Amazon Ads has stopped selling a DSP and a console as two products. On September 29 it renamed the combined platform Amazon Ads Agent, and the buying tools that used to sit in separate workflows now sit behind one conversational layer.
What Amazon announced
At its unBoxed 2026 event in San Francisco, Amazon Ads said the unified platform it introduced a year earlier is now called Amazon Ads Agent and is “powered by agentic AI”. The platform carries three campaign types: sponsored ads, Display, Video, and Audio, and a new one called Full-Funnel Campaigns.
Full-Funnel Campaigns bring sponsored ads, display, video and streaming TV into a single campaign. Advertisers supply a budget, products and creative, and Amazon’s AI plans, executes and optimizes. Advertisers approve creatives before launch. Amazon says the format is available to all advertisers in the United States today.
Display, Video, and Audio buying becomes DVA+, which Amazon says combines what used to be managed through Sponsored Display, Sponsored TV and programmatic campaigns. Advertisers pick a goal such as sales, traffic or awareness, add products and creative, set a budget and launch. DVA+ begins rolling out in late October. Amazon’s own Amazon DSP page now reads “Amazon DSP is now part of Amazon Ads Agent”.
Control stays available, by Amazon’s account
The obvious worry with an agent in front of a DSP is losing the levers. Amazon addresses that directly. In DVA+, “advanced settings” let experienced programmatic buyers manage targeting, activate deals, choose supply sources, set frequency caps and configure bidding strategies. Kelly MacLean, Vice President, Engineering, Science, & Product at Amazon Ads, framed the split this way in Amazon’s announcement: “Rapid advancements in AI are allowing us to deliver better advertising with improved performance across all channels and customer objectives”.
The company also says existing campaigns, audience segments, creative assets, deal management and performance history carry forward, that current pricing carries forward, and that sponsored ads remain cost-per-click with no minimum spend. Existing Amazon DSP certifications stay valid.
The numbers Amazon published
Amazon’s unBoxed 2026 recap reports that beta testers of Full-Funnel Campaigns saw 67% higher long-term return on ad spend and 29% lower cost to acquire new-to-brand customers. The same page says advertisers using the generative creative tools drove up to 71% more product coverage and up to 15% sales growth versus their results before adopting the suite.
From the conversational experience launched last year, Amazon reports that advertisers who applied targeting recommendations through natural language saw more than 25% additional unique customers and more than 10% lower cost per impression on average. Those are Amazon’s figures about its own products, with no outside audit attached. The conversational experience is in expanded closed beta, and Amazon says new capabilities such as media planning and natural language analytics will roll out over the coming months.
Dentsu’s Jason O’Toole, EVP, Head of Commerce & Retail Media, is quoted in the announcement saying his team’s strategists “spend less time on execution mechanics and more time on the insights and creative thinking that drive results for our clients.”
The shift: the buying surface is becoming the agent
Strip away the product names and the pattern is that a platform’s interface is turning into an agent. Reporting that used to take a report builder is now a question. Amazon says Amazon Ads Agent puts nearly 1,000 metrics behind natural language. Setup that used to take a campaign type per format is now one objective and one budget.
We have been tracking this on MarTech Edition. Agentic AI Enters Ad Buying, One Workflow at a Time covered the early, narrow automations. Amazon’s announcement takes the same idea to the whole platform. Our read, and it is ours rather than Amazon’s, is that the consolidation matters more than any single feature, because it changes what a buyer has to learn, audit and negotiate.
It also lands in a market that has not agreed on shared language for agents. Ad Tech Can’t Agree on One Language for AI Buyers laid out that gap. Every platform that folds its tools into an agent defines its own objects, its own approval steps and its own reports.
What it means for the marketing leader
Three practical points follow from the announcement itself.
First, the rename is a migration for your team even though Amazon says no action is required to keep campaigns running. Certifications stay valid, but Amazon encourages recertification on the updated courses. Plan training time for the people who run your programmatic buys.
Second, the choice between guided and manual is now a setting you control campaign by campaign. Amazon says advertisers can use manual building tools, let Amazon’s AI optimize, or mix both. Decide which campaigns get which mode before the rollout reaches you, and write the rule down. A rule that keeps brand-safety-sensitive and high-spend campaigns in advanced settings is easier to hold than one made in the middle of a launch.
Third, treat the published lifts as hypotheses. Full-Funnel Campaigns reports on new-to-brand and long-term sales metrics alongside impressions, clicks and sales. Those long-term metrics are defined by Amazon. Run a holdout against your own results before moving budget on the strength of a 67% figure from a beta.
What to do next
Ask your Amazon Ads representative three questions this month. When does DVA+ reach your account? Which advanced settings carry over from your current DSP setup? What does the Full-Funnel Campaigns report show for your category, and which metrics does it define differently from the ones you use today? Then pick one product line for a controlled test, keep a matched set of campaigns in the old workflow, and compare after one full purchase cycle. The answer will show whether the agent earns the budget or only simplifies the interface.
Source: Amazon Ads
