Amazon Unboxed 2025: Key Announcements & Takeaways for Brand Advertisers
I'm going to show my age here. I remember when Amazon ads were limited to Exact match, Broad Match, and Phrase Match. IYKYK...
Today of all days, its clear that Amazon's ads ambitions aren't limited to retail, to online search, or even to humans running ad campaigns with hands-on-keyboard.
Today I'm at Amazon's Unboxed event in Nashville where the company is announcing a raft of product upgrades to Amazon ads. I'll share some highlights from the announcement with you, and my personal observations from being here at Unboxed so far.
1. Unified Campaign Manager — Amazon’s DSP and Sponsored Ads converge.
Amazon is collapsing its disparate buying interfaces into a single, cross-format platform with shared real-time signals.
👉 Takeaway: This finally allows full-funnel activation and measurement in one place, moving beyond siloed reporting between retail media and programmatic. For brands, it blurs the line between performance marketing and upper-funnel media — and positions Amazon as a one-stop ecosystem, not just an e-commerce ad network.
2. “Ads Agent” — AI-powered natural-language campaign orchestration.
Advertisers can now query and command campaigns conversationally (e.g.: “show me under-delivering campaigns”) as Ads Agent translates those requests into SQL queries within Amazon Marketing Cloud.
👉 Takeaway: This shifts Amazon Ads from a media buying console to an AI co-pilot model, reducing manual work for brands of all sizes. It also gives smaller advertisers access to data-science capabilities that were previously only in reach for those with a data science team.
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3. “Creative Agent” — Generative AI for display, audio, and video assets.
Amazon’s generative model can refresh, reformat, or create new creative assets from product data, "with outputs good enough for Prime Video inventory," per Jay Richman (Amazon's VP of Creative Experiences).
👉 Takeaway: For large brands, it’s a way to localize and version creative efficiently. For small advertisers, it’s a creative department in a box. But it also risks flooding premium inventory with low-grade “AI slop,” potentially eroding perceived quality and differentiation. And not just a sponsored product ad, it will be on your TV.
I peeped a holiday TV ad for crockery brand Pfaltzgraff build entirely with Amazon''s new AI Agent, and while there was nothing really wrong with the ad, it was inherently soulless and manufactured. Could the creative agent be a little more creative in the hands of a human copilot comfortable with taking more risk? Possibly.
4. “Crystal Box” positioning — Transparency as a brand promise.
Amazon contrasted its approach to its automation engine with Meta and Google’s “black-box” systems, promising advertisers visibility into how algorithms make decisions.
👉 Takeaway: This is both philosophical and competitive. Amazon is betting that advertisers — burned by opaque systems like Performance Max — will prefer a “show-your-work” model. Read more in my column for The Drum today.
5. Full-Funnel Campaigns — Unified automation from awareness through conversion.
In 2026, Amazon will launch full-funnel optimization campaigns that use signals from media exposure through purchase, powered by real-time data from the unified platform.
👉 Takeaway: If executed well, this closes the loop between branding and performance on Amazon surfaces. But as automation deepens, even with “crystal box” transparency, human understanding of why certain creative or audiences perform may become more limited.
6. AI-native analytics — SQL-level access meets natural-language intelligence.
Marketers can use conversational prompts to trigger Amazon Marketing Cloud analysis without writing code.
👉 Takeaway: This makes data exploration for non-technical marketers more accessible, and levels the playing field for brands of all sizes.
Initial observations
I'll be sharing more thoughts this week while at Unboxed, speaking with solution providers and agencies to get their temperature on these capabilities and the evolving Amazon ecosystem overall.
What strikes me right now is:
- Despite Amazon's dominance over the retail and ecommerce advertising industry, they continue to somehow keep pulling a rabbit out of a hat with new innovation and growth. Momentum helps the big get bigger, but dominance also breeds complacency. In the ads portion of the business, there still seems to be a healthy paranoia pushing progress forward.
- As Amazon builds these features into their core advertising product, it displaces a lot of the tech partners that are here in Nashville being celebrated as partners of the ecosystem. That must sting, to say the least. Healthy paranoia is necessary for all.
- As automation and AI take over more advertising processes, there’s more ‘perfect’ information for advertisers. How will advertisers get their edge? In the past it was about savvy media buyers, smart creative, being faster to market, or simply having more budget to spend. Which of those factors matters in the future?
MORE FROM ME
In my column for The Drum today, I share more on how Amazon positioned itself against Meta and Google's black box automation at its Unboxed event, unveiling a unified campaign manager and AI tools it claims operate as a "crystal box"—showing advertisers how algorithmic decisions get made rather than hiding them.
But the transparency promise faces practical limits: when AI generates audience-specific creative variants at scale and optimizes full-funnel campaigns across awareness through conversion, advertisers can see aggregate performance without necessarily understanding why the algorithm made specific decisions—raising questions about whether this represents genuine oversight or just sophisticated documentation of automated choices.
Are you based in Atlanta or be in the ATL area on Weds Dec 3rd? Join me and a couple dozen of your new retail media industry besties for a festive happy hour! Register here:
