Hey there,
I just got back from Amazon unBoxed '25 in Nashville, and I'm still processing what I saw over the two days.
Amazon dropped over a dozen major announcements.
The overarching theme was how Amazon is using AI to collapse the complexity that's made full-funnel advertising feel impossible for most brands.
They're looking way beyond just automating tasks; how campaigns get built, managed, and optimized across every channel they control.
Amazon is finally merging the Ads Console and DSP into one unified platform (launching next month).
Which means no more separate logins, duplicate dashboards, and manually compiling metrics across systems.
Campaign Manager becomes your single hub for sponsored ads, programmatic display, streaming TV, and audio.
The interface uses AI-powered search so you can ask questions in plain language and get answers faster.
According to Amazon, early testing shows this can cut campaign launch time by up to 67%, turning what used to take an afternoon into something closer to a 45-minute workflow!
The goal is to lower the technical barriers that have historically made full-funnel strategies harder for smaller brands.
And while the tools are getting more accessible, it doesn’t automatically make the strategy simple.
There’s still a learning curve, and knowing what to ask, why to build something a certain way, and how it impacts your broader growth plan still takes a fair amount of experience/guidance.
Amazon introduced two AI agents that go beyond typical automation.
1. Ads Agent handles campaign management
You can tell it "cut all bids 20% across all marketplaces" and it executes immediately. Early adopters are seeing 18% CPM reductions without manually adjusting dozens of campaigns.
The agent can pre-draft audience strategies based on your campaign settings, then help you maximize Amazon Marketing Cloud analytics through natural language queries.
You're getting strategic recommendations that would typically require hours of analysis.
2. Creative Agent builds entire creative storyboards from scratch
We’ve been working with the AI Creative Studio for a while now, and our team has been testing the Creative Agent beta over the past couple of weeks.
So what Amazon showed at unBoxed wasn’t entirely new to us, but it was a strong look at where they’re trying to take creative automation.
The tool analyzes your Brand Store, product pages, and website to pull out what Amazon considers your core selling points.
From there, it can generate creative concepts and build display, audio, and now even streaming TV assets.
During the live demo, they started with a product photo and a simple stick-figure sketch of the scene they wanted.
Within minutes, the agent produced a polished lifestyle image featuring a model at a New Year’s Eve party, plus seasonal variations, new formats, and multiple versions using basic chat prompts.
Of course, we all know that the live demo is the tip of the iceberg, there was clearly a lot more ideation and refinement behind the scenes than what fits into a stage presentation.
And while these tools are moving fast, they still benefit from strategic oversight, brand direction, and someone who knows how to coax the right outcomes from them.
This might be the biggest announcement that got the least attention.
Amazon is launching Full-funnel Campaigns in 2026.
A tool that lets you launch and manage complete funnel strategies across streaming TV, audio, display, and sponsored ads from a single campaign setup.
Instead of building separate campaigns for awareness, consideration, and conversion, you describe your goals in natural language.
The system recommends a personalized setup based on your best opportunities, then continuously adjusts budgets, audiences, and tactics across formats to optimize holistically.
This is what brands with huge budgets and sophisticated agency teams have been doing manually.
Amazon just made it accessible to everyone.
Smaller brands won’t be guessing budget allocation across channels, the system optimizes based on Amazon's signals across the entire customer journey.
Amazon announced several shopping-focused innovations that change how brands control their presence:
Sponsored Brands reserve share of voice - Lets you pre-purchase top-of-search placement for branded keywords at a fixed upfront price. No more getting outbid on your own brand name during competitive periods
Sponsored Brands collections - Displays curated products from across your catalog in one unit. AI helps identify which products to show based on shopper behavior. Beta testers saw a 44% surge in conversion rates
Sponsored Products video - Adds video to your existing sponsored product campaigns. Amazon claims 72% higher engagement when videos highlight product details. Activation is seamless as you're just adding video assets to campaigns that already work
The last one was actually one the first announcements to get a genuine applause from the crowd, but also left us with a lot of questions we’re hoping Amazon will answer over the coming weeks.
Amazon is giving brands more control over branded search moments and better tools for education within the shopping experience.
If your products need more explanation or demonstration, these formats finally give you space to tell that story without forcing shoppers to leave search results.
Prime Video now reaches over 315 million global users, with monthly ad-supported reach of more than 130 million in the US alone.
Amazon's making Prime the destination for live sports by adding NBA League Pass, expanding WNBA coverage through Twitch integration, and building on their NFL Thursday Night Football success.
Contextual targeting around live sports drives different engagement patterns than on-demand content.
Viewers are actively watching, not background-streaming. The attention quality is measurably higher.
Combined with Amazon's authenticated graph reaching 90% of US households, you can now build campaigns that follow shoppers from sports content to product research to purchase.
Our team is prioritizing three immediate tests based on what we learned:
Campaign Manager migration in December - We're preparing clients for the unified platform launch by auditing current campaign structures and identifying opportunities for consolidation.
Creative Agent for display and audio - We're testing whether AI-generated assets perform comparably to human-designed creative across different product categories. Commodity products will likely see similar performance, while differentiated brands might still need human creative direction.
Full-funnel campaign beta access - We're requesting early access for select clients to test the automated funnel optimization against our manual approaches. The 2026 launch timeline gives us months to prepare strategy frameworks.
Amazon is using AI to eliminate the complexity barriers that made sophisticated advertising feel unreachable for most brands.
Unified platforms, AI agents, automated creative production, full-funnel campaign management, etc. are now pieces of a larger strategy to democratize capabilities that previously required massive budgets and specialized teams. These tools also make it easier for agencies like AO2 to show the value of our work to brands.
COMING NEXT WEEK:
Why DSP isn't just for enterprise brands anymore and the specific use cases where it outperforms sponsored ads.
Jess
CEO, AO2
P.S. Which unBoxed announcement matters most for your business? The unified platform, AI agents, or full-funnel campaigns?
Tell me where you're most curious – it helps shape what we cover in upcoming issues.
P.P.S. Missed the Netflix × Amazon DSP integration update? Read the previous issue here on how 94M users changed the streaming advertising landscape.