Amazon unBoxed 2025 Recap: What Actually Matters for Leading Brands?

Amazon unBoxed 2025 brought a wave of new AI-powered tools, unified campaign management, and advanced analytics designed to help brands optimize spend and gain deeper customer insights across every stage of the funnel.

If you’ve been following the announcements and recaps from Amazon and event attendees, you may feel you’ve seen it all already. But before you tune out, don’t miss our true expert opinions at the end of this article! 

While the updates have been shared widely by Amazon and industry voices, what really matters is which innovations will actually move the needle for your brand. Skip to the end of this recap to the “Envision Horizons’ Take” section, where we cut through the noise to reveal the updates with the biggest bottom-line impact. Plus tips on how your brand can start capitalizing before the competition catches up. 

TLDR unBoxed 2025 Updates:

unBoxed 2025 unveiled unified campaign management, letting brands control Sponsored Ads and DSP in one AI-driven platform. 

Creative Agent now produces custom video, audio, and display assets for every campaign, ideal for asset-light brands. 

Ads Agent debuted, enabling quick optimizations and insights with natural language commands. 

AMC added deeper analytics and segmentation, while expanded DSP inventory and new formats (like Sponsored Products Video) support full-funnel strategies. 

The focus was on simplification, automation, and better insights, making high-impact advertising easier for leading consumer brands.

Recap of unBoxed 2025 Announcements:

Amazon’s big themes this year were creative and operational automation, holistic campaign management, and direct access to premium audiences and media.

Unified Campaign Manager: SP + DSP

Amazon now unifies Sponsored Products (SP) and DSP campaign management under one predictive, agentic AI-driven “command center.” This means brands can:

• Optimize allocation across the funnel, using real-time intelligence to shift spend where it matters (brand, awareness, performance, or conversion).​
• Identify opportunities and bottlenecks with cross-channel performance views, eliminating data silos and duplicated manual effort.​

This isn’t just a workflow improvement! This is Amazon’s step towards unifying full funnel advertising. It’s becoming easier for advertisers to implement DSP awareness tactics. Brands that delay true SP and DSP integration will miss out on compounded learning, smarter allocation, and serious operational efficiencies.

Creative Agent: AI-Powered Asset Creation

Amazon’s Creative Agent in Creative Studio now allows brands to rapidly develop, refine, and scale creative across audio, video, and display formats. 

• Build differentiated, custom assets for every campaign or segment (examples: new product line, limited-time color drops, or regional campaigns​).
• Create and test variants for Sponsored Brand Video, update messaging for new product launches, or produce fresh audio assets for streaming and CTV at speed.​

Ads Agent: Conversational Analytics & Optimization

With Ads Agent, teams can use natural language instructions to:

• Instantly surface high-spend/no-conversion campaigns, find outlying CPCs, or identify new scaling opportunities for high-ROAS efforts. No more complex spreadsheets or SQL.​
• Bulk action on findings, whether it’s bid adjustments, negative keyword audits, or customizing branded/non-branded performance breakdowns.​

AMC (Amazon Marketing Cloud): Granular Audience Insight & Control

• Amazon Marketing Cloud’s five-year purchase data lookback has been available in limited beta and became broadly promoted by Amazon in 2025. While not brand new, it was a major focal point at UnBoxed as it only recently became widely accessible for all brands this year. The real breakthrough for 2025 is the expanded ad signal lookback: advertiser impression, click, and engagement data can now be accessed across 13 to 25 months- this is a brand new capability.
• The expanded ad traffic lookback window from 13 months to 25 months allows sellers to analyze advertising performance across a significantly longer time period. Brands can segment, exclude, or reactivate past buyers, suppress awareness oversaturation, or craft “lapsed” reengagement plays.​
• AMC’s AI agent now lets any marketer or analyst build advanced queries, generate reporting, and unlock audience insights with simple commands.​

The ability to segment, re-engage, and exclude based on up to five years of data transforms how brands can win back lapsed shoppers, suppress over-targeted groups, and fine-tune loyalty. Those leaning into granular AMC strategy will see deeper customer insights and differentiation, while laggards will drown in noise.

Check out Jeff Cohen’s insights on this. 

DSP, Performance+ / Brand+, and Media Mix Modeling

• Amazon further expanded DSP reach and inventory, now bundled with sports like NBA/WNBA and premium streaming partners (e.g., Roku), all accessible with new fixed-rate and PMPs for maximum transparency.​
• Test Performance+ and Brand+ (AI-driven campaign types), and use the evolving Ads Planning and MMM tools to build data-driven, cross-platform investment strategies—and justify spend in the C-suite with clear forecasts.​

Sponsored Products Video & Prompts

• New Sponsored Products Video (SPV) brings interactive, feature-rich video directly to the SERP, showing +15% CTR and +21% conversion lifts for early adopters.​ (source: Amazon)
• AI-powered prompts create more engaging, conversational shopping experiences, building stronger branded intent capture and discovery.​

Sponsored Brands Reserve and Branded Search

• Brands can now “lock in” fixed rates on branded keywords to protect against conquesting, though impact on cost efficiency will require careful, ongoing measurement.​
• Up to 86% of shoppers have tried brands they’ve never purchased from before, reinforcing the importance of both offensive and defensive branded ad strategies.​ (Source: Amazon)

---

Envision Horizons’ Takes | Expert Insights on unBoxed 2025

Matt Koski, Director of Media at Envision Horizons, shares key, operator-level takeaways and tactical recommendations:

“Creative Agent continues to get better and better. For large brands, this means we can build truly customized assets for key niche segments (men’s fragrances, seasonal styles, or underserved colorways) without the historic bottleneck of creative supply.”

How to capitalize: Start testing Creative Agent to generate asset variations for campaigns, especially those targeting new segments or launching seasonal products. Test video, audio, and display formats (even with limited creative budgets) and measure performance to double down on what resonates. Empower your brand teams to request creative tailored for keywords or audience niches often overlooked due to asset constraints.

“Ads Agent is a clear efficiency unlock. With natural language filters, my team can audit high-spend/no-sale campaigns or bulk-adjust outlier CPCs in seconds. It’s democratizing optimization, putting power in the hands of all users, not just analysts.”

How to capitalize: Shift from reactive reporting to proactive diagnosis. Leverage Ads Agent to run natural language filters for bleeding spend, inefficient keywords, or scaling wins. Use bulk actions to adjust bids or pause campaigns instantly. Consider training even non-technical team members to leverage Ads Agent so everyone can contribute to optimization.

“AMC’s expanded lookback and new AI agent are game changers for audience strategy. We can now exclude lapsed buyers, reactivate past loyalists, or suppress overexposed segments—all with simple queries, enabling more surgical full-funnel planning.”

How to capitalize: Build custom AMC audiences for winback and new-to-brand targeting. Exclude recent buyers from prospecting to sharpen efficiency, and use reactivation tactics for shoppers who last purchased seasons ago. Create a prompt library for your team to accelerate granular audience queries, enabling full-funnel audience orchestration with minimal technical barriers. Use AMC capabilities to message ideal customers segments ahead of tentpole events.

Subscribe to Envision Horizons’ newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, where we share case studies outlining our latest strategies, including AMC wins. 

“Performance+ and Brand+, the new AI-powered campaign types in DSP, are ripe for test-and-learn. We’re prioritizing careful measurement of incrementality, not just overall ROAS or topline gains, to ensure true value for our large-brand clients.”

How to capitalize: Pilot AI-driven DSP campaign formats, but demand rigorous control and post-analysis. Measure organic sales and topline shifts to catch cannibalization, and use incremental reporting to separate true growth from mere spend redistribution. Share learnings across your media/ops teams, and build Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) scenarios to forecast cross-channel impact before scaling up Performance+/Brand+ investments.

Matt also shared thoughts on agency-client partnerships:

“Brands trust us more when we thoughtfully recommend the right media mix, even when that means recommending lower spend at times. Our ability to rapidly iterate, forecast, and test using Amazon’s new tool suite positions us as the genuinely strategic partner they need.”

Partner for Innovation

The best way to avoid plateaus and maintain momentum, especially in a volatile market, is to work with a partner who’s fully invested in being the best in their industry.

At Envision Horizons, we make it our mission to test every feature, stay ahead of every Amazon update, and blend hands-on, real-world expertise with a relentless commitment to cutting-edge strategy. This proactive, experimental mindset is what turns new breakthroughs into everyday wins, ensuring your brand maximizes every opportunity the platform offers. We are committed to innovation at every turn!

Request your growth plan to get an audit tailored to your brand’s unique goals, challenges, and category position.

Don’t Miss The Envision Horizons Team At The Next Big Event!

See the faces behind our proven results! Our team thrives on learning, sharing, and leading at the most important industry conferences. Planning to attend an upcoming Amazon, retail media, or eCommerce event? Reach out to us to connect in-person! Plus, get on the guest list for our exclusive executive roundtables- intimate sessions where we dig into advanced strategies, answer your burning questions, and foster real conversations among brand leaders.

Check out pictures of the team at Amazon unBoxed 2025…