Amazon Sponsored Brands Video Specs: The Complete Spec Sheet

The full spec sheet: duration, dimensions, file size, codec

These are the hard limits. Miss any one and the file gets bounced before a human ever looks at it — this is an ingestion check, not a creative review.

• Duration: 6–45 seconds. Amazon's own guidance recommends 20 seconds or less, and in practice shorter cuts complete more often inside the search grid.
• Dimensions: 1280x720, 1920x1080, or 3840x2160 pixels.
• File size: 500MB maximum.
• Format: .MP4 or .MOV only.
• Aspect ratio: 16:9, square pixel — no letterboxing, no pillarboxing.
• Codec: H.264 or H.265, Main or Baseline profile.
• Frame rate: 23.976 through 30fps.
• Bitrate: 1 Mbps minimum, 4 Mbps or higher recommended.
• Scan type: progressive only — interlaced files fail on upload.
• Audio: PCM, AAC, or MP3, stereo or mono, 96kbps minimum, 44.1kHz minimum sample rate.

One detail that trips up editors coming from other platforms: the video autoplays the moment 50% of its pixels are in the viewport, and it always starts with audio off. If your opening beat depends on a voiceover or a sound cue, that beat is silent for most viewers.

The part everyone misses: the safe area and the mute toggle

The spec sheet tells you what the file must be. It doesn't tell you where things actually sit once Amazon lays the ad unit on top of it. The mute toggle sits in the bottom-right corner of the video, permanently. Any title text, CTA, or logo placed there gets covered.

Amazon publishes a safe-area template for exactly this reason. Use it before you approve a final cut, not after the campaign is already live and you're staring at a rejected asset with a launch date in three days.

The end card matters more than most briefs treat it. Your brand name and logo should land late in the video, not in the first three seconds — the opening few seconds are for the product or the hook, the closer is for the brand.

A worked structure that fits the spec and the reviewer

Take the 20-second recommendation and build inside it rather than trimming a 45-second brand film down after the fact. A structure that fits both the technical spec and Amazon's stated creative guidance looks like this:

• 0–3 seconds: product on screen, doing the thing it does. This is the hook — no logo, no voiceover the viewer can't hear yet.
• 3–15 seconds: the one thing that makes the product different. Not a feature list — one idea, shown, not narrated, since sound is off by default.
• 15–20 seconds: logo, title text, CTA end card, clear of the bottom-right corner.

We've shipped 45-second cuts that looked polished in a full-screen review and then underperformed inside the search grid — the autoplay trigger only fires at 50% of the viewport, and a slow open simply never gets seen before the shopper scrolls past. The fix wasn't a better story. It was cutting the open to three seconds and moving the brand reveal to the end, where the spec sheet always said it belonged.

Vertical vs. 16:9 — what Amazon's own pages disagree on

Amazon's technical spec page states Sponsored Brands video accepts 16:9, square pixel, only. Amazon's own getting-started guide for Sponsored Brands video separately states the format supports both vertical (9:16) and horizontal (16:9) creative, and describes vertical as better suited to creator-style content reused from social.

Those two Amazon pages contradict each other. Before you commission a vertical cut on the strength of the getting-started guide, confirm inside the current advertising console at the moment you build the campaign — accepted formats change faster than help-center pages get updated, and a vertical file that isn't currently accepted for this ad type is a wasted edit, not just a wasted upload.

When it gets rejected anyway

Rejection almost always traces to one of four things: a safe-area violation, audio under the 96kbps floor, an aspect ratio that isn't true 16:9 square pixel, or a claim in the video that doesn't match the product detail page. Amazon requires the two to say the same thing — a video claiming a benefit the listing doesn't support gets held, not approved.

Submit at least a week before launch. You can pre-moderate creative in your asset library ahead of any specific campaign, which is the only way to catch a spec problem before it costs you a launch date. If a video does get rejected, the email states the reason — check the safe-area template and the spec sheet against that specific reason before you resubmit, rather than resubmitting the same file and hoping.

Where a managed system fits

Getting one video approved is a checklist. Getting every future creative decision — which duration to test, when to refresh a tired end card, whether a rejected asset is worth a re-edit or a write-off — reviewed against the account's actual numbers is a different job. Dr. PPC reads the account and proposes changes with the evidence behind them, a measurement plan, and a rollback trigger attached to every one, so a creative swap is judged on what it did to spend and sales, not on whether it looked good in a deck. It's $300 a month plus 3% of ad spend, capped, with the first 30 days free, and Orbit — the tracking and analytics suite most people pay a separate subscription for — is included. None of that replaces knowing the spec sheet. It just means someone is watching what happens after the video passes moderation.