Art directing Amazon's first commercial campaign for its Delivery Service Partner program
COMPANY: Amazon INDUSTRY: Online Retail ROLE: Art Director PRODUCTION: Bruton Stroube
Overview
Amazon's Delivery Service Partner program ("DSP") gives entrepreneurs the tools to launch and run their own last-mile delivery businesses under the Amazon umbrella. By 2021, the program had grown to nearly 3,000 owners across 14 countries, employing 275,000 drivers and delivering over 10 million packages a day. To support continued growth, the DSP marketing team built a new acquisition site at logistics.amazon.com and needed video content to anchor it: a commercial ad campaign and a 13-part webinar series to walk prospective owners through the program. I was up to bat.
Goal
Produce the first-ever video commercial campaign for the DSP program, along with 13 individual webinar videos for the Amazon's DSP acquisition site. All content needed to hold up to legal and privacy review for both the US and Canada, and had to work across multiple formats: :30, :15, and :06 cuts for the ad campaign, and standalone video for each webinar.
My Role
I flew to St. Louis to work on set at Bruton Stroube across two weeks of production, shooting motion and stills simultaneously. Before a single camera rolled, I had aligned with the DP and his crew on the full shot list, script, casting, props, wardrobe, and hair and makeup to make sure every element was consistent with where the DSP brand needed to go visually.
The biggest production challenge was the delivery station itself. Amazon's stations run 24 hours a day and couldn't be shut down for a shoot, so we built one from scratch inside an empty warehouse. Every element was brought in: fake packages, real Amazon door desks, background actors in authentic uniforms, and carefully staged props throughout the space. I helped art direct the entire build to make sure it read as a real, functioning station on camera rather than a set.
Getting the people on camera was its own challenge. The webinar series featured real DSP owners talking about their businesses, many of whom had never been in front of a camera before. I worked with each of them to get comfortable, find their natural voice, and speak with confidence rather than reciting lines. Amazon employees presenting the logistics content had a different set of pressures — every line had to be crisp, clear, and legally precise — so a lot of the day was spent coaching delivery and pacing to get clean takes.
Once the studio moved into initial edits, I went through dozens of music tracks to find the few worth licensing. Getting the right tone mattered as much as the visuals. The music had to feel like an opportunity, not a corporate pitch.
From there I worked with the production team to narrow a pool of voice talent down to the two you hear in the final spots. Fun fact: the male VO I hired also does the VO for the Disneyland Monorail ("You are now entering Tomorrowland. Please exit to your left.") I digress. Recording the final tracks required coordinating across four cities at once: I directed the session remotely from Seattle, my marketing partner joined from New York, the voice actors recorded in Atlanta, and the studio captured everything in Los Angeles. We spent the day working through multiple reads of the :30, :15, and :06 scripts in different intonations to find the right feel for each cut.
BEHIND THE SCENES
Outcome
The campaign launched as two :30 spots, each with :15 and :06 social cutdowns — one centered on a female DSP owner, one on a male owner, both people of color, with a cast of drivers reflecting a range of cultural backgrounds. That wasn't a creative accident. Amazon had just announced a $1 million diversity grant to help Black, Latinx, and Native American entrepreneurs cover DSP startup costs, and the campaign needed to speak directly to that audience.
The 13-part webinar series launched alongside the spots on logistics.amazon.com, giving prospective owners a full picture of what running a DSP actually looked like.
There's no data I can publicly share tying this campaign directly to owner recruitment numbers, but the trajectory of the program in the years that followed tells its own story. When production wrapped, Amazon had roughly 3,000 DSP owners worldwide. By 2023 that number had grown to 3,500, with 279,000 driving jobs created and $45 billion generated for small business owners. Today the program has 4,500 owners across 20 countries, with Amazon having invested $16.7 billion in the program since launch. The webinar series remains live at logistics.amazon.com/marketing/webinars.
Commercial series
FEATURE :30 SECOND SPOT
:15 SOCIAL CUT
:06 SOCIAL CUT
FEATURE :30 SECOND SPOT
:15 SOCIAL CUT
:06 SOCIAL CUT
Webinar series
WELCOME TO THE DSP PROGRAM