Amazon unBoxed 2025: The announcements that matter for performance marketers

With the dust settled after November’s unBoxed conference in Nashville, and Black Friday/Cyber Monday in the rearview, we’re focused on what Amazon’s 2025 announcements actually change for your 2026 advertising plans.

As with most of the industry right now, AI sat at the center of nearly every update, touching creative, optimization, and measurement. In this blog, we break down what each new product or tool is, why it matters for your media strategy, and how Perpetua is responding so you can decide where to test and invest next.

AI agents: automating the heavy lifting in creative, Amazon DSP, and AMC

Amazon introduced a suite of AI agents designed to save time through natural language interactions across creative development, Amazon DSP setup, and Amazon Marketing Cloud analysis. At a high level, these agents remove friction from upper-funnel investment and are aligned with Amazon’s broader push to unlock more budget for display, video, audio, and connected TV.

Creative Agent (Open beta)

Creative Agent turns product information and existing brand assets into commerce-ready ads with generative AI, speeding up production for display and video and enabling faster testing and iteration across Amazon campaign types.

Why does it matter for your 2026 strategy? Creative is one of the areas AI is commoditizing the fastest. Amazon has introduced multiple creative tools over the past few years to lower the barrier to launching display and video. That trend will only accelerate.

Perpetua’s angle: We’ve deliberately chosen not to build creative tooling of our own. Instead, we’re focused on what we do best: optimization. Any new Sponsored Ads or ADSP campaigns launched with assets built by Amazon’s Creative Agent can be fully optimized by Perpetua’s bid engine the moment they go live.

• Your path forward: treat Creative Agent as a production accelerator, and let Perpetua handle budget and bid optimization against your performance goals.

Ads Agent (Open beta)

Ads Agent automates audience identification for Amazon DSP campaigns by using AI to recommend relevant audience segments based on campaign settings. This ADSP-centric tool lives within the Target widget at the line-item level in ADSP.

Why does it matter for your 2026 strategy? If Ads Agent works as intended, it can reduce the manual legwork of audience planning, especially for brands that are newer to ADSP or expanding into new markets or categories.

Perpetua’s angle: Used alongside Perpetua’s intuitive, goal-based ADSP campaign launch, Ads Agent has the potential to unlock stronger, more tailored performance by pairing smarter audiences with automated optimization. Our early testing focus:

• Validating whether AI-recommended audiences stay precise, or over-rotate toward scale at the expense of efficiency (e.g., “broader audience = more impressions = more spend”).

• Identify where Ads Agent recommendations outperform, or underperform, existing audience strategies for different verticals and goals.

We’ll prioritize integrating Ads Agent in ways that compound goal-based optimization rather than just increasing reach.

AMC Ads Agent Skill (Open beta)

The AMC Ads Agent skill allows marketers to create audience segments, generate SQL queries, and access product support via natural language directly in the AMC UI. It underscores Amazon’s push to democratize AMC-powered, data-driven insight generation at no added cost.

Why does it matter for your 2026 strategy? AMC is no longer just a playground for SQL-savvy teams. With AI support, more brands will be able to move from basic reporting to more nuanced, path-to-purchase analysis and audience building without heavy technical lift.

Perpetua’s angle: Amazon keeps adding AMC functionality at no added cost, which naturally reduces the value of partners that only offer “AMC access” or basic reporting layers. Our focus is different:

• We’re investing in turning AMC insights into actionable optimizations for all Perpetua clients.

• Our newly launched Return on Customer Dashboard marries AMC data with competitor benchmarks—visibility not available in the AMC UI—to surface optimization opportunities along the shopper journey.

In other words: let Amazon’s AI help you ask better questions in AMC, and let Perpetua operationalize the answers.

From fragmented to unified: the new full-funnel toolkit

UnBoxed 2025 reaffirmed Amazon’s push to help brands engage shoppers across the full funnel (awareness, consideration, and conversion) with less fragmentation between Sponsored Ads and ADSP.

Campaign Manager (GA)

Campaign Manager reduces fragmentation between the Ads Console and ADSP by providing a centralized dashboard with core media metrics across Sponsored Ads and ADSP, and by streamlining navigation across accounts for global brands.

Why does it matter for your 2026 strategy? For brands investing across Amazon’s full ads ecosystem, having a single source of truth for high-level performance is simply more practical. It becomes easier to see where spend is going and how channels trend over time.

Perpetua’s angle: This is a helpful step forward, but in many ways, it’s playing catch-up to what solutions like Perpetua have offered for years:

• Seamless cross-market media management

• Unified goals and optimization strategies that span Sponsored Ads and ADSP

We’ll continue to focus on depth (goal-based optimization and translating AMC insights into action) on top of the visibility Campaign Manager provides.

Unified Reporting

Unified Reporting combines Sponsored Ads and ADSP data into a single analytics layer, enabling advertisers to analyze full-funnel investment, run reports with cross-channel metrics, and access longer performance lookback windows.

Why does it matter for your 2026 strategy? This makes it easier to assess how your investment across tactics ladders up, especially for brands who’ve been stuck reconciling disparate exports.

Perpetua’s angle: Partners like Perpetua have long offered a version of this cross-channel visibility. What stands out is what’s not yet included: retail performance. Amazon hasn’t taken the next step of layering in retail metrics (e.g., share, organic performance, inventory signals) into this view. Perpetua already connects media and retail outcomes in-app, enabling:

• Streamlined analysis of ad investment against topline sales and profitability

• Clearer tradeoffs between incremental growth and efficiency

We’ll continue to lead with media and retail joined up, not just media in isolation.

Full-Funnel Campaigns (Closed beta)

Full-Funnel Campaigns aim to let brands launch and optimize multiple campaign types with the help of AI under a single strategy, potentially spanning Sponsored Ads and ADSP within one coordinated setup.

Why does it matter for your 2026 strategy? If executed well, this could dramatically reduce the operational overhead of coordinating upper- and lower-funnel activity and make it easier for smaller teams to run sophisticated setups.

Perpetua’s angle: We’re intrigued, and will be leaning into testing as more detail emerges. Our working hypothesis:

• The optimization will likely rely heavily on rules-based inputs and pre-defined playbooks.

• That’s distinct from Perpetua’s ads engine, which continuously optimizes toward your goals using performance data, not static rules.

As this feature evolves, we’ll focus on where Full-Funnel Campaigns can complement goal-based optimization rather than compete with it, particularly for brands wanting a “single switch” for experimentation, with Perpetua refining performance over time.

Complete TV (Open beta)

Complete TV centralizes TV and streaming investments for TV buyers, making it easier to achieve full upfront delivery while managing, optimizing, and analyzing cross-publisher TV investments in a single environment.

Why does it matter for your 2026 strategy? Brands planning annual or semi-annual streaming TV budgets stand to gain the most here, especially those treating Amazon as a cornerstone of their TV strategy.

Perpetua’s angle: Our immediate product focus is upstream of this: expanding capabilities for brands actively moving up the funnel through Amazon display, video, and audio. As more brands lean into streaming and CTV as part of a full-funnel strategy, we’ll focus on the connective tissue: how these investments translate into downstream retail performance and how to allocate budgets across formats and objectives.

Relevance at scale: how Sponsored Ads are evolving

Amazon also spotlighted personalization and relevance improvements within Sponsored Ads. These are early, but worth monitoring. Perpetua’s bid engine is already equipped to optimize any test campaigns you launch, thanks to our campaign takeover capabilities.

Sponsored Products Video (Open beta, US mobile only)

Sponsored Products Video extends Sponsored Products by allowing advertisers to showcase up to five videos within existing campaigns. The format is currently in Open Beta, available only in the US and only on mobile.

Why does it matter for your 2026 strategy? This format has the potential to bring richer storytelling into high-intent placements, expanding on what Sponsored Brands Video has already unlocked.

Perpetua’s angle: We’re watching for how this is differentiated from Sponsored Brands Video beyond the number of featured videos and where it appears within the shopper journey. Today:

• Our app is already set up to take over Sponsored Products Video campaigns launched in the Ads Console.

• We provide campaign-level reporting for brands that add video to existing SP campaigns.

As performance data matures, and if we see consistent impact, we’ll deepen integrations and automation around this unit.

Sponsored Prompts (Open beta, US mobile)

Sponsored Prompts are auto-enabled on mobile in the US and surface product information within a new variation of Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. They pull from PDP content, Brand Stores, and ad campaigns to deliver contextually relevant prompts that aim to accelerate purchase decisions.

Why does it matter for your 2026 strategy? This is a brand-controlled-in-content, but not brand-controlled-in-format feature. There are no direct levers to “optimize” Sponsored Prompts the way you would traditional ads.

Perpetua’s angle: Because control is limited and reporting (for now) is largely tied to Sponsored Products, the path to outsized gains here isn’t obvious yet. Our guidance today:

• Keep PDPs and Brand Stores current and high quality as this is the content Amazon will surface.

• Monitor performance data in the Ads Console as it becomes available.

We haven’t seen strong, directional results yet, so our focus is on keeping you ready to capitalize once (or if) clearer levers emerge.

Sponsored Brands Reserved Share of Voice

Sponsored Brands Reserved Share of Voice guarantees top-of-search placement on branded keywords at a fixed, upfront price, simplifying brand defense strategies and taking the guesswork out of protecting core terms.

Why does it matter for your 2026 strategy? This makes brand defense more predictable from a cost standpoint, but also forces a strategic question: how much is that predictability actually worth relative to investing in unbranded growth?

Perpetua’s angle: After analyzing historical Sponsored Brands branded spend across Perpetua advertisers, we believe Amazon’s pricing for this feature appears fair, and likely informed by the same data set we’ve seen. When evaluating whether to invest, we recommend:

• Quantifying the value of branded term stability during key seasons and launches

• Estimating sales lost (or at risk) to competitor conquesting

• Weighing the tradeoff between paying a premium for guaranteed control vs. funneling that budget into unbranded or category growth

Many brands are already highly competent at brand defense, or are using Perpetua’s Top of Search Keyword boost to protect core terms. For some, Reserved SOV will simply formalize what they’re already achieving efficiently; for others, those dollars may be better deployed driving incremental demand.

Where to place your bets for 2026

Amazon’s unBoxed 2025 announcements solidify the strategy of infusing AI across the ad stack to drive efficiency, surface more automation, and unlock larger full-funnel investment. Brands that move early, and strategically, will see the compound effects sooner. We recommend:

Testing creative agents on hero ASINs: Use Amazon’s tools to accelerate asset creation, then let Perpetua’s bid engine optimize those campaigns against your performance goals.

Pairing ADSP audience automation with goal-based optimization: Experiment with Ads Agent to uncover new audiences, but validate whether scale comes with acceptable efficiency. Use Perpetua to keep budgets and bids aligned to your targets.

Validating media strategies with AMC and acting on the results: Leverage AMC Ads Agent to explore new insights, and use Perpetua’s Return on Customer Dashboard and other AMC-powered tools to translate those insights into concrete optimization steps.

We’re ramping up to put real weight behind the launches that can deliver outsized performance for our advertisers in 2026, prioritizing features that:

• Shorten the loop between insight and action

• Unlock measurable incremental growth

• Compound the value of our goal-based optimization, not duplicate it

If you’re ready to turn Amazon’s 2025 launches into your 2026 performance strategy, let’s connect.