Amazon’s ad business continues to be a bright spot in the tech giant’s portfolio, generating nearly $20 billion in revenue in Q2 2026 and beating analyst estimates. To build on that growth, the company continues to make its Amazon Ads offering easier to use and more effective at meeting advertiser goals — once again using its UnBoxed conference to show off improvements to its one-stop shop for advertising.
Amazon on Sept. 29 announced that the unified platform that combines its demand-side platform and ads console is now named Amazon Ads Agent, bringing together sponsored ads, display, video and audio in one place. The power of the platform is unlocked by artificial intelligence in the form of an updated chat experience that helps advertisers at every step of the process.
“How do we provide more of the capabilities and access to the trillions of signals that we have for marketers who are trying to reach people where they are in their advertising journey?” said Kelly MacLean, vice president at Amazon Ads, about customer feedback in a recent interview with Marketing Dive. “How do we continue to just make it easy? How do we drive radical simplification in the way that marketers want to work with us?”
Unified and simplified campaigns
Amazon Ads Agent allows advertisers to use three types of campaign types, including its bedrock sponsored product ad. One is full-funnel campaigns, an offering previewed at last year’s UnBoxed, that is now available to all advertisers in the United States. Advertisers provide budget, products and creative, and Amazon’s AI handles planning, execution and continuous optimization across channels.
In a case study shared by Amazon, dog treat brand Canine Naturals used full-funnel campaigns to bring together its disparate efforts across the platform, cutting down on manual effort and demonstrating the effectiveness of advertising on sales. Over 206 days, a full-funnel campaign drove 41% of sales from new-to-brand shoppers. The offering also demonstrated the total impact of advertisers beyond just sales, and led to higher return-on-ad-spend than campaigns created separately.
“I don't have to do anything, just give it all the assets and it'll figure it out. That's music to my ears,” said Brenda Quintana, digital marketing manager at Canine Naturals, in a statement.
Amazon Ads Agent also brings programmatic capabilities to all advertisers in the form of DVA+, a new ad format that unites display video and audio ads that were previously managed separately, including sponsored display, sponsored TV and display video and audio programmatic campaigns. The offering is powered by Amazon’s Brand+ and Performance+ tools that identify audiences and optimize toward outcomes, respectively, and will begin rolling out to all advertisers in late October through the end of the year.
Amazon’s previously announced creative agent runs automatically in both full-funnel campaigns and within DVA+ to scale creative assets by using generative AI. Cuisinart, in collaboration with agency partner Global Overview, tested Amazon Ads’ creative generation tool to accelerate creative production while staying true to its brand.
A pilot run in Q2 2026 around the company’s food processor products generated an 18-point increase in detail page view rate versus traditionally produced assets, a 14% reduction in cost per detail page view and a 10-point lift in branded search rate, per a case study shared by Amazon.
The pilot also demonstrated how AI tools can be used by brands and agencies without losing control of the ad-making process. Amazon is seeing adoption of generative AI tools by both large brands and the small advertisers who some assumed would most benefit from AI-generated creative.
“We have great partnerships with agencies. We see this as a huge enabler for creative agencies; not all agencies have resources for all types of brands to build beautiful creative for every campaign,” MacLean said. “Maybe it's a much smaller brand that they're advertising, in addition to the parent brand… and this is a way to also empower them to do that.”
More conversational
Amazon launched its conversational experience within Amazon Ads with select capabilities designed to make campaign creation simpler. For example, advertisers using natural language to apply targeting recommendations saw more than 25% additional unique customers while lowering costs by more than 10% for cost-per-impression on their campaigns, on average.
At UnBoxed, Amazon launched new capabilities across the chat experience around media planning, AI targeting, campaign guidance, natural language analytics, sponsored ads guidance and insight generation. The capabilities are rolling out in beta to eligible advertisers across 20 marketplaces in 21 languages, MacLean said.
“[The conversational experience is] surfacing more opportunities to improve targeting, bids and budgets within a click or less, and then you can measure and ask more questions across your overall connected experience,” the executive added.
The capabilities also include the ability within Amazon Marketing Cloud to access more insights and understand more intelligence without having to know the programming language SQL. Dentsu was a beta tester of the conversation experience, which is fundamentally changing how its teams work, according to Jason O’Toole, executive vice president and head of commerce and retail media at the agency.
“Rather than spending hours on manual campaign setup and optimization, we can now make human-informed optimizations directly,” O’Toole said in a statement. “Our strategists spend less time on execution mechanics and more time on the insights and creative thinking that drive results for our clients.”
