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Amazon hands its AI the split of ad budgets across sponsored, display, video and streaming TV
Amazon's Full-Funnel Campaigns let its AI decide how an advertiser's budget runs across sponsored ads, display, video and streaming TV in one campaign. Amazon now sells the ad space and picks each buyer's mix across it while government allegations over its auction practices still follow its ad business.
The Investor · Invest desk
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What happened
- Amazon renamed its unified ad platform Amazon Ads Agent and is extending it from a conversational interface into an AI layer covering planning, campaign creation, optimization, measurement and support.
- Inside Full-Funnel, Amazon's AI continuously optimizes toward outcomes that include new-to-brand customers and Amazon's own long-term sales metric.
- A second launch, DVA+, merges Sponsored Display, Sponsored TV and programmatic display, video and audio buying, with a simplified mode in which Amazon handles targeting and optimization.
- Amazon unveiled the products on Sept. 29 at unBoxed, its flagship advertising conference, held this week in San Francisco.
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Why it matters
- exposure A buyer judging whether the AI's split worked relies on Amazon's measurement against a sales metric Amazon defines, produced in the same AI layer that made the split.
- decision Small sellers can buy programmatic across Amazon's formats without hiring a trading team; in exchange, Amazon's optimizer makes the targeting and bidding calls a trader would have made.
- constraint Folding Sponsored Ads and DVA into one campaign removes the step where a buyer worked out how upper- and lower-funnel spend should interact, a job Bhattacharyya said advertisers did through separate setups.
Amazon's argument for the automation is reach. Kelly MacLean, a vp at Amazon Ads, told Digiday the approach was about "bringing the power of programmatic advertising to all advertisers" [6]. The simplified DVA+ workflow is aimed at smaller businesses with no dedicated programmatic teams, and for Amazon that expands the pool of advertisers using its programmatic infrastructure [11]. Each of those advertisers comes in through a mode where Amazon handles targeting and optimization [3].
There are two descriptions of what a buyer keeps in advanced mode. Digiday's list has five items: targeting, deals, supply sources, frequency and bidding [3]. MacLean's has seven: objectives, products, creative approval, budgets, pacing, flight dates and location targeting, with the platform optimizing toward those goals [8]. Targeting is the only item on both [1]. Bidding is on the first list alone. In an auction the bid sets the price, so for a buyer it matters more which list governs than what MacLean called the approach, "human-led AI supported" [7].
According to Digiday, allegations from government authorities about Amazon's auction practices continue to dog parts of its media operations [4]. The report does not name the authorities or say what they allege. In the simplified mode, bidding is not among the settings the buyer keeps [3]. Where the auction is also Amazon's, the company would be running the sale and placing bids for some of the buyers in it. An inquiry into the auction and a buyer's question about the optimizer would then turn on the same bid data.
Two outcomes look plausible. Large buyers could keep their budgets in advanced mode and leave automation to small sellers; Digiday reports the setup is designed so larger buyers are not forced into the automated experience [12]. Or Full-Funnel, which asks the advertiser for three inputs [2], could become the default for everyone. Amit Bhattacharyya, vp for full-funnel products, AI and modeling at Amazon Ads, said the thinking behind it was: "What if we made it really simple, and yet very powerful for advertising?" [10]
I think the first outcome holds for agencies and the second for small sellers. That would mean the share of Amazon ad spend allocated by Amazon's AI grows from the small end first [11]. The counter-case is that Full-Funnel gets DVA+-style advanced settings of its own. In that case buyers of every size give up less than the current description, products, creative and budget in and AI execution out, implies [2]. The view is wrong if agencies move enterprise budgets onto Full-Funnel's default settings early, since large buyers would then be handing over the bid, deal and supply controls they now hold in DVA+ [3].
What to watch
- Whether the government authorities behind the auction allegations are identified, and whether any remedy covers bids Amazon places on advertisers' behalf.
- Whether Full-Funnel reporting breaks out spend and new-to-brand results by format, so buyers can check the AI's allocation against their own sales data.