Amazon retired "Amazon DSP" at unBoxed on Sept. 29. The platform is now Amazon A
By Ahbrownstein · October 2, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Amazon retired "Amazon DSP" at unBoxed on Sept. 29. The platform is now Amazon Ads Agent, and Amazon opened Full-Funnel Campaigns in beta, running sponsored ads, display, video and Prime Video streaming TV from "one budget and one optimization engine." Advertisers "cannot select individual channels or specific audiences," Digiday reported.
I think most brands aren't organized to buy full funnel well, despite trying for many years, because they are organized by channel or tactic, each with separate budgets. In eMarketer's Ad Buyer Insights Survey, nearly half of advertisers fund commerce media from two or three separate budgets. Only 12% of the US consumer-goods brands and agencies in Skai's 2026 survey have fully integrated media and commerce operations.
Picture a hypothetical snack brand. Its brand team judges streaming TV on reach and on-brand measures that take months to move. Its commerce team, often funded with trade and shopper money, is judged on this quarter's sales. A performance team wants proof that each dollar drove a sale the brand wouldn't have made anyway. All three can read the same impressions and reach different verdicts, and Full-Funnel asks them not only to collaborate but also to fund one unified campaign and let Amazon do the rest.
None of this slows Amazon down much, since eMarketer puts it at 79.7% of US retail media spending in 2025. I don't think brands will hold money back until Amazon explains its agent, because most of them can't. Brands control what goes in.
For agencies with existing access, the old DSP controls stay one setting away, in what Amazon calls advanced settings. With DVA+ doing the targeting, bidding, and creative, the open decisions sit between a client's teams: which budget funds a Full-Funnel campaign, what it has to prove before it gets more budget, and whether Amazon's numbers hold up against the brand's own. I think agencies that already work across brand and commerce teams are best placed to evaluate full-funnel performance.
I wrote about Amazon's ChatGPT ads pilot here: https://lnkd.in/p/gvANgNRc. In my last article, I argued OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be where people research and decide what to buy: https://lnkd.in/p/gsWkY5Uy. At unBoxed, Amazon did the same on the other side of the sale. Its agent now decides where an advertiser's money goes, so the shopper's choice and the brand's spend are both moving into AI-run platforms.
Most brands already view Amazon as a must-buy for retail media. Amazon's push into full funnel extends that position from the shelf into streaming TV and other companies' inventory. I think brands will keep buying either way, and the ones that put brand, commerce, and performance money under one decision, with their own measurement next to Amazon's, will be best equipped to analyze and evaluate this change. Is this the catalyst to connect full-funnel marketing?