Amazon's New-to-Brand Customer May Already Be Yours

Hi there,

Amazon just summed up the future of performance marketing in a single sentence, and it went out in a product announcement.

At unBoxed last week, Amazon told advertisers to bring "their budget, products, and creative," and its AI would handle the rest [2].

Notice what's missing from that list. Who you're targeting. That decision now belongs to the platform.

Amazon just collapsed the media plan into one box

Quick recap if you missed it. At unBoxed, Amazon rolled its ad tools into one platform called Amazon Ads Agent and launched Full-Funnel Campaigns, which put sponsored ads, display, video, and streaming TV into a single campaign [1]. A second product, DVA+, folds Sponsored Display, Sponsored TV and programmatic buying into one experience, rolling out starting late October [2].

You pick the products, the creative, and the budget. Amazon's AI decides where it runs, who sees it, and how much to pay. It optimizes toward new-to-brand customers and long-term sales, using what Amazon calls "trillions of shopping, browsing, and streaming signals" [2].

Amit Bhattacharyya, who leads full-funnel products for Amazon Ads, framed the whole thing as a question: "What if we made it really simple, and yet very powerful for advertising?" [1]

Simple for the advertiser, yes. But the complexity didn't go away. It moved inside Amazon.

Every platform is running the same play

If this feels familiar, it should.

Meta did it with Advantage+. Google did it with Performance Max. TikTok did it with Smart+. Every major platform has spent the last few years pulling the same lever: fewer knobs for the marketer, more decisions for the algorithm.

Remember when a great performance marketer's edge was building audiences? Stacking interests. Layering exclusions. Testing 40 ad sets to find the one that hit. That skill set is being retired.

I don't think that's a bad thing. A lot of those audience builds were educated guesses anyway. But it changes what good looks like for a performance team.

Amazon says advertisers using its AI targeting recommendations reached more than 25% additional unique customers while lowering cost per impression by more than 10% [2]. That's Amazon grading its own homework, so hold the exact number loosely. The direction is the point. The platforms believe their AI finds your buyer better than you can. And, on their own data, they're usually right.

When the platform builds the audience, the marketer's job stops being targeting. It becomes feeding. Feeding it creative and budget, sure. But mostly, feeding it the truth about who actually bought.

Every platform only sees its own slice

Amazon can offer a "just give us your budget" button because it sees the whole loop on its own turf. The ad, the browse, the add-to-cart, the purchase, the repeat purchase. All under one roof. But even Amazon only sees Amazon.

When it optimizes for "new-to-brand," that means new to your brand on Amazon. If someone sees your Amazon ad and buys at Target, Amazon's targeting doesn't learn from that sale. And if someone already buys you at Target and then buys on Amazon for the first time? Amazon still counts them as new-to-brand.

Your most loyal retail shopper can show up in Amazon's reporting as a brand-new acquisition.

Bhattacharyya said it himself: "We are figuring out how to give them more transparency on the audience side" [1]. Which tells you advertisers are already asking the right question. Who exactly did your AI find, and were they actually new to me?

Now think about the rest of your media plan. Meta, Google, and TikTok are asking for the same trust. Hand over the targeting and let the algorithm find the buyers. But for most omnichannel brands, those algorithms only learn from the sales that happen on your own site. The shopper who saw your ad on Instagram and bought at Target? Invisible. The one who grabbed you at Walmart after a YouTube pre-roll? Invisible.

Every platform is driving with its own partial map, and none of them can see the whole road.

The brands winning in this era won't be the ones with the cleverest audience builds. Those are going away. They'll be the ones whose algorithms learn from total sales, retail and marketplace included.

Every platform just told us the same thing. Give us your budget and your creative, and we'll find your customer. But whether that buyer/audience is representative or not depends on whether you can actually tell them who your customers actually are.

Talk soon,

Kait

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Sources

[1] Modern Retail (via Digiday), Ronan Shields, "At its flagship unBoxed conference, Amazon Ads collapses buying silos as AI takes a bigger role in media decisions."

[2] Amazon Ads, "Introducing Amazon Ads Agent, your AI-powered ad platform."

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