All articles
Amazon Rewires Its Ad Business With New AI-Powered Command Center
Amazon consolidates its ad platforms into a single, AI-powered command center called Campaign Manager to simplify ad buying.
Key Points
- Amazon consolidates its ad platforms into a single, AI-powered command center called Campaign Manager to simplify ad buying.
- The new platform features AI agents that automate campaign creation and generate video and display ads from simple prompts.
- The move directly challenges programmatic ad giants like The Trade Desk, with holding company Omnicom already shifting a significant ad budget to Amazon.
- Amazon is offering an aggressive 1% fee on open web ads, significantly undercutting competitors to attract more advertisers.
Amazon is overhauling its advertising business, consolidating its sprawling DSP and Ads Console into a single, AI-powered platform called Campaign Manager. The move, announced at the company's unBoxed conference, aims to simplify a notoriously complex ad-buying process and tighten Amazon's grip on the digital advertising market.
Rise of the agents: The new platform is packed with AI assistants to do the heavy lifting. An "Ads Agent" can take a media plan and automatically build out campaigns, while a "Creative Agent" will scan a brand's product pages to autogenerate video and display ads. According to Amazon, the goal is to let advertisers accomplish with a simple prompt what once took hours of manual work.
Shots fired: The consolidation is a direct assault on programmatic ad giants like The Trade Desk. The new approach is already showing teeth, as AdExchanger first reported that holding company Omnicom began shifting a "double-digit share" of its programmatic ad budget from The Trade Desk to Amazon in the third quarter of 2025.
The price of admission: Amazon is greasing the wheels for this shift with an aggressive pricing model: a mere 1% fee on open web ads and no fees for certain deals on its own properties. That pricing is a direct shot at The Trade Desk, which reportedly charges a take rate of roughly 20%. The move lowers the barrier to entry for smaller advertisers previously priced out of Amazon's powerful DSP.
Building the moat: The platform overhaul is just one piece of a much broader offensive. The company recently rolled out a free, 24/7 news destination on Prime Video and is taking direct aim at Spotify's viral Wrapped campaign with its own "2025 Delivered" feature, adding more ad inventory and user touchpoints to its ecosystem.
These moves all tie back to a philosophy of patient, long-term investment articulated by CEO Andy Jassy. Amazon's ad business, which brought in nearly $18 billion in the third quarter alone, is the result of that persistence—methodically building an interconnected ecosystem to create a competitive moat that's nearly impossible to cross.
