what actually launched
Amazon Ads and Samsung announced in March 2026 that Amazon's Interactive Video Ads (IVA) technology would come to Samsung TV Plus. That's live now, in July.
The mechanics: a viewer watching free, ad-supported content on their Samsung TV sees an ad. At the right moment, an overlay appears prompting them to use their remote. If the brand sells on Amazon, the CTA is "Add to Cart" — one click and the product lands in the viewer's Prime shopping cart, ready for checkout when they open their phone or laptop. For brands not on Amazon, the formats shift to "Send to Phone" or "Sign Up Today."
Samsung TV Plus is the default FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) service on Samsung's smart TVs. There are about 240 million Samsung smart TVs globally. That's not niche inventory.
This runs through Amazon DSP. Samsung TV Plus is the first external CTV device partner to carry Amazon's IVA format — the same format that already runs on Fire TV and Amazon Freevee inventory.
the numbers amazon is claiming
Amazon Ads published performance data from IVA campaigns across its existing Fire TV inventory: 6x higher brand search lift, 4x more product detail page views, 4x more add-to-cart actions, and 5x higher purchase rates compared to standard streaming TV campaigns.
Take those figures with appropriate skepticism — they're from Amazon's own data, comparing IVA against baseline CTV, not against Google Shopping or Meta conversion campaigns. The real test is what you see in your own account.
That said, the directional logic holds. Standard CTV has always had an attribution problem: someone sees your ad on TV, maybe searches your brand later on their phone, maybe converts, and you're stitching that together with probabilistic matching. Interactive CTV cuts out the stitching. The action happens in the moment, tied to an Amazon account, with purchase history attached.
why the Amazon account layer matters
This isn't just about adding a button to a TV ad. The product data, purchase history, and identity layer are already inside Amazon. When someone clicks "Add to Cart" on a Samsung TV, they're acting on a product in your Amazon catalog, and that cart action feeds directly into Amazon's conversion attribution.
For DTC brands that split inventory between their own site and Amazon, this creates a measurable closed loop that standard CTV can't touch. You can see which products generate the most remote-click add-to-carts, compare that against your Sponsored Products conversion data, and start making actual allocation decisions.
The initial launch partners — Boiron USA, Logitech, PLAION, Reckitt — are mostly established Amazon sellers, not DTC-only brands. That's the segment where the format makes the most obvious sense first.
who should test it now and who should wait
If you're running Amazon DSP campaigns and already have Shopping or Sponsored Products spend above $30K/month, you have the infrastructure to plug this in without restructuring anything. The IVA inventory access is through your existing DSP relationship. Start there.
If your Amazon presence is thin — catalog under 20 SKUs, weak A+ content, average star rating below 4.2 — the TV ad will drive awareness against a weak conversion page. Fix the product listing quality before paying for more impressions.
Brands that don't sell on Amazon at all will get "Send to Phone" as their action. That's a different attribution model — you're still routing to your site. It might work, but it doesn't give you the closed-loop advantage that makes this format structurally different from standard CTV.
the broader shift this represents
CTV has spent years selling itself as an awareness medium. The pitch was reach at scale, brand safety, and premium context — not performance. Every major streaming platform has been adding shopping and commerce features for the past two years, and the common thread is the same: remove the gap between the ad impression and the transaction.
Amazon's advantage here is that it owns the shopping cart. Fire TV, Alexa, Amazon DSP, Sponsored Ads, Prime Video ads, and now Samsung TV Plus IVA all feed into the same conversion infrastructure. No other platform has that end-to-end.
If you're allocating CTV spend right now as purely upper-funnel, this partnership is worth revisiting that assumption. Not all CTV is equal anymore.
The free audit benchmarks your current paid media setup against category peers — worth running if you're considering shifting budget between channels.
Your TV ad can close a sale in three clicks. That's new, and your CTV line items probably need to reflect it.
Sources: Amazon Ads, Samsung Newsroom, MediaPost, StreamTV Insider, Variety, March–July 2026
