Amazon Immersion Day

AI & Generative AI in Advertising

A core theme was Amazon’s long-standing use of AI and machine learning, which has been embedded across its business for over 25 years—powering personalised shopping experiences, content recommendations, and now, advertising. The emphasis remains on a customer-first approach, ensuring ads are relevant, timely, and impactful.

Key Discussions & Innovations

• Prime Video Advertising – Amazon is enhancing Prime Video’s ad capabilities, helping brands drive deeper engagement.

• Brand Innovation – Showcased how brands are leveraging Amazon’s ecosystem, with Mars’ "For you that thing you did" campaign demonstrating how AI-driven signals can create personalised consumer rewards.

• Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) – Highlighted how AMC is evolving to provide faster insights, enabling advertisers to optimise full-funnel strategies more effectively.

Prime Video

Amazon is stepping up its Prime Video advertising game with new interactive formats designed to turn viewer attention into action. Rolling out in Australia in the second half of the year, these innovations include interactive pause ads, interactive video ads, and shoppable carousels.

• Interactive pause ads – Viewers can add products to their Amazon cart straight from the pause screen (for endemic brands) or get more info on a product or service (for non-endemic brands).

• Interactive video ads – Overlays interactive elements onto video creatives, letting users take actions like adding to cart or booking an appointment.

• Shoppable carousels – Allows viewers to browse and purchase multiple products featured within an ad.

Early US beta testing has shown these formats significantly boost brand awareness, favourability, purchase intent, and actual purchases compared to standard video ads. Big move from Amazon in bridging engagement and conversion.

Retail Media & The Amazon Business Maturity Framework (ABMF)

Retail media remains a major growth area, with global ad spend in the space set to rise significantly. Amazon is leading this evolution, moving beyond standard ad placements to fully integrated, data-driven solutions. The newly introduced ABMF helps businesses assess their maturity in activation, data, and analytics—offering a roadmap to scale their retail media strategies.

First-Party Data & Measurement

Amazon is doubling down on first-party signals, refining AMC to make it richer, simpler, and faster. The focus is on improving identity and measurement capabilities, addressing industry-wide challenges in attribution and effectiveness.

Takeaway

Amazon continues to push the boundaries of advertising innovation, integrating AI and retail media into a seamless, customer-centric approach. The event reinforced how brands and agencies can leverage Amazon’s ecosystem to drive measurable impact, from upper-funnel engagement to bottom-funnel conversions.