ad portfolio, Amazon Ads’ bread-and-butter is still bottom-of-the-funnel targeting — think sponsored product ads or retargeting people who left a product in their cart. My first project as Principal Research Scientist was to develop and test Brand Metrics, i.e. quantifying for each day and each brand on Amazon.com how many consumers were likely in each stage of the purchase funnel. Next, we showed how upper-funnel and always-on marketing improved these brand metrics, and that acting on our advice improved brand sales and new-to-brand buyers.

When it comes to top-of-the-funnel creativity and context, there's often a tension between the platform's obsession with measurable performance and the messier, more human aspects of persuasion: emotion, narrative, and timing.

These new pause ads represent a potentially transformative moment. They’re trying to close that gap. But execution will matter. A lot.

When clients talk to me about streaming ads, they often just want to know: “What’s the ROI?” But creative relevance — and the context in which an ad is delivered — can be just as important. Ads that feel seamless with content (vs. slapped on) tend to perform better not just in brand lift, but also in conversion… eventually.

Quantifying this ‘eventually’ was the topic of my PhD dissertation, and continues to uncover new insight into today’s digital advertising.

Zooming Out: What It Means for Digital Advertising

Amazon is blurring the lines between commerce and content, and they’re doing it at scale. This is a clear signal: TV is becoming transactional. Every pause, frame, and scene could be monetized — and personalized — with AI.

And here’s the bigger strategic takeaway: First-party data will dominate. Because Amazon knows what you watch and what you buy, it can build ad formats that no other platform can easily replicate. Not even Google or Meta have that tight of a closed loop between attention and transaction.

That’s both powerful and a little scary. If you're in the advertising game, it's time to think less about individual ad channels and more about ecosystems. Amazon’s ecosystem is integrating entertainment, commerce, and AI — all while owning the infrastructure underneath.

The bottom line: Amazon’s new AI-powered pause ads aren’t just a technical gimmick — they’re a signal that advertising is shifting from interruptive to immersive. For marketers, this means two things: you’ll need better creative, and you’ll need a stronger understanding of how data, content, and behavior intersect. Happy to help.