Amazon ushered in a new era for television advertising when it converted Prime Video into an ad-supported experience by default in 2024. By the middle of this year, some 130 million U.S. viewers were on Prime Video’s ad tier, watching between four and six minutes of ads per hour, according to an Adweek report.
The move is part of the company’s long-term plan to dominate television advertising as viewership shifts from traditional broadcast and cable TV to streaming platforms. “The digital advertising landscape is rapidly evolving with streaming TV becoming mainstream,” says Kelly MacLean, VP of Amazon DSP, the company’s ad-buying platform.
Under MacLean, Amazon’s been rolling out a slew of adtech tools to help businesses of all sizes reach viewers on Prime Video and even streaming rivals, including Netflix, NBCUniversal, and Disney. Amazon’s also helping with the creative side: It introduced an AI-powered video generator earlier this year that allows advertisers to easily create their own spots.
Amazon’s investments are paying off. For the past decade, the company’s cloud-computing arm, AWS, has been the engine powering Amazon’s dominance. AWS brought in $91 billion in revenue in the first nine months of 2025, up 18% year over year. Amazon Ads is shaping up to be the next juggernaut: It’s taken in $47 billion so far this year, and grew 24% last quarter.
Jay Richman, Amazon’s vice president of creative experiences, says Amazon operates one of “the most vast and sprawling ad networks on the planet.” Amazon is now preparing to turn this sprawling network into a well-oiled machine with the help of generative AI.
At its annual unBoxed conference, which is being held this week in Nashville, Amazon is unveiling a suite of agentic AI tools that will do everything from brainstorm creative concepts and produce video ads to advise advertisers of all sizes on where to place the finished campaigns for the most impact.
The result, says Richman, is “taking an advertising process that traditionally requires weeks of work and significant financial investment and transforming it into something that can be accomplished within a few hours at no additional cost to advertisers.” Here’s a look at what’s coming.
Unifying the streaming ad market
Though other major tech companies, including Google and Meta, have been integrating AI in their advertising products to make certain tasks easier for ad buyers, Amazon is unique in positioning its DSP platform as the go-to place for buying television ads.
Over the past two years, Amazon Ads has secured partnerships with major publishers including Netflix, Paramount, Fox Corp, NBCUniversal, Disney, and Roku, allowing advertisers to gain access to the partners’ inventory. The Disney and Roku partnerships were announced just in time for Cannes this past summer. In September, Amazon and Netflix announced a plan to offer programmatic buying on Netflix’s Ads Plan.
MacLean says that Amazon has been able to notch deals with every major streamer—even its rivals—because it’s adding value for them through capabilities like Amazon Cloud Publisher, a service that helps streamers and others use Amazon’s data to make their ad inventory more valuable.
Even as Amazon creates new tech and services to help publishers, it’s making it easier for a wide range of advertisers—from big brands to small businesses—to start running ads. And that begins by offering them a unified platform.
Behind the scenes, MacLean’s team has rebuilt the backend of Amazon’s ad platform to allow advertisers to buy targeted spots not on Amazon’s own properties and across the wider internet. MacLean says that Amazon is using AI to harness the “trillions of signals” it has about consumers’ shopping and viewing habits to help target the right people at the right time and on the right platform.
“A lot of advertisers are just dealing with mass fragmentation,” MacLean says. “They’re duplicating who they’re reaching. They’re wasting media dollars. So our focus has been on how to innovate and help marketers through these challenges, making it easier to distribute their ad spend in a way that can reach the right users.”
Introducing AI agents
Amazon is showcasing its next slate of tools and services for digital and video advertisers at unBoxed this week.
One of the new features is Campaign Manager, which unifies the ads console and Amazon DSP into an individual media buying tool, allowing advertisers of all sizes to manage their campaigns through one entry point.
But the most groundbreaking new features take the form of agentic AI. The company has a new Creative Agent tool that will be integrated into the unified Amazon Ads console. Advertisers will be able to summon the tool via chat to make streaming and sponsored ads for television and elsewhere.
Using natural language prompts, advertisers can ask the Creative Agent to conduct audience research, brainstorm concepts and create storyboards, and even produce display and video ads using generative AI.
“This is truly game-changing for the industry, allowing mid-market and small brands to design creative ad campaigns and professional-quality advertisements that were previously only accessible to large brands with substantial resources,” Richman says.
Once those ads are complete, Amazon’s new Ads Agent tool, which can be accessed via a chat window throughout the Amazon Ads platform, offers recommendations on how advertisers can improve the efficacy of their campaigns.
An advertiser, for example, could upload a custom media plan and let the tool configure all the campaign structures and the ad groups—or let it optimize all of the advertiser’s campaigns at scale using only natural language.
“The goal for every brand is reaching the right people wherever they are and having compelling ads that drive those business results,” MacLean says. “But with our vast offerings, we’ve heard from customers that they also need a more streamlined process.” The Ads Agent tool is designed to be the specialist that can help simplify everything.
Other products Amazon announced include Full-Funnel Campaigns, an agentic AI tool that will make advertising easier to launch and manage across multiple channels and formats, and sponsored product videos, which let advertisers showcase products within the Amazon store.
Unlike traditional short video ads, these product videos will offer deeper demonstrations and highlight key features. Customers can browse between videos, skip to specific sections, and click through to the product detail page on Amazon for more information—creating a more interactive and personalized shopping experience.
“The goal is to provide shoppers more information at a glance than is possible today with just static product shots,” Richman says.
MacLean says that the ultimate goal with all these tools is to make Amazon Ads “the best place” to buy advertising. “We’re going to continue to simplify, automate, and drive performance,” she says.
Amazon, it seems, is becoming the everything store for advertisers.
