Carel van Rooyen is a Retail Media Manager.
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Prime Day is no longer just a sales spike. It’s a full-funnel moment.
If last year was about adapting to a four-day event for the first time, this year, the questions are different:
- How do we protect margins while still gaining market share?
- How do we build demand before the event instead of reacting during it?
- Which products actually deserve Prime Day investment?
- How do we use AMC and DSP more strategically?
That's the lens we're using for media in 2026. This is Part 2 of our Prime Day playbook.
Part 1 covered organic content and operations. This week, we're going deep on paid media, sharing the frameworks, tools, and tactics that separate brands that win from those that just show up.
Start Planning Earlier Than You Think
Unlike the ops side of Prime Day, media doesn't have a series of hard drop-dead dates. But that doesn't mean you can wait. The goal is to have everything locked in four to six weeks before the event.
- Confirm Budgets Early
Brands should finalize Prime Day budget guidance as early as possible. This includes:
- Total event budget
- Lead-in budget
- Event-day budget
- Lead-out budget
- Flexible “leeway” budget for real-time adjustments
- Launch Creative Testing Early
Creative testing should already be happening weeks before Prime Day. This is especially important for:
- Sponsored Brand Video
- DSP video creative
- Sponsored Display creative
- Upper-funnel awareness campaigns
Early testing helps brands identify:
- Which creatives drive higher click-through rates
- Which messages generate stronger detail page engagement
- Which formats improve new-to-brand performance
- Which audiences respond to different storytelling approaches
- Finalize Promotional ASINs
The “promote everything” strategy is disappearing. Brands are narrowing focus and concentrating spend behind their highest-opportunity products. Carefully evaluate:
- Profitability
- Inventory availability
- Competitive positioning
- Cross-sell potential
- Customer acquisition opportunity
What's Different in 2026
The four-day format is no longer new territory. That data now exists for brands in the US and in Canada, which ran a four-day Fall Prime event as well.
What's different in 2026 is the context.
Margin pressure is real. The broader macroeconomic environment means brands are scrutinizing every promotional dollar more carefully. The question has shifted from “how aggressive do we go?” to “how do we win visibility without sacrificing profitability?”
That shift in mindset, from sales spike to full-funnel strategy, runs through every decision that follows: which ASINs make the cut, how budgets are structured, and how much of the strategy is built around acquiring new customers versus defending existing ones.
The sections below break down exactly how to execute against that framework.
AMC: The Tool You Can't Leave on the Table
If there's one area of the Amazon ad ecosystem brands cannot afford to ignore this Prime Day, it's Amazon Marketing Cloud.
AMC isn't new, but it's changing fast, and its accessibility has expanded significantly. Previously, you needed a DSP account to unlock AMC. That's no longer the case. If you have a search account, AMC is available to you.
Why AMC matters for Prime Day specifically:
The primary goal of a tentpole event is to convert consumers, especially new-to-brand customers. AMC lets you build curated audiences to make that happen more precisely:
- Cart abandoners: Shoppers who added your product but didn't buy; a high-intent audience that's already partway through the funnel.
- Product viewers who didn't purchase: Shoppers who showed interest during the lead-in period and need one more push during the event.
- Cross-sell audiences: Products that are frequently purchased together; use demographic and purchase data to identify which ASINs to pair.
- In-event audiences: With four days to work with, you can build audiences on Day 1 and retarget them on Days 2 and 3. That's an advantage that didn't exist in a two-day format.
AMC doesn't replace keyword targeting. Your branded, category, competitor, and long-tail keyword campaigns still need to run. What AMC gives you is the ability to adjust how much you pay for different types of customers within those campaigns, spending more to acquire new-to-brand shoppers and less on loyal customers you'd reach anyway.
The earlier you start building AMC audiences, the better, as there are minimum audience size thresholds.
Media Strategy: Lead-In, Event, Lead-Out
The full media strategy breaks into three distinct phases, each with a different objective.
Phase 1: Lead-In (Now through ~2 weeks before Prime Day)
The goal here is awareness and audience building. You're not trying to convert; you're making sure your brand is familiar when shoppers arrive at the event.
Focus on:
- Category and competitor targeting to expand reach beyond your existing audience
- Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Brand Video for high-visibility placements
- DSP upper-funnel tactics, including online video; push budget toward awareness formats
- Creative testing - get your assets live now so you know what's driving detail page views and clicks before Prime Day begins
If you're running new video or display creatives during the event, they need to be submitted and in-market well before the event starts.
Mid-to-late May is the right window. Anything later than early June is risky. Amazon's moderation process takes time, and event-specific creative has an additional review layer.
Phase 2: The Event
Shift from awareness to conversion. The audiences you built during the lead-in are now your highest-value targets.
Focus on:
- AMC retargeting - reach shoppers exposed to upper-funnel ads who haven't converted yet
- Defensive campaigns - protect your branded terms; competitors will bid on them aggressively
- Single-ASIN campaign structures for your Hero SKUs so you have clean visibility into performance on the campaigns that matter most
- Hourly budget pacing - more on this below
One practical tip: download your campaign bulk files before the event starts, during a normal advertising day. Post-event, you can upload those files to instantly reset bids and budgets to standard settings rather than manually adjusting dozens of campaigns on a Saturday morning after a four-day sprint.
Phase 3: Lead-Out
Don't shut down when the event ends. There are two distinct windows to manage:
- Days 1–4 post-event: Demand drops sharply as shoppers recover from four days of deals. Pull back on aggressive CPCs and upper-funnel spend, but don't go dark. Maintain enough presence to protect branded terms and avoid being conquested.
- Days 5–10 post-event: Traffic often rebounds toward pre-event levels. Resume budget for performing campaigns. This is also where you can capitalize if competitors burned through their budgets during the event itself - their drop-off creates share-of-voice opportunities for brands that still have fuel in the tank.
AMC continues to play a role here. Post-event audiences based on cart abandoners and product viewers from the event are highly valuable retargeting segments.
Budget Management: The Most Important Lever
Four days of sustained high-volume traffic require a more rigorous approach to budget management than any previous Prime Day format. This is where the most critical planning happens.
- Lock in a leeway budget before the event. One of the smartest strategic moves brands can make is pre-approving budget flexibility before Prime Day starts. Why? Because the worst time to negotiate incremental spend is during peak-event chaos.
Define a percentage (10–15%) that you're authorized to overspend on high-performing days without needing approval in the middle of the event. If Day 1 is spiking and your daily budget is exhausted by noon, you need to know immediately whether you can push more. Having that conversation in advance means you won't miss sales while waiting on approvals.
- Plan budget by day based on the demand curve. The data from 2025 confirms: Day 1 is the highest, Day 4 is second, and the middle days are softer. Build your daily budget allocation to match, don't distribute spend evenly across four days.
- Manage budget hourly during the event. Shopper behavior doesn't move in flat patterns throughout the day. There are predictable peak windows, typically morning and evening, and lower-activity periods in between. Using historical hourly sales data to identify those peaks and pre-allocate budget accordingly is one of the highest-leverage actions a media team can take. Running out of budget during a peak window means losing sales you can't recover.
Use Amazon's automation tools to help manage this at scale. Auto-pause low performers, auto-inject budget when campaigns hit performance thresholds, and auto-scale bids during peak hours. Four days is too long to manage purely by hand.
What Brands Are Most Excited to Test in 2026
One of the biggest shifts we are seeing is that brands are zooming out.
In previous years, most Prime Day conversations were executional, while this year, brands are asking a different question: what role does Prime Day actually play in our overall growth strategy?
1) Full-funnel creative experimentation. Brands are becoming significantly more focused on storytelling. They are actively testing different DSP creatives for different funnel stages. One set of assets for retargeting existing audiences, a different set for new-to-brand acquisition. Sponsored Product Video, in particular, is taking on a much larger role across the funnel.
2) AMC and DSP as a whole are playing a much bigger role and opportunity. As AMC becomes more widely available and accessible, brands are gaining better visibility into customer behavior and attribution. At the same time, DSP is opening up significant new inventory and audience opportunities beyond traditional sponsored ads. Together, these capabilities are creating a meaningful unlock, and brands are becoming much more willing to invest in upper- and mid-funnel media strategies.
3) Accepting lower short-term ROAS for new-to-brand acquisition. This is a meaningful mindset shift. Brands that previously optimized every Prime Day dollar for immediate ROAS are now willing to accept lower efficiency on new-to-brand campaigns because they understand that acquiring a customer during Prime Day, even at a higher cost, pays back over the lifetime of that customer relationship.
Final Thoughts
Long gone are the days when Prime Day was just a sales spike. Today, it’s a strategic opportunity to acquire new customers, test what truly converts, and build audiences that compound through Q3 and Q4.
Four days, a compressed window, a volatile macro environment, and more tools than ever to either use well or waste. The margin between winning and losing Prime Day 2026 is preparation. The window is open. Use it.
Give It a Listen
You can tune in for the full discussion with Carel van Rooyen and Michael Childers on the Ecommerce Braintrust hosted by Julie Spear and Jordan Ripley.
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