Adweekly: Amazon to Sunset Freevee, Streamlining Its Ad and Product Efforts

Welcome to Adweekly, the LinkedIn newsletter giving you an inside look at the advertising industry. Each edition will highlight some of Adweek's most important stories from the past week to help marketers, agency leaders, creatives and publishers better understand the industry they work in. By senior media reporter Mark Stenberg

Good morning, and welcome back to Adweekly. One of the top stories of the last week (which I also happened to write) scooped the news that Amazon is planning to sunset its free, ad-supported television app Freevee.

Amazon has denied the news, but several inside sources confirmed to me that the company has been laying the groundwork for this decision for months, dating back to last summer.

The impetus for the move is simple: When Amazon introduced ads to Prime Video in January, it found itself with two ad-supported streaming services, both of which overlap to a significant degree in their content slates.

This redundancy, combined with a series of other strategic factors, has compelled the company to sunset Freevee and fold it into the larger Prime Video offering.

The only remaining question is when this will happen. Sources have speculated it could happen as soon as March, or as late as Q2. Another suggested the company might want to fold Freevee before the Upfronts in May.

Regardless of the timeline, Freevee is not long for this world.

“If the question is whether or not Amazon will persist with two stand-alone streaming services,” said one person familiar with the situation, “I’m certain the answer is no.”

Go deeper on the strategy behind the decision here.

Rite Aid Wants Customers to Know It's Got Their Backs. Will That Cure Its Many Ills?

Rite Aid has unveiled a new campaign, titled It Means More, in a bid to remind consumers what distinguishes the pharmacy chain from its competitive set.

The five spots serve up three vignettes in which Rite Aid employees solve problems for customers in a pickle, and each scenario was plucked from the real-life experiences of Rite Aid staff.

But in its bid to refocus consumer attention on its neighborly charm, the campaign faces a tall task. Rite Aid lost $750 million in 2023 and is currently working its way through bankruptcy protection.

The company is also facing 1,600 lawsuits stemming from its alleged role in exacerbating the opioid crisis of the last decade. The Justice Department filed a complaint in May 2023 accusing the company of filling "thousands" of controlled-substance prescriptions that had “obvious red flags.”

According to veteran brand consultant Allen Adamson, the theme of the campaign is a poor strategic choice.

“The ad looks lovely,” he said, but it is “detached from reality.”

Watch the spots, and check out further analysis, here.

Related | One brand marketing campaign we can all get behind? Smokey the Bear celebrates his 80th anniversary in this nostalgic spot.

Exclusive: The Trade Desk's Media-Quality Product, SP500+, Puts Publishers at the Center

This story came out last week and was overshadowed by the Super Bowl, but it is well worth a second look.

Platforms reporter Catherine Perloff scooped the news that the demand-side platform The Trade Desk, the largest independent DSP in the world, has covertly launched a new product that fundamentally reimagines the programmatic ad-buying process.

The product, called the Sellers and Publishers 500+ (or, confusingly, the S&P 500), allows ad buyers to target users across 500 premium publishers, including The New York Times, Hulu and The Wall Street Journal, according to documents obtained by ADWEEK.

The development is significant because DSPs like The Trade Desk have historically been much more focused on helping buyers find the perfect audience, rather than finding the perfect media partner or environment.

It represents the latest instance of a larger trend, in which advertisers increasingly acknowledge that the context, ad density and user experience of a website should be valued more critically in the buying process.

Read more about the new product, and what it portends for programmatic buying, here.

Read more about the sweepstakes, and the logistics behind its creation, here.