Amazon Ads has overhauled its DSP and the sponsored product and search-based ad console for on-platform ads, the company announced at its unBoxed event in San Francisco on Tuesday.
As one part of that overhaul, the product name “Amazon DSP” has been replaced by a new product dubbed DVA (for “display, video and audio”).
On top of that, the Amazon Ads console and Amazon DSP are being merged and rebranded as “The Amazon Ads Agent.”
Amazon introduced an Agentic Technology Ads Agent as a chatbot helper interface at last year’s unBoxed event. “Since then, we’ve expanded that same agentic intelligence to now power the entire advertising experience,” Kelly MacLean, VP of science, engineering and product at Amazon Ads, told AdExchanger.
The chatbot helper itself is much improved, too, MacLean said. It now retains context when an advertiser jumps between pages or campaigns, or is using either the DSP (ahem, DVA) or buying sponsored placements on Amazon, which previously used totally different workflows and sign-in systems.
When logging in and setting up a campaign, advertisers will see a toggle that gives them “that traditional DSP-type experience [they] already know and trust,” she said. This is part of the “advanced settings” in the Amazon Ads Agent UI.
The other option, which is now the de facto campaign setup (unless one toggles out of it), is called DVA+, and is an AI-based ad campaign type. It is powered by Performance+, which optimizes towards sales and conversions at the bottom of the funnel, and the other, Brand+, is more for video-esque branding and customer prospecting. DVA+ selects whether to use Brand+ or Performance+ based on the advertiser’s campaign objective.
These Amazon Ads Agent updates are all about simplicity, according to MacLean.
“We’ve heard feedback over the years [from advertisers] wanting to unleash the power of Amazon’s DSP in a much simpler way,” she said, “and so we’ve made massive progress in simplifying the overall experience.”
More funnel, less fuss
That push for simplicity extends beyond campaign setup to the range of channels advertisers can use.
Another new product announced on Tuesday is called “Full-Funnel Campaigns,” designed to help small advertisers or sellers branch into channels, such as streaming TV and audio. Smaller advertisers do “not want to necessarily have to be experts in how to set up all of those other campaigns and formats and supply sources,” MacLean said.
Advertisers can generate video creative within the Amazon Ads Agent workflow, and then if granted approval the platform can auto-generate a media plan and auto-optimize the campaign once it’s running. The complicated process of analytics is simplified by the natural language chatbot interface, MacLean said, so advertisers no longer require knowledge of SQL or data science to put that data to use.
The next step is to bring that same AI-powered assistance earlier in the process, starting with campaign planning and forecasting, which is in development this year, she said.
Nailing down planning and forecasting is perhaps the last gap in the chain before the Amazon Ads Agent is (theoretically, and with the consent of an account owner, of course) able to seamlessly jump from optimizing and attributing a given campaign to setting up the next campaign.
The push to bring planning, buying and optimization together also addresses a longstanding challenge for Amazon’s ad business, which is to make its disparate products feel like one cohesive platform.
For years after it acquired the Sizmek ad server business in 2019, Amazon was known for its “clunky” ad platform. Amazon’s various properties – including Twitch, its nascent Fire TV CTV inventory, the Amazon site and app and the open web audience network – simply didn’t fit together and the DSP lacked the sort of tools that were table stakes on other platforms.
But no more.
“Now we’re really proud that we believe we have the simplest experience in the industry,” MacLean said.
