Launching Pause Ads

How might we design Prime Video’s First Non-Interruptive Ad Format?

 

My Role

I directed the UX strategy and execution for Pause Ads, defining the behavior model, interaction logic, and global long-term launch plan. The result was a scalable format that increased revenue, strengthened advertiser outcomes, and improved the ad experience for millions of customers across six countries to date.

Time period

12 months from beta launch to international general availability (GA) launch

Project Background

Prime Video Ads (PVA)

Prime Video is Amazon’s global streaming service, serving 315M monthly customers across 240 territories with thousands of movies, series, and live events available across devices. It delivers premium entertainment through personalized discovery, immersive playback, and seamless viewing experiences that connect audiences worldwide. Launched in January 2024, Prime Video Ads is building a multi-billion-dollar business that enables continued investment in content while improving the ad-supported viewing experience. Its mission: make every ad interactive, and make them entertaining, inspiring, and useful.

Pause Ads is Prime Video’s first native, non-interruptive ad format, designed to appear when a viewer intentionally pauses content. Unlike mid-roll ads, Pause Ads introduced a net-new monetizable inventory without disrupting the viewing experience.

What are pause ads?

A Pause Ad is an ad unit that appears on the screen when the viewer pauses the content that they are watching. The ad appears if the viewer takes no action for 5 seconds, and disappears when the viewer resumes playback or interacts with any other player feature. It is an opportunity for brands to share their message with viewers and capture their attention in a non-intrusive manner, during a user-generated intermission.

Why Amazon needed them

Non-disruptive ad formats, including Pause Ads, did not exist at Prime Video Ad’s launch, but innovation on non-disruptive ad formats is critical to scaling the PV ad business and delivering a better ad experience for customers.  Pause ads are the most obvious “tablestakes” format in this space, for many good reasons, but that didn’t mean they didn’t come with challenges.

 

THe problem space

Prime Video Viewer Challenges

  • Customers view pause as a “safe, control moment” — any ads must respect this expectation.

  • The experience needed to feel optional, non-intrusive, and immediately dismissible.

  • The UI had to adapt to diverse content genres, scenes, and remote-control behaviors.

Advertiser Challenges

  • Advertisers needed strong performance with predictable placements and measurement.

  • Creative production needed to scale to hundreds of brands and dozens of device types.

  • we wanted to lower the adoption barrier by creating placements that are scalable for different kinds of advertisers and wouldn’t provide a ton of custom work.

  • To support all our advertisers, we needed to support mid and lower funnel results

Amazon Challenges

  • PVA needed new supply opportunities without increasing ad load (a top viewer complaint).

  • When this project started, we were building in the interactive framework in tandem, so we didn’t have a holistic framework to rely on yet.

  • Launching this ad format would need to happen during a major Prime Video UI overall that was happening in tandem.

My role

  • Single-threaded UX owner for Pause Ads

  • Designed a scalable creative system

  • Led cross-org alignment across 7+ teams

  • Established UX strategy and standards for Prime Video’s non-interruptive ad formats

Research & Insights

Our UXR studies revealed key behaviors that shaped the viewer experience:

1. Pause is a high-attention moment

2. Interactions must be intentional

3. Context matters

Design process

Start with a standard pause ad, designing with intention

Standard pause ads are non-interactive meaning there is no remote interactivity available. Freevee, Amazon’s in-house FAST content, was an existing testing ground with standard pause ad infrastructure that would be a low- lift to reuse on FireTV (~20% of viewers).  So while not our long term solution, we wanted to take the opportunity to get real data to help inform us quickly.

The design

How we got here

We ran a series of two in-lab tests followed by a beta experiment that led us to this design. Of the variants below, viewers preferred variant 1.

Key findings:

  • Customers found v1 the most engaging because it had the most convincing creative imagery

  • The content background peek helped customers understand they hadn’t left their program

  • The full screen creative variant is a more scalable creative for the majority of our advertisers

Design the long-term Interactive pause ads solution

Our long-term interactive pause ad solution was built off of the standard pause add. We prioritized two primary CTAs: 1) Add to Amazon Cart for endemic advertisers and 2) Learn more for non-endemic for initial launch. We also future-proofed the designs to scale for international, additional ad functionality, and for our solution to eventually leverage GenAI.

be ready for GEnai

Amazon has multiple advertiser AI solutions underway that are making it easier than ever for advertisers to publish. We here time and time again viewers expect ads to be relevant to them, so we wanted to ensure Pause Ads could leverage BreakThrough as soon as the solution was ready. BreakThrough is our Gen AI powered advertising solution that creates meaningful connections between content, viewers, and advertisements through contextually aligned creatives. This solution would allow us to generative contextually relevant copy for pause ads titles that we hypothesized would increases brand recall and engagement.

Why does it require an extra click? 

The ad will be viewed in context of playback where viewers will also see other actions like X-Ray or Stats for live above the scrubber as well, so that interaction of pressing up and select to engage won't be isolated to just this ad format

We know this does require extra clicks, but we do believe those clicks serve a purpose of actually reducing cognitive load by using existing interactive components viewers already know how to engage with, rather than spending time reading instructions on how to engage with something and then doing so. It also ensures viewers are taking intentional action on the ad as well. It was important that we test this in our usability UXR where we found that viewers understood they needed to press up to get to the button and press select to engage. Participants had no issue then with engaging with the CTA. We will continue to monitor interaction rates in our beta testing and through launch.

Launch in phases

This effort had many moving parts, with data and insights incorproated with each test or experiment.

GenAI experiment

While marching towards a GA launch internationally, a GenAI powered advertising solution was ready earlier than expected. BreakThrough – our Gen AI powered advertising solution creates meaningful connections between content, viewers, and advertisements through contextually aligned creatives. We set up an experiment to test the hypothesis that generative contextual copy for pause ads increases brand recall and engagement. The pilot launched in two phases, first with “Add to Cart” then will a “Send Email” call to action". Afterwards, we are running brand lift study to couple with engagement data.

Cross-Functional Execution

Pause Ads touched many teams and required sustained leadership to keep everyone aligned.

Some of my team’s contributions included:

  • Defining requirements for measurement APIs

  • Aligning Playback on rendering edge cases

  • Working directly with advertisers throughout the phased rollout, onboarding 57 ahead of GA

  • Creating templates with engineering to speed device rollout

  • Ensuring accessibility and localization compliance across EU5 from the start

Results & Impact

  • Pause Ads are now GA in 6 locales (US, UK, DE, FR, IT, ES) with additional international expansion underway. 

  • +50% CPM lift

  • 57 advertisers, 73 campaigns before GA

  • 89 advertisers in GA (Aug 2025)

  • $XXMM revenue in 2025 (Aug); $XXXMM target for 2026

  • Template system enabling future native formats

Overall this was seen as both both a viewer experience win and a business unlock.

Whats next

With the existence of a pause ad format, this is just the beginning. Multiple plans are underway to expand pause ad capabilities including interactive shoppable carousels and brand trivia.