By Karsten Weide, Chief Analyst
The Dawn of Agentic Advertising
Amazon Ad’s 2025 unBoxed conference, its annual showcase for advertisers and agencies, took place November 9-12, 2025 in Nashville. The message: Advertising is entering the era of intelligent automation, and Amazon is intending to take the lead. The company unveiled a slew of new products, such as an integrated suite of AI-powered tools designed to accelerate creative production, unify campaign management, and improve performance while extending its full-funnel ecosystem. At the center of this push is “agentic AI” – a new class of assistants that combine natural language interfaces, first-party retail data, and predictive optimization to simplify complex advertising workflows.
AI Agents as the New Workforce
The most transformative reveal was Amazon’s debut of conversational AI agents. The new Ads Agent serves as a natural-language assistant that can create and optimize ad campaigns art scale, generate audience strategies, and make it faster and easier to extract insights from Amazon’s Marketing Cloud by translating natural language input into SQL queries. In parallel, the Creative Agent expands on the company’s earlier Creative Studio product by automatically producing display, audio, and now video assets. It can turn a brand’s website or product listings into fully formatted ad campaigns – including TV-quality video spots. This is a boon especially for small and medium businesses, for whom video ads were completely out of reach before.
Amazon’s AI agents embody the industry’s move toward intelligent automation where machines execute routine marketing functions autonomously under human supervision. Google also announced the launch of two AI agents during unBoxed – perhaps not by accident – one for creation and optimization, one for insights. For advertisers, the payoff is enormous: faster iterations, lower costs, and consistent cross-channel performance. For Amazon, the upside is even greater – it locks brands more tightly into its ecosystem, where every optimization reinforces the value of its proprietary data and cloud-based AI infrastructure. Amazon’s Creative Agent also puts Adobe on notice: Instead of paying a hefty fee to use the company’s creative tools, advertisers and agencies can use Amazon’s agents for free.
Simplifying the Ad Stack
Another major announcement was Amazon’s new Campaign Manager, merging the company’s DSP with its self-service Ads Console product. Advertisers can now plan, activate, and measure across Sponsored Products, Brands, display, and streaming TV without juggling multiple interfaces and accounts. The new system offers format-based buying and AI-assisted campaign creation that can set up and launch campaigns in a fraction of the time required before.
For advertisers, this means less friction and greater transparency. Instead of manually configuring dozens of campaigns and audiences, they can rely on Amazon’s AI to auto-recommend budgets, audiences, and creative formats. By collapsing the distinctions between retail media, programmatic, and video, Amazon has effectively built an omnichannel command center that few rivals can match.
Prime Video’s Expanding Universe
Amazon also used unBoxed to remind buyers of the enormous size of its media footprint. Prime Video’s ad-supported tier is now available in 16 countries and reaching 90% of U.S households deterministically, making it one of the largest ad-supported streaming platforms globally. The company showcased an expanding slate of premium sports content, from the NFL and NBA to NASCAR and the WNBA, positioning itself as a leading destination for advertisers seeking reach and live-event engagement.
Partnerships with Disney, Netflix, Spotify, and iHeartMedia extend Amazon’s ad inventory beyond its own walls, effectively turning its ad network into a distributed media marketplace. For advertisers, this means seamless access to both retail and streaming audiences through one platform – a proposition that few other players can offer. For publishers who are not partnered with Amazon, though, the news is more complicated: Amazon’s growing dominance in connected TV and retail media threatens to siphon spend away from independent inventory sources.
What It Means for Advertisers
The immediate impact for advertisers is simplification. What used to require multiple agencies and specialized teams can now be handled inside a single Amazon interface with AI assistance. Budget allocation becomes dynamic, creative production becomes automated, and audience segmentation becomes predictive. This will appeal especially to small and mid-sized brands that have historically struggled to compete with enterprise advertisers on data and efficiency.
At the same time, Amazon’s tighter integration of media and commerce data sets a new standard for closed-loop attribution. Marketers can trace ad exposure all the way to purchase, a capability that will pressure Google and Meta to improve their own measurement systems. The risk, however, is that this convenience comes at the cost of dependency: advertisers who go all-in on Amazon’s ecosystem will find it increasingly difficult to manage campaigns elsewhere without starting from scratch.
The Competitive Ripple Effect
For The Trade Desk, these announcements represent both a challenge and a roadmap. Amazon’s unified approach and AI-first vision raise the bar for what a DSP must deliver. The Trade Desk has been innovating with Kokai and its own AI optimization layer, but it lacks Amazon’s retail and media data, underscoring TTD’s need to expand on its commerce media partnerships.
Google faces its own dilemma. While it remains the largest single advertising platform, its separation between retail, search, and YouTube advertising looks increasingly archaic. Amazon’s unification of shopping, media, and analytics highlights just how fragmented Google’s stack has become. The pressure to merge these experiences – or risk ceding retail-driven budgets to Amazon – will intensify in 2026.
Publishers and independent SSPs will also feel the heat. Amazon’s agentic ecosystem reduces the need for intermediaries by automating buying and selling functions directly within its network. As advertisers shift more of their budgets into unified retail and CTV systems, open-web publishers may see further erosion of demand, and SSPs like Magnite and PubMatic will need to double down on differentiation through data collaboration, CTV inventory, and transparency.
The Future of Advertising
Amazon’s unBoxed 2025 is a prime example for the direction digital advertising is taking (no pun intended). The ad stack of the future will be a tightly integrated system powered by AI agents. Campaign planning, creative development, measurement, and optimization will increasingly converge in automated loops guided by machine reasoning and first-party data.
By fusing commerce and media into a single feedback system, Amazon is positioning itself as an operating system for advertising in the AI era. The age of manual campaign management is over. Advertisers that adapt to this agentic model will gain efficiency and insight, while those that don’t move forward from legacy workflows will be left behind.
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