At unBoxed on September 29, Amazon renamed its unified platform, which combines its demand-side platform and advertising console, as Amazon Ads Agent, while expanding the decisions handled by AI. Reporting from Digiday and Marketing Dive describes two approaches inside that platform: Full-Funnel Campaigns delegates execution across formats, while DVA+ includes an advanced mode that preserves more conventional buying controls.
Advertisers entering Full-Funnel Campaigns provide products, a budget and creative. Amazon then handles planning, campaign delivery and continuing optimization. Marketing Dive reports that the offering, previewed at the previous year's conference, is now available to all advertisers in the United States. DVA+ is due to begin rolling out in late October and continue through the end of the year.
Full-Funnel Campaigns links sponsored advertising with display, video and audio, including third-party inventory on the open internet. Digiday says the system optimizes toward outcomes including customers new to a brand and Amazon's Long-Term Sales metric. The buying process no longer requires the advertiser to assemble each of those components as a separate campaign and determine how they interact.
That integration also changes which decisions remain available. Advertisers approve creative, but cannot select individual channels or particular audiences inside Full-Funnel Campaigns, according to Digiday's interviews. Amazon provides visibility by format and is still developing more audience transparency. The product therefore hands some allocation decisions to Amazon's system.
DVA+ brings together capabilities previously handled through Sponsored Display, Sponsored TV and programmatic display, video and audio campaigns. Its simpler mode asks for an objective, budget and creative, leaving execution to Amazon. In advanced settings, buyers retain controls over targeting, supply sources, deals, frequency and bidding. Marketing Dive reports that DVA+ uses Brand+ and Performance+ for audience identification and outcome optimization. These options give DVA+ a different degree of advertiser control from the full-funnel product.
The conversational interface is expanding alongside the campaign formats. Marketing Dive reports new chat functions for media planning, targeting, campaign guidance, analytics and insight generation. The beta is reaching eligible advertisers across 20 marketplaces in 21 languages. Within Amazon Marketing Cloud, the interface also provides a route to insights without requiring the advertiser to write SQL. Amazon's creative agent operates within both DVA+ and Full-Funnel Campaigns to generate additional assets.
Amazon supplied performance examples to accompany the launches, but they remain company-provided cases. Marketing Dive describes a 206-day Canine Naturals campaign in which new-to-brand shoppers accounted for 41% of sales. In a second case, Cuisinart's second-quarter creative pilot reported an 18-point improvement in detail-page view rate, a 14% reduction in cost per detail-page view and a 10-point increase in branded search rate against traditionally produced assets. These figures describe the cited campaigns and do not constitute independent validation of results for every advertiser.
Digiday's reporting highlights questions that remain as automation takes a larger role. Amazon is working on explanations for the targeting and budget recommendations produced by its agent. Asked about visibility into the formation of individual winning auction prices, the company did not commit to providing that level of detail. Reporting where an ad ran and explaining how a particular price was set remain different kinds of transparency.