The role of the Amazon agency has been changing for a while, and some are only j
By James Northcott · October 9, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
The role of the Amazon agency has been changing for a while, and some are only just realising it.
Amazon has opened the door for agencies to move beyond Sponsored Ads and compete for much bigger upper-funnel budgets through Prime Video and streaming inventory from publishers such as Netflix and Disney.
At the same time, Amazon is automating more of the execution…great. That’s the bit that slows most people down.
That means the agencies that pull away will be the strategic ones.
The ones that don’t just accept what the platform recommends, but understand whether it makes sense for that specific brand.
To do that, agencies need to retain more than performance data.
They need the commercial context behind it: margins, stock positions, wider marketing activity, previous tests, customer behaviour and, importantly, why past decisions were made.
For example, Amazon might report that a full-funnel campaign delivered brilliant attributed performance.
But the agency should know how much came from existing customers, branded searches or demand that was already there...and use tools such as AMC to test whether the campaign genuinely created incremental growth.
The same applies to AI.
AI can make content optimisation faster, but it’s only better if the inputs include the brand persona, historic performance, customer insights, keyword data and wider market intelligence from tools such as Helium 10 or SmartScout.
And that’s one of the simplest applications.
And let’s not forget, Amazon will always have its own best interests at heart.
Historically, if you go to build a new manual Sponsored Product campaign, Amazon will suggest a list of keywords and suggested bids. I hope no one reading this has ever clicked through this list and added those suggestions as they are.
In the same way, Amazon Ad Agent may make CPM recommendations for a brand when building a media plan. In fact, the example they showed us at unBoxed had the agent suggest an increase from $12 to $21.
Great for Amazon, sure. But for the brand? Maybe (unlikely), but that’s where an agencies value will be.
We’ve been positioning Toucan around this shift for a long time and building our own internal AI technology to capture and apply that context.
We’ll be releasing more detail publicly soon.
AI doesn’t remove the need for organisational memory.
It gives us the opportunity to operationalise it.
We aren't winning because we can do tasks faster.
We are winning because our tech knows what information matters, which questions to ask and when Amazon Ads Agent’s answer needs to be challenged!