Amazon video ad specs, in one place

Amazon video ads run at a 16:9 aspect ratio, at one of three resolutions: 1280×720, 1920×1080, or 3840×2160 (4K). There's no partial credit for close — a video shot vertically or square for social and simply cropped to fit will look wrong and may get flagged at review.

If you're producing video for multiple platforms at once, the safest approach is to shoot and edit at 1920×1080 from the start — it satisfies the Amazon spec cleanly and scales without much loss if you need other aspect ratios elsewhere.

It's also worth checking this before the shoot, not after the edit. Framing a product for a 9:16 reel and then trying to crop it into 16:9 afterwards usually means losing part of the product or the packaging at the edges of the frame — decide the aspect ratio first, then compose the shot for it.

Export as MP4 or MOV, keeping the file at 500 MB or smaller. Duration has to land between 6 and 45 seconds — short enough that you can't rely on a slow build, long enough that a single frame of production won't cut it.

Frame rate needs to be one of: 23.976, 24, 25, 29.97, 29.98, or 30 fps. Video should carry a minimum bit rate of 1 Mbps, encoded in H.264 or H.265 (Main or Baseline profile), with a single video stream — no layered or multi-track exports.

None of these numbers are negotiable, and most editing software defaults to something slightly off — a frame rate of 24.0 rounded oddly, or a container format that technically isn't MP4 or MOV underneath the extension. It's worth exporting a test file and checking its properties before uploading a whole batch of creative built the same way.

Audio needs a sample rate of 44.1 kHz or higher, encoded in PCM, AAC, or MP3, at a minimum bit rate of 96 kbps. Stereo or mono both work, but the file should carry a single audio stream — and whatever language the ad uses has to match the locale you're targeting.

A lot of ads also get watched with the sound off, at least for the first few seconds, since autoplay on most placements starts muted. Treat the audio spec as a technical requirement to meet, not the thing carrying your message — the visual and any on-screen text need to work on their own before sound ever gets involved.

Any on-screen text needs to stay legible on a phone screen — Amazon's ad inventory is overwhelmingly mobile, and text sized for a desktop preview often disappears on a six-inch screen. Keep supers large, high-contrast, and on-screen long enough to actually read.

Avoid placing text or key visual elements in the lower-right corner of the frame — Amazon reserves that space for its own interface elements, and content placed there gets covered.

Run through the checklist in this order: aspect ratio and resolution, duration, format and file size, frame rate and codec, audio spec, then text placement. Catching a mismatch here saves a round trip through ad review, which is usually the slower fix.

It's worth keeping this checklist somewhere your video editor or agency can see it directly, rather than relaying specs secondhand through a brief. Most rejected files aren't wrong by much — a resolution one step off, a duration a couple of seconds over — and those are the easiest mistakes to make when the spec gets summarised from memory instead of checked against the source.

If you're building out a storefront alongside your ad campaigns, it's worth having whoever builds the store also own the video spec — that's exactly the kind of build-and-launch work we do at ARTH, so the creative and the storefront it lands on are handled by the same hands.