With some distance from the major unBoxed 2025 announcements, the broader arc of Amazon’s advertising strategy is much easier to see.
Across 14+ product updates, three themes shaped nearly every reveal: democratization, simplification, and a decisive shift toward agentic, intelligence-driven tools that are set to transform how brands operate across Amazon.
Here’s a look at the most significant trends, the updates most likely to influence the industry, and what these changes mean for brands and solution providers navigating retail media’s next evolution.
The Dominant Themes: Democratization & Simplification
If one message rose above the rest at unBoxed, it was that Amazon is actively lowering the barriers to full-funnel advertising.
Capabilities once reserved for enterprise teams or technically advanced providers are now becoming self-service, intuitive, and accessible, whether you’re a global brand, an emerging startup, or a non-endemic advertiser without a single SKU on Amazon.
But democratization only matters if tools are easy to use. That’s where simplification becomes central. Amazon is clearly signaling that powerful tools won’t drive adoption unless they also reduce friction.
From creative production to media management, the direction is unmistakable: less operational overhead, more strategic output.
Layered onto this is another gradual but unmistakable transition: Amazon is steadily moving advertisers away from keyword-centric thinking and toward audience-driven, creative-first, and placement-led strategies. Many of this year’s updates reinforce that shift.
The Unified Console: Sponsored Ads + DSP Become One System
One of the most consequential changes, though not the flashiest, is the unification of Sponsored Ads and DSP into a single platform.
The revamped Campaign Manager now serves as a centralized hub delivering simplified operations, smarter decisions, and integrated visibility for advertisers of every size.
This change:
- Eliminates multi-window workflows
- Consolidates reporting (now one-click access to combined Sponsored Ads + DSP reports)
- Ends the historical silos in Amazon’s ad tech stack
- Acknowledges the central role of agencies and providers in Amazon’s ecosystem
For years, these platforms evolved independently, each with its own product team. That left advertisers managing disjointed workflows that didn’t reflect how consumers interact with brands across the full-funnel.
The new unified experience is not just convenient; it is fundamentally customer-centric, supporting cohesive measurement and strategy.
Importantly, it also strengthens the case for upper-funnel investment. With unified reporting and AMC insights built directly into the console, it becomes easier than ever to:
- Tell the story of impression-driven influence
- Move beyond last-click attribution
- Demonstrate how DSP and streaming placements impact downstream Sponsored Products performance
For agencies, this means less time spent stitching data together and more time on strategy; a shift that aligns with where the ecosystem is heading.
Agentic Solutions: A New Chapter for Creative, Analytics, and Audience Strategy
One of the clearest signals from unBoxed is Amazon’s commitment to agentic tools: natural-language interfaces that automate tasks, accelerate decision-making, and make advanced workflows accessible to non-experts.
Creative Agent: High-Quality Content, Zero Production Bottlenecks
Creative Agent was easily the most jaw-dropping demo of the week. When the demonstration began, laptops closed, and heads lifted. Why? Because the output quality exceeded expectations.
Creative Agent can generate:
- Prime Video-level video assets
- Image-based creatives
- Multiple creative variants for testing (styles, tones, environments, seasonal themes)
With a simple brief, or even just a product detail page, brands can now produce creative assets that previously required studios, large budgets, and weeks of production.
The release unlocks large-scale testing and creative iteration, finally enabling advertisers to answer questions like:
- Does lifestyle content convert better than product-only?
- Do customers prefer indoor or outdoor usage demonstrations?
- How do seasonal or thematic elements influence engagement?
A new competitive edge is also emerging: prompt expertise. The quality gap between lazy prompts and strategic ones will be meaningful, and the brands that master this discipline will pull ahead.
Ads Agent: New Skills for Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)
If Creative Agent grabbed the spotlight, Ads Agent might quietly become many advertisers’ new best friend.
Amazon has expanded Ads Agent’s capabilities so advertisers can now generate full AMC analytics queries using simple natural language inside the platform.
Previously, even straightforward AMC questions required someone with SQL expertise, slowing down insights and limiting who could work with the data.
Instead of spending time writing or troubleshooting queries, analysts can focus on interpreting results, validating hypotheses, and guiding strategy. Meanwhile, non-technical team members gain the ability to self-serve more of their own insights.
In effect, Ads Agent makes AMC far more accessible, faster to use, and easier to scale, turning what was once a highly technical environment into something every advertiser can leverage for deeper, full-funnel understanding.
AI Won’t Replace Strategy; It Will Create More Space for It
A consistent conversation across Amazon’s announcements is the automation of execution. From creative to campaign setup to AMC analysis, many tasks are becoming faster and easier.
But the value of these tools depends on skilled strategic oversight. AI can generate campaign structures and creative assets, but it cannot determine:
- Whether the strategy fits the brand objectives
- How budgets should be allocated
- Where tradeoffs exist
- What competitive dynamics require
The future skill set shifts from building campaigns to evaluating, interrogating, and course-correcting them. In many ways, these updates increase the need for strong strategic leadership.
Beyond the Hype: SERP Innovations
While agentic solutions dominated the conversation, several SERP-related changes deserve attention.
Sponsored Products Video Expands Rapidly
Video is increasingly taking over Sponsored Products placements - an evolution consumers will notice without even trying. This new format enables advertisers to showcase multiple product features through interactive videos within existing Sponsored Products campaigns.
The trend echoes broader digital behavior: across nearly every platform, consumers prefer video content for learning about products, and Amazon is no exception.
Beyond simply being “on trend,” this format brings measurable benefits:
- Higher click-through rates
- Higher conversion rates
- Better mobile performance, where most Amazon shopping now occurs
And with Creative Agent lowering the cost and complexity of video production, Amazon is solving the “creation bottleneck” that historically limited adoption.
Sponsored Brands Reserve Share of Voice
This feature allows advertisers to lock in top-of-search branded placements at a fixed upfront cost.
While initially perceived as a heavy, long-term budget commitment, the ability to reserve SOV for periods as short as 30–90 days makes it practical in moments when visibility is critical (product launches, peak seasonal windows, competitor encroachment periods, high-traffic promotional moments).
Still, it’s a strategic tradeoff:
- For defensive brands, reserving branded share of voice during high-traffic periods could be strategically sound.
- For others, especially those focused on growth, this can become a budget trap, siphoning dollars away from upper-funnel expansion and new customer acquisition.
As with most high-control features, Reserve Share of Voice can be powerful, but only when used intentionally and with clear strategic guardrails.
“What’s Possible” vs “What Works”
Across these SERP-focused updates, one theme stands out: innovation only matters if it drives measurable results.
New formats, new levers, and new creative options are exciting, but for advertisers, the challenge now is to distinguish between features that create real lift and those that simply expand the menu of possibilities.
The next few months will be about disciplined testing: identifying which updates genuinely reshape SERP strategy and which become just another button to push.
Streaming TV & Full-Funnel Innovations: Quiet Releases With Outsized Potential
Some of the most transformative shifts in long-term brand building arrived with limited fanfare.
Project Complete TV
Complete TV is Amazon’s new way to unify and simplify how advertisers plan, buy, and optimize streaming TV across multiple publishers within its ecosystem.
The initial details are still somewhat high-level, but the strategic intent is clear:
- Create a streamlined order experience for cross-publisher streaming buys
- Allow advertisers to prioritize spend based on defined goals
- Enable measurement of top-funnel impact in a more centralized, accessible way
In essence, Complete TV is built to make brand-building investment (traditionally fragmented, complex, and difficult to measure) far easier to execute and evaluate.
While it may not come with the glamour of other launches, its long-term significance could be substantial, especially when viewed through the lens of the 95/5 rule, which emphasizes the importance of reaching future buyers who are not yet in-market.
It may not feel groundbreaking today, but if it delivers on its promise, Complete TV could become a foundational piece of how advertisers scale upper-funnel demand generation on Amazon.
💡 Learn more about Acadia’s DSP Philosophy: The 95/5 Rule
Full-Funnel Campaigns: A Potential New Default
Another significant announcement was Full-Funnel Campaigns, a tool designed to simplify end-to-end advertising setup and management.
Rather than running multiple separate campaigns, this tool recommends a tailored configuration based on a brand’s strongest opportunities to reach new audiences and drive sustained sales across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, display ads, and Streaming TV.
If it functions as intended, this could deliver:
- A genuine one-click, full-journey activation
- A major shift in how advertisers allocate time and resources
- A new standard for how brands evaluate the complete customer path
We often preach full-funnel strategy to the brands we work with, but achieve it through fragmented setups and manual alignment. A more automated, unified structure could become the new normal.
Among all of the lesser-hyped announcements, this one may carry the greatest potential to redefine Amazon advertising workflows, provided the product proves robust in practice.
Final Thoughts
When the noise of unBoxed settles, what stands out isn’t any single demo or feature, but the new direction of the ecosystem.
Amazon is building a world where creative is abundant, insights are immediate, and full-funnel planning happens with unprecedented ease.
But this future also demands more thoughtful leadership, sharper experimentation, and a deeper commitment to understanding what truly moves customers.
The next chapter of retail media will reward the brands that can pair AI-driven acceleration with human-driven strategy. That chapter starts now.
🏆 Partners as Strategic Innovators
At unBoxed, Amazon showcased success stories that illustrate partners' roles as strategic advertising advisors. Acadia was honored with the Challenger Brand Award: AMER. BODi's collaboration with Acadia achieved an impressive 80% new-to-brand purchase rate through video-first campaigns and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC).