Amazon unBoxed 2026: 7 shifts brands need to plan for

Every year, Amazon’s advertising event sets the direction for the year ahead. At unBoxed 2026 in San Francisco, that direction was hard to miss: AI will take on more and more of the work of advertising on Amazon.

 

Amazon’s stated goal is to simplify advertising across the full funnel, meet shoppers inside the conversations they’re already having, and connect the first impression to a verified purchase. Day one was about products, tools and data. Day two, under the banner “Reimagine”, was about what brands can do with the time AI gives back.

 

Our team followed both days. Here are the seven shifts we believe brands should plan for, and what they mean in practice.

1. Shopping is becoming a conversation

With Branded Conversations, Sponsored Brands prompts turn into a multi-turn dialogue inside Alexa for Shopping. Shoppers can compare products, ask which one fits their needs and build a routine, with answers drawn from the brand’s catalog, reviews and the content it supplies: buying guides, compatibility tables, usage tips.

 

Amazon reports that shoppers who click a Sponsored Prompt convert 48% more often and spend 21% more, and that nearly 7 in 10 purchasers are new to the brand (Amazon Internal, US, 2026).

 

What it means: your detail pages, A+ content and Brand Store now write your ads. A thin page makes a thin conversation.

2. One campaign, one budget

Full-Funnel Campaigns, now in open beta in the US, bundles sponsored ads, display, video and streaming TV under one budget and one optimization engine. Brands set their products, budget and creative; Amazon’s AI handles the mix. In early beta, Amazon reports 67% higher long-term ROAS and a 29% lower new-to-brand cost per purchase than advertisers’ independently configured campaigns.

 

At the same time, DVA+ merges display, video and audio buying, and Campaign Manager becomes Amazon Ads Agent.

 

What it means: the question is no longer how to build each campaign, but which products to hand to automation and which to keep under direct control.

3. Immediate ROAS is giving way to 12-month value

Full-Funnel Campaigns optimizes for Long-Term Sales: immediate sales plus the estimated value of new customers over 12 months. On stage, brands and agencies pushed the same idea. PBS Distribution talked about focusing on lifetime value rather than ROAS. Others insisted that each stage of the funnel needs its own definition of success.

 

What it means: long-term value is the right compass. To move budget with confidence, brands also need an independent read of what is truly incremental.

4. Creative is no longer the bottleneck

Responsive eCommerce Creative now adds rich media, video, carousels and Alexa+ placements, and Branded REC applies a brand’s logo, colors and guidelines. Dynamic TV Creative tailors the interactive overlay of a single streaming ad to each audience. TV-quality video can be generated from product pages in minutes.

 

Results shared on stage were striking: Revlon reported 5.9x ROAS against beauty and personal care benchmarks with REC, and Nestlé Purina saw 3 to 4 times higher new-to-brand rates when journeys included audio.

 

What it means: production is getting cheap. Taste, brand guidelines and a clean asset library are what make AI creative look like you.

5. Your product and first-party data is now the fuel

Prompts, conversations, display creative and generated video all draw on the same inputs: titles, attributes, images, A+ content and Brand Store. Ads data manager makes it easier to connect CRM, website and offline data to Amazon Ads.

 

What it means: weak inputs make weak outputs. Brands that connect their data while keeping their own unified customer view can tell a customer who is new to the brand from one who is only new to Amazon.

6. AI agents are joining the team

Amazon Ads Agent lets advertisers query close to 1,000 metrics in plain language and plan media in one conversation. The Amazon Ads MCP Server lets brands and partners plug their own AI agents into Amazon Ads. The consensus on stage: trust agents to think, but keep humans in charge of approving spend.

 

What it means: before switching any agent on, define what “better” means and who approves budget decisions.

7. Amazon Ads now reaches beyond the Amazon store

DVA+ works for brands that don’t sell on Amazon. Interactive video ads are expanding to third-party streaming publishers, starting with Samsung TV+. Sponsored Services connects shoppers with local service providers. Speakers described Amazon going from “gimmick” to a mainstay of every media plan.

 

What it means: Amazon Ads now belongs in the overall media mix, and should be judged with the same cross-channel lens as search, social and TV.

What stays in your hands

Taken together, these announcements make execution easier. They also shift where the real decisions sit. When AI runs the campaigns, four roles make the difference:

 

• Setting the course: choosing which products to automate, which to steer directly, and what goal the algorithm should pursue.
• Feeding the machine: making sure your content, creative and data are ready to speak for you.
• Verifying: knowing whether sales were created or just captured.
• Arbitrating: deciding where the next budget goes, across every channel.

 

A few questions worth asking your team today:

 

• Do you know which products to hand to automation, and which to keep under your control?
• Can you tell a customer new to your brand from one who is only new to Amazon?
• Is your Amazon budget weighed against Google, Meta and TV, or decided on its own?