What a difference a yr makes: In Q3 2024, Amazon saw its third straight quarter of decelerating ad sales growth and used its 2024 UnBoxed conference to announce small-scale changes to its various ad platforms.
Fast forward to 2025, and Amazon’s outlook is sort of different. The company’s ad business has seen several quarters of revenue acceleration, hitting 24% year-over-year growth in Q3 2025 as Amazon’s quarterly revenue in the area approaches $18 billion. And eventually week’s UnBoxed conference in Nashville, Amazon unveiled a set of tools and capabilities that — in the event that they work as promised — could change how marketers and agencies do business.
Central to Amazon’s bid to advertisers are two latest capabilities with names that talk to the simplicity and centrality it hopes to offer. The company introduced full-funnel campaigns and revamped its Campaign Manager, uniting sponsored ads and its demand-side platform in a single, artificial intelligence-powered ad hub. Amazon also continues to step up its streaming TV play, demonstrating how its connected TV prowess has driven advertiser outcomes.
“We’re doing greater than just constructing tools,” said Kelly MacLean, vice chairman of engineering, science and product for Amazon Ads. “We’re constructing a one-stop shop, empowering you to make smarter decisions to drive higher results across the entire advertising journey.”
Old problems, latest tools
The latest full-funnel campaigns offering, launching next yr, is an agentic AI tool that helps advertisers automate campaigns across sponsored ads, display ads and streaming TV. The tool draws from Amazon’s wealth of first-party signals and an Authenticated Graph that it claims reaches 90% of all U.S. households.
“Full-funnel campaigns are the simplest method to grow brand awareness, attract latest customers and drive conversions. It’s early, but we’re super enthusiastic about what’s possible while you mix Amazon Ads’ unmatched supply and signals with the capabilities of AI,” said Paul Kotas, senior vice chairman of Amazon Ads.
Powering full-funnel campaigns is Ads Agent, an AI agent that helps advertisers plan, launch and optimize campaigns by automating time-consuming tasks, including campaign targeting, media planning and data evaluation. AI can be at the heart of Creative Agent, a previously announced creative tool that may now create streaming TV ads, and the revamped Campaign Manager, an offering that accelerates a shift in digital advertising.
“Platforms are automating the low-value, executional work of campaign setup, bidding and optimization, which suggests agencies can now not differentiate on operational efficiency alone. The winners will probably be the firms that move up-funnel — into strategy, creative intelligence, cross-channel orchestration and real measurement,” said Ted Iobst, president of performance marketing agency Stellar, in emailed comments.
While Amazon is using AI to attempt to make campaign creative and deployment easier and more efficient, it’s also using the technology to drive outcomes — an increasingly crucial development for marketers facing smaller budgets and burnt-out consumers. To accomplish that, Amazon has worked to enhance its Brand+ and Performance+ tools with enhanced AI models and latest consideration tactics.
Looking to achieve customers across fragmented touchpoints during the tax season, H&R Block combined its data with Amazon’s, creating seed audiences for retargeting and optimization. The use of Brand+ and Performance+ helped bring latest customers into the funnel while motivating those near conversion to make a purchase order. The result was a 144% lift in full-funnel conversion rate and a 35% improvement in cost per acquisition, MacLean said.
It’s not TV, it’s Amazon
Amazon’s accelerated growth as an advertising powerhouse has mirrored the development of Prime Video as an ad-supported streaming video platform that may higher compete with legacy publishers and fellow tech giants like Netflix. At UnBoxed, Amazon announced that Prime Video now has a mean monthly ad-supported reach of greater than 315 million viewers globally — up from 200 million in April 2024.
Along with boosting Prime Video, Amazon has spent the last several months integrating other publishers into its platform and claims to be the only place that advertisers can access all premium streaming TV and audio under one roof. At UnBoxed, the company announced a way for advertisers to unlock this scale, allowing them to barter each standard streaming TV deals and people with premium streaming publishers in its Inventory Hub. Complete TV, a previously announced tool that helps advertisers plan, manage and optimize their streaming TV investments, is now also available to all advertisers.
“Thanks to our signals, powered by AI, you may easily manage and meet all of your upfront commitments across every publisher. You can incorporate your linear TV data to see the full picture across linear and streaming TV reach for an entire view of audience overlap,” MacLean said. “You won’t find this mixture of intelligence, flexibility and privacy anywhere else in the industry.”
Amazon’s play in streaming TV comes as the channel now represents greater than 44% of overall TV viewing time in the U.S., surpassing broadcast and cable combined, per Nielsen data. At the same time, streaming TV is increasingly sold programmatically, with 30% of non-YouTube streaming sold that way and 80% of programmatic activated using biddable deals, in response to data cited by Lauren Bernard, a principal technical product manager for Amazon Ads, during a panel discussion at UnBoxed.
“The shift to programmatic is laying the groundwork for a world where advertisers have more flexibility, optimization levers and control, forecasting a future where streaming TV is used to drive actual business outcomes,” Bernard said, while admitting that framing streaming TV as a performance channel was “a bit generous.”
“There’s a reason that 30% and never 100% of streaming TV ads are sold programmatically today. Operating in the latest world, it’s tough, and our work shouldn’t be yet done to resolve advertisers pain points,” she added.
Driving outcomes
Streaming TV still has issues around fragmentation, inefficiency and complexity. Amazon has worked to handle fragmentation through its publisher deals in its DSP, with campaigns leveraging Amazon’s holistic streaming TV solutions seeing 1.4 times higher incremental reach, 45% higher detail page view rates and 26% higher purchase rates. Moves like its take care of Roku have helped address inefficiency, with authenticated reach driving 42% higher unique reach at the same budget, 26% less frequency per user and a three-times return on ad spend, per early testing.
To address the complexity of streaming TV, Amazon has built tools to assist TV buyers plan, manage and measure their investments, through solutions like Complete TV and full-funnel measurement that brings together Amazon Marketing Cloud insights with those from third-party vendors including Nielsen, VideoAmp, Samba TV, Circana and others.
A Lay’s case study presented at UnBoxed by Bernard demonstrates how Amazon’s streaming TV can drive outcomes. By consolidating Prime Video with streaming TV apps across the open web in Amazon DSP, leveraging Amazon Marketing Cloud and frequency management capabilities, the campaign was capable of deliver 133% higher purchase rates, 79% higher incremental reach and a 9% lift and brand awareness. It also saved 3% of the media budget through reduced platform fees.
In one other example, appliance company SharkNinja teamed with Amazon to assist drive a “big bet” around its Ninja Crispi air fryer, explained Dave Kersey, the company’s global head of media. SharkNinja applied authenticated reach through Amazon DSP, driving a 30% reduction in cost per weekly household reach and a 12% reduction in CPM.
“We needed to have precision in the marketplace, and we would have liked to be sure that that every one of our greenbacks are being spent as effectively as possible,” Kersey said during a panel discussion. “[The results] prove that our model of taking a look at the right layers of signals, in addition to working inside the right DSPs and the right partners, can provide us that efficiency, but in addition that incredible business impact, as well.”
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