Amazon retired the Amazon Ad Console on September 29 at unBoxed 2026 in San Francisco, replacing it with Amazon Ads Agent, an AI-first platform that collapses sponsored ads, Full-Funnel Campaigns, and the newly branded DVA+ (Display, Video, and Audio Plus) into a single interface. Full-Funnel Campaigns is already live for all US advertisers. DVA+ opens to everyone in late October, with general availability across 35 markets targeted for Q1 2027.

The structural shift is that streaming TV, display, and audio, formats previously gated behind DSP contracts and agency relationships, are now self-serve for anyone selling on Amazon. A founder provides a goal, a budget, and creative. Amazon’s agent handles planning, targeting, placement, and optimization against what the company describes as trillions of shopping, browsing, and streaming signals.

The pitch comes with numbers Amazon wants cited. In internal beta data from June to August 2026, Full-Funnel Campaigns delivered 67% higher long-term ROAS and 29% lower cost per new-to-brand customer versus the same formats run separately. Advertisers who used natural-language targeting recommendations reached more than 25% additional unique customers at more than 10% lower cost per impression on average. Improvado’s recap flags the obvious caveat: these are Amazon-reported figures, not independently verified. The long-term sales metric itself mixes booked revenue with a 12-month forecast from Amazon’s own model.

The case studies read better. Canine Naturals ran a 206-day Full-Funnel Campaign in which 41% of sales came from new-to-brand shoppers. Cuisinart, piloting Amazon’s creative-generation tool in Q2 2026, saw an 18-point lift in detail-page-view rate, a 14% drop in cost per detail page view, and a 10-point branded search lift against traditionally produced assets.

“Rapid advancements in AI are allowing us to deliver better advertising with improved performance across all channels and customer objectives. At the same time, we are making it as simple as possible for brands and agency partners of all sizes to create highly impactful campaigns and achieve their goals,” said Kelly MacLean, Vice President, Engineering, Science, and Product at Amazon Ads. New chat capabilities covering media planning, targeting, and Sponsored Products guidance are rolling out in beta across 20 marketplaces in 21 languages.

Context matters. Amazon’s ad business did nearly $20 billion in Q2 2026, beating estimates, and the agent framing is partly narrative management for a retail-media business that now competes head-on with Google and Meta on self-serve simplicity. It’s also a real capability expansion for the long tail. The platform doesn’t read Google, Meta, or linear TV outcomes, so attribution stays inside Amazon’s walls. For a small seller with three weeks before DVA+ goes live, that’s a tradeoff worth running the math on. The storefront side of the same shift is already in motion: Shopify’s Canvas lets any merchant build a conversion-ready storefront without a design team. The media side just caught up.

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