Amazon rebuilds its ad machine for the mass market

At this year’s unBoxed conference, Amazon introduced a unified Campaign Manager that collapses the Amazon DSP and the Ads Console into a single buying tool. It also rolled out agentic AI tools that can generate creative, build campaigns, recommend targeting and write complex Amazon Marketing Cloud queries using natural language. 

Together, the changes are meant to make full-funnel advertising on Amazon simpler to plan, execute and measure regardless of a brand’s size or internal expertise. 

“Marketers now get a consolidated view into how their campaigns are delivering recommendations right across the funnel,” said vp of Amazon Ads Kelly MacLean. “We’ve consolidated the advertising accounts so that you don’t need to go and register and create separate accounts to go and advertise as well as reporting on the back end.”

In practice, the unified Campaign Manager brings search advertising and programmatic buying into one workflow. An genetic mode called Full-Funnel Campaigns can set up and adjust muti-format campaigns across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, display and streaming TV from a single prompt. Ads Agent interprets media plans, builds campaign structures, recommends budgets and surfaces AMC insights. Creative Agent generates or scales video and display assets that fit Amazon’s retail and streaming environments. 

While the buying experience is now unified, the underlying commercial model remains.  Advertisers already using Sponsored Ads can continue to run Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and video, audi and display formats in Campaign Manager without added fees. The DSP, however, still carries its existing minimum spend requirements.

“If you think about the history of DSPs, a lot of it was focused on more complex use cases for larger enterprises,” said MacLean. “We’ve tried to take a lot of that guesswork out as we’ve rebuilt the entire front and back end of the DSP so that it’s really anchored on performance and simplification.”

Pieces of this shift have been underway for some time. The first real shift came last October when Amazon lowered DSP entry thresholds through resellers — a practical opening for the mid-market. Sales teams later began nudging spend toward premium third-party streaming supply, not just Amazon-owned surfaces. And in September, access to Amazon Marketing Cloud broadened beyond the biggest enterprise accounts. Each step pushed the ad stack closer to something more open and less gated. 

The unBoxed updates formalize that trajectory into a system that doesn’t rely on specialist traders or agency-grade operations to run. 

If it holds, Amazon’s ads business tilts further toward smaller and mid-market advertisers in a sustained, always-on way. It’s the same dynamic that underpins Google and Meta – steady demand driven by a broad base of ongoing spend, rather than a narrow set of large enterprise budgets. 

“Really, the opportunity that we see is by reducing the complexity and effort to create ads, including ones that can run on television for brands of all sizes, we have the opportunity to dramatically increase the overall marketplace,” said Jay Richman, vp of product and technology at Amazon Ads.

There’s also a pricing angle. As more advertisers optimize in one loop, demand for Amazon’s inventory could tighten, pushing CPMs higher over time. 

This is the Amazon flywheel applied to advertising. Simpler tools reduce the expertise needed to get started. Lower barriers widen the pool of always-on buyers. More advertisers drive incremental spend across retail and streaming inventory, which sharpens measurement signals and improves optimization. Better performance leads to reinvestment. Barriers fall further and the loop accelerates – at least in theory. 

“Amazon’s actively lowering the historical barriers to entry for sophisticated targeting, measurement and optimization,” said Kashif Zafar, CEO of agentic AI platform, Xnurta. “It’s a shift from focusing on those larger brands and enterprise clients to really making the ad platform accessible to all sellers of every size.”

In some ways, this shift was set once CEO Andy Jassy positioned advertising as a core margin lever. In the four years since, the company has gone beyond its reputation as a retail media performance behemoth and moved into territory typically occupied by holdco media networks and buy-side ad tech vendors like The Trade Desk. The company now has authenticated reach across more than 90% of U.S. households, direct integrations with every major premium streaming provider and determinist measurement tying impression to sales. 

What remained unresolved was usability, and a way to prove upper-funnel value without splitting teams, budgets or measurement frameworks to do it. 

“We’re finding that our Creative agent is getting early traction with independent agencies that either didn’t offer creative services but can now do thanks to it or they have some amount of creative service and they’re just finding a lot of efficiencies,” said Richman.

True as that may be, this shift has implications for agencies, especially from those who value rest on knowing how to work Amazon’s system. As AI takes on campaign setup and AMC query-building, operational expertise becomes less of a moat. Instead, the differentiation moves up the funnel: strategy, creative concepting and performance interpretation. 

“Candidly we’re looking to expand our solutions beyond Amazon now,” said one media buyer on condition of anonymity.