Adbrew at Amazon unBoxed 2026: What Amazon Announced and What It Means for Advertisers

Amazon unBoxed, Amazon Ads’ annual conference, ran September 28–30 at Moscone West in San Francisco. We were there all three days at Booth SC3, a week after Amazon Accelerate in Seattle.

unBoxed has a bit of history for us. Our 2023 and 2024 Amazon Ads Partner Award wins were both announced there, so it’s always one of the events we look forward to most.

What Amazon announced

Nearly everything this year was about AI agents and simplifying how campaigns are bought. These were the announcements that came up most at our booth:

• Amazon Ads Agent. The advertising console and Amazon DSP are being merged into one platform, with a conversational assistant built in. Until now, Sponsored Ads and DSP have been separate tools with separate logins and reporting. It’s in an expanded closed beta.

• Full-Funnel Campaigns. You set a goal and a budget, and Amazon’s system decides how to split it across channels, creative and audiences in display, video and audio.

• DVA+. Display, video and audio run under one campaign, with one objective and one budget.

• Branded Conversations. Brands can give Amazon’s AI shopping assistant guidance on their products, so it has better information when shoppers ask about them.

• AI creative. Display and video ads generated from the product images and assets you already have.

• Natural-language reporting. Ask a question in plain English across close to a thousand metrics instead of building a report.

• Developer tools. An updated Amazon Ads MCP server for connecting AI assistants to Amazon Ads, and a tool that helps write Amazon Marketing Cloud queries.

Several of these are in beta and rolling out over the coming months, so not every account will see them right away.

What we think it changes

We’re still working through the detail, but three things stood out.

1. DSP is no longer just for big advertisers. A lot of mid-sized brands have stayed on Sponsored Ads because DSP meant a separate tool, minimum spends and a learning curve. A merged platform with goal-based campaigns removes most of that. We expect many more brands to test upper-funnel advertising next year.

2. How Amazon’s assistant describes your product starts to matter. As more shoppers ask Rufus instead of scrolling search results, part of the work shifts from bids and keywords to making sure the assistant has accurate, useful information about what you sell. Branded Conversations is Amazon’s first real lever for that.

3. Amazon’s agents only see Amazon’s data. They don’t know your margins, how much stock you have, or that you’d rather protect profit than chase volume this quarter. Automated campaigns will optimize toward whatever goal they’re given, so setting the right goal, with your own business context, matters more than before. That’s the problem we’ve been building Adbrew Intelligence around. It works from the goals and margins you set, plus live signals like Buy Box status and days of stock. Through the Adbrew MCP server you can reach your Adbrew account from the AI assistant you already use.

What we showed

We brought back Adbrew Arcade, the self-serve demo we first ran at Accelerate. You type in a question about your own advertising, the kind you’d normally send to an analyst, and Adbrew Intelligence answers it. It also shows where you rank against competitors in Amazon search, hour by hour, and runs a short quiz on Sponsored Ads, DSP and AMC. Everyone who played left with a trial offer.

We also had a new visual on the stand:

The line on it, “A touch of AI. The rest is you.”, reflects how we think about this. Adbrew Intelligence can run deep analysis, make corrective changes, launch campaigns and handle AMC queries. Even so, the advertisers who do best with it are the ones with strong judgment about their own business, and the AI’s job is to give them more time to use it.

After hours

On Tuesday evening we hosted our second happy hour of the season at Shelby’s Rooftop, near Moscone. Read about both happy hours.

Continuing the conversation

There was more news than anyone could digest in three days, so we’ve joined two recap sessions since:

• The future of Amazon PPC, Rufus and Amazon Display Networks (October 13), with Igloo Media Co. and Vega North. Our GTM & Sales Lead for EMEA, Nacho de Ros Durban, joined Andrew Watson and Alex Knight of Igloo Media and Hitesh Aswani of Vega North.

• Unboxing September: Accelerate & unBoxed Recap (October 15), hosted by AO2. Nacho joined Jessica Wright (AO2), Danan Coleman (eCom Triage) and Kai Tayabas-Kim (IPSecure) to cover what changed and what to act on in Q4.

Thanks to everyone who came by Booth SC3. If we didn’t get a chance to talk, book a demo and we’ll go through what these changes mean for your account.

About Adbrew

Adbrew is an Amazon Ads Advanced Partner and a retail media platform for brands, sellers and agencies. It covers Sponsored Ads, Amazon DSP, Amazon Marketing Cloud and Walmart Connect in one place, with automation, reporting and Adbrew Intelligence, our AI agents for analysis and account changes.