unBoxed 2024: What’s New From Amazon Ads and Why It Matters

Summary

Amazon’s unBoxed 2024 revealed a clear focus on full-funnel, omnichannel advertising, introducing advanced tools and features to help advertisers connect with customers. Key innovations include an updated DSP experience, no-code AMC solutions, AI-powered campaign and creative tools, new measurement systems, and audience bid boosting. These updates align with the industry’s move towards cohesive strategies across touchpoints, offering deeper insights and refined targeting for better results.

Amazon Ads’ unBoxed event is the company’s annual showcase of new retail media tools, features, and strategies to help advertisers connect more effectively with customers. With keynote presentations, product reveals, and insights from industry experts, unBoxed continues to serve as a vital touchpoint for marketers looking to stay ahead of evolving trends and maximize their advertising potential.

This year’s unBoxed 2024 was dedicated to full-funnel advertising – with frequent usage of the term “omnichannel” – and it was very clear that this has become the main focus and growth engine for Amazon Ads. While Sponsored Product ads remain a foundation for the Amazon Ads business, everything else they’re building is where their interests now lie.

Relying on a single channel or tactic in retail media limits the ability to reach and convert shoppers effectively. A full-funnel approach connects all touchpoints—both on and off retail sites—to engage consumers with consistent, relevant messaging throughout their journey. This strategy enhances the shopping experience and drives better results by ensuring every interaction counts.

At its core, a full-funnel approach requires seamless connectivity between different media types, data points, tactics, and capabilities. Skai’s strength shines as an omnichannel, cross-publisher platform built to address this complexity. For us, a full-funnel strategy isn’t just a direction—it’s a fundamental belief in how marketing should be done to drive more meaningful and cohesive results. 

And more importantly, Skai is the only platform that is already built for this. While others try to play catch-up – which will prove difficult, if not impossible – we stand alone in truly delivering an omnichannel approach to full-funnel, cross-publisher advertising. 

Key announcements from unBoxed 2024

At Skai, we were excited to see many of the new innovations unveiled at Amazon Ads’ unBoxed 2024, as they align with our vision of where the industry is headed. The focus on full-funnel connectivity and advanced tools resonates with our belief in creating cohesive, data-driven strategies that maximize impact. 

Let’s take a look at some of the key announcements and explore how they fit into this evolving landscape.

A refreshed Amazon DSP experience

The new Amazon DSP experience includes updates to the user interface to improve the customer experience, making the platform more intuitive and transparent. Enhancements such as standard line items and a central Home Page with Recommendations & Insight Cards will provide advertisers with clearer, more actionable insights. Read more.

Maximizing impact with Skai: With an improved Amazon DSP console, we can now focus even more on our unique connectivity, intelligence, and optimization across retail media, paid search, and paid social. This makes Skai even more of a perfect complement to Amazon Ads! New features like campaign creation and frequency-capping tools will increase streaming TV adoption for new-to-CTV advertisers. For example, frequency capping allows brands to reduce spend while increasing precision, leading to broader reach with net new customers if reinvested.

Ads data manager and no-code AMC solutions

Amazon Ads introduced an ads data manager, which offers advertisers a secure interface to upload signals once and use them across Amazon DSP and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC). Integrated with leading providers like Treasure Data and Salesforce, this tool enables advertisers to connect their first-party data to Amazon DSP audiences. Read more

New AMC solutions also introduced no-code capabilities in an intuitive interface—extending AMC’s sophisticated analytics capabilities to brands of all sizes. Read more.

Maximizing impact with Skai: The combination of Amazon’s data and no-code AMC capabilities means advertisers can quickly uncover advanced insights for audience targeting and measurement. Skai’s platform is built to support these insights by integrating with Amazon DSP once available via API. This is not just about integrating data into Amazon but using these unified data points for enhanced optimization and actionability through our visualization and analysis tools.

AI-powered Performance+ campaigns

Amazon introduced Performance+, an expanded campaign type for Amazon DSP that uses AI and first-party data for automated audience creation, optimization, and campaign setup. This feature now includes additional tactics like remarketing and retention, offering automated solutions for more refined targeting. Early adopters have seen significant gains, including a 51% improvement in customer acquisition costs in one case study. Read more.

Maximizing impact with Skai: As an Amazon Ads partner, Skai can use Performance+ to help brands reach the right customers at the right time. With AI-powered optimization leveraging Amazon’s first-party signals to rank users hourly, Skai supports refined targeting and pacing controls to maximize conversions and efficiency. This strategy is particularly beneficial for both endemic and non-endemic advertisers running streaming TV campaigns.

Advanced measurement tools

Amazon has introduced a suite of advanced measurement tools, including a new multi-touch attribution system that uses machine learning to understand how every ad engagement contributes to purchasing decisions. Additionally, the introduction of Long-Term Sales metrics offers insights into the 12-month impact of brand campaigns, while Conversion Path reporting provides a detailed 60-day view of the customer journey. Read more.

Maximizing impact with Skai: As the industry moves away from focusing solely on ROAS, these new measurement tools open up more opportunities to assess impact across the funnel. Skai is designed to integrate any data point, connect it to anything, and drive actions, especially in incrementality solutions such as ours that align with this evolving measurement landscape.

AI-powered creative tools

In a move that democratizes high-quality ad creation, Amazon Ads introduced a trio of AI-powered creative tools. The video generator enables brands of all sizes to produce compelling video ads without breaking the bank. The new audio generator creates interactive audio ads in minutes for audio advertisers. The crown jewel is the AI creative studio, a comprehensive platform that combines AI functionality with expert-level controls, allowing advertisers to create and iterate on high-quality ad content with ease. Read more.

Maximizing impact with Skai: It’s great that Amazon Ads is offering more visual ad formats and placements, especially for marketing teams who typically do not work on visual advertising. Skai will support these creatives in our Creative Center, a hub within our platform that helps with managing and optimizing creative assets at scale across multitudes of channels and publishers. 

With Creative Center, all assets are brought into one central location so marketers can easily monitor and compare performance insights for creative assets across all campaigns in one place and test different versions to see what works best. The solution also enables faster activation and collaboration, allowing marketers to close the feedback loop between analysis, activation, and creative iteration.

Ad Relevance and New Product Campaigns

Amazon Ads introduced Ad Relevance, which leverages signals, addressability, and AI to deliver more relevant ads without third-party cookies. Additionally, the New Product Campaigns service helps brands launch products more efficiently during the crucial first 90 days by leveraging data-driven media plans and Amazon Marketing Cloud insights. Read more.

Maximizing impact with Skai: Skai already supports existing offerings and will continue integrating new Amazon capabilities as they become available. As a comprehensive platform, Skai enables brands to leverage rich data to optimize outcomes across other retailers and media types beyond just Amazon, providing a true omnichannel solution.

Audience bid boosting

Amazon introduced audience bid boosting, a feature powered by AI that offers more bid controls to target high-purchase-intent shoppers and improve both sales and ad efficiency. Advertisers can create custom audience segments by combining their first-party data with Amazon’s, through the privacy-safe Amazon Marketing Cloud. Read more.

Maximizing impact with Skai: Audiences are the “secret sauce” of retail media, and allowing advertisers to better leverage these capabilities for optimization is a straightforward value add. With Skai’s Audience Center, complex insights from Amazon’s audience signals can be translated into actionable strategies, helping marketers expand reach to relevant audiences and discover new opportunities for display and video advertising. Audience Center’s integration with Amazon DSP enables data-driven decisions that enhance engagement and ROI throughout the customer journey.

Limited ads on Prime Video in select regions

Starting in 2025, Amazon will introduce limited advertisements on Prime Video in regions including Brazil, India, Japan, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. This move aims to support ongoing content creation while helping brands connect with new audiences. Read more.

Maximizing impact with Skai: As Prime Video expands its ad offerings, Skai is positioned to quickly support new marketplaces, unlocking value for customers as these opportunities become available. This allows marketers to extend their reach and engage audiences in new regions.

Looking ahead: embracing the full-funnel future of retail media advertising

The key takeaway from unBoxed 2024 is clear: the future of advertising isn’t just about individual tactics or isolated channels; it’s about connecting every piece of the puzzle to create cohesive and impactful strategies. 

As Amazon continues to innovate with full-funnel solutions and advanced data tools, the opportunity lies in embracing this interconnected approach. It’s not just about adapting to new features—it’s about rethinking the way brands engage with consumers across touchpoints and unlocking the power of a more connected ecosystem.

At Skai, we believe this shift toward true omnichannel and full-funnel strategies is essential for staying ahead. By prioritizing seamless integration, rich data insights, and cohesive execution, marketers can elevate their strategies to meet the demands of an increasingly complex digital landscape.

For us, unlocking new revenue opportunities and driving operational efficiency throughout the customer journey isn’t on the roadmap – it’s already here.