Why Amazon Ads' unBoxed 2025 Game-Plan Matters For Advertisers Now

“We’re using AI to enable smarter, faster campaigns across multiple channels and formats — with the control and transparency you deserve.” — Claire Paull, Amazon Ads keynote

 At unBoxed 2025, Amazon rolled out the next era of retail media and programmatic buying.

If you treat these as “console upgrades,” you’ll miss the strategic shift entirely. This is Amazon signalling what the next decade of advertising infrastructure will look like — and giving brands a path to run sophisticated, full-funnel strategies without the layers of external machinery that have traditionally been required.

Below is my breakdown of the announcements that matter most, what they unlock, and how leaders should be thinking about them.

1. The Amazon Authenticated Graph — The Most Important Announcement of All

Let’s start with the big one. The announcement that matters more than every other feature combined.

The Amazon Authenticated Graph.

This is the backbone of Amazon’s entire ads ecosystem — and the thing that fundamentally sets Amazon apart from everyone else.

What it is:

A deterministic identity graph built on authenticated Amazon relationships that reaches 90% of US households.

Not probabilistic. Not stitched cookies. Not third-party enrichment. Deterministic, at national scale (in the US).

What it unlocks:

Advertisers can now connect the dots from a streaming TV impression in someone’s living room all the way to the brown box on their doorstep.

End-to-end attribution across:

• Retail

• Streaming

• Devices

• Prime

• The Open Internet

• And everything in between

No other company (*in the West) can do this. Not even close.

The kicker

It’s free. Automatically applied across all Amazon Ads products. Automatically active across Amazon inventory + Open Internet supply. This is the architecture the entire industry has been trying to build. And Amazon just quietly shipped it.

What this means for the industry

Amazon is very clearly coming for the lunch of the legacy holding companies.

Identity. Measurement. Planning. Execution. Attribution. Consolidation.

Amazon is building the stack brands ultimately want — and doing it inside an ecosystem already connected to real purchase behavior.

Short-term impact to hold-cos? Probably limited. Mid- to long-term? 99%.

The Authenticated Graph is the real power shift of unBoxed 2025. Everything else sits on top of it.

2. Unified Campaign Manager — The New Full-Funnel Operating System

 The merge of Sponsored Ads + DSP into a single Campaign Manager is more than a UI consolidation. It’s Amazon saying:

“Stop thinking in channels. Start thinking in outcomes.”

What it means

• One interface

• One set of metrics

• One data layer

• One workflow from upper → lower funnel

Amazon claims 67% faster campaign launches and major reductions in daily management overhead.

Why it matters

Most brands still have separate workflows, agencies, dashboards, and KPIs for lower-funnel search and upper-funnel display/CTV.

This merge means the full funnel becomes:

• Easier

• Faster

• More integrated

• More aligned with how consumers actually move

Leaders vs everyone else

Leaders have already moved to algorithmic buying — machine-learning driven, not human-driven workflow steps.

If your activation process is still manual or vendor-heavy, this will feel like a productivity boost. If you’re already algorithmic, this aligns Amazon’s stack to how you operate.

3. Creative Agent & Ads Agent — AI Across Creative, Strategy & Execution

Two major AI-led tools:

Creative Agent

Pulls from:

• Your Brand Store

• PDPs

• Your site …and generates image, video, audio, and now streaming-TV creative.

Ads Agent

 Lets you query AMC in natural language, draft audiences, and build strategies automatically. Which in theory is a great idea, but I'm not sure how many non-technical media buyers will suddenly jump into the AMC to really do this for themselves.

What this means

 The creative bottleneck — especially for video — is being targeted aggressively. Great for small brands that don’t have production teams.

But for large brands? I have reservations.

I asked a question in one of the sessions (which didn’t get approved/answered): “Who owns the input prompts, the output creatives, and the training data generated from those assets?”

This matters. Large advertisers do not want their creative IP training models for their competitors six months later.

This is the single biggest adoption barrier for enterprises — and I expect this to become a bigger conversation in 2026.

4. Full-Funnel Campaigns — Amazon’s First End-to-End Automation Layer

This new product builds and optimizes across:

• Sponsored Products

• Sponsored Brands

• Display

• DSP

• Streaming TV

…as one coordinated full-funnel campaign.

Why it matters

• No more siloed channel planning

• Budgets shift dynamically

• Audiences are sequenced across formats

• Optimization becomes behaviour-led, not placement-led

This makes it dramatically easier for agencies to deliver full-funnel execution without building custom orchestration layers.

How leaders already operate

The best practitioners have been doing this manually using AMC audience signals — test → learn → scale.

This new feature essentially industrializes that workflow for everyone else.

Your checklist

• Ensure measurement frameworks match full-funnel behaviour

• Remove creative/media/vendor silos

• Pilot one full-funnel campaign and benchmark against old workflows

5. Entertainment & Streaming TV Expansion — Amazon Becomes a Mass-Reach Channel

Prime Video now reaches 315M global monthly viewers. Plus expanded live sports for NBA, WNBA, NFL, NASCAR.

This puts Amazon into the same conversation as:

• Connected TV platforms

• Premium sports broadcasters

• Traditional mass-reach channels

The difference? Measurement and attribution tie directly back to real retail outcomes via the Authenticated Graph.

Action items

• Reassess budget allocation for upper-funnel

• Audit your video/TV creative for Amazon’s formats

• Update measurement: CTV won’t convert immediately, so attribution has to reflect multi-touch paths

6. Shopping Innovation — Sponsored Brands Reserve, Collections & Sponsored Products Video

For the first time in a long time, meaningful innovation in search placements.

Sponsored Brands Reserve

Pre-purchase top-of-search branded placements at a fixed price. Predictable. Controlled. Premium.

Sponsored Brands Collections

Curated product collectioned — ideal for brands with SKU/Portfolio depth.

Sponsored Products Video

Video on shopping pages — a major shift in consumer expectation at the point of conversion.

Sponsored Queries

Similar to how Perplexity gives you a list of suggested queries to follow up with your original prompt, brands will have the opportunity to pay to appear in the interactions Amazon shoppers have with Rufus.

What this means

This is Amazon protecting its Cash Cow while giving bottom-funnel advertisers a reason to continue (and increase) investment, and innovating in the prompt based shopping experience (which will eventually replace search).

My Reflection

Looking across all announcements, one thing is obvious:

The barrier to entry for premium retail media is rising — fast.

If you still treat Amazon as “bottom-funnel conversion media,” you will fall behind the brands treating it as a full ecosystem.

The combination of:

• Deterministic identity

• Unified buying

• AI-driven creative

• Streaming reach

• Richer search formats

• Cross-inventory measurement

• And open-internet activation

…makes Amazon the most complete closed-loop advertising platform available today in the west.

Now is the time to re-architect:

• Remove workflow silos

• Integrate media, creative, and analytics

• Budget for video-first assets

• Build a full-funnel measurement framework

• Lean into AMC and AI tools

• Prepare your teams for identity-led planning

Full list of announcements here: Amazon Ads unBoxed 2025 Announcements

Let me know what your favorite announcement from Unboxed was in the comments!

I want to hear from you!

What did you think of today’s email? Reply and let me know!

Thanks for reading!

See you next week.

Imteaz & the Applied Intelligence team