From unBoxed 2025 to Your 2026 Roadmap: What to Adopt to Stay Ahead

Amazon Ads' annual unBoxed conference brought together thousands of retail media leaders in Nashville to unveil a comprehensive vision for the future of retail media. The November event showcased how artificial intelligence, unified workflows, and expanded premium inventory are reshaping what advertisers can achieve across the full funnel. From AI-powered creative production to conversational ad formats and streaming TV at scale, Amazon introduced tools designed to simplify complexity while delivering measurable performance. This recap breaks down the most significant announcements across three strategic themes and provides perspective on where to invest in 2026 to stay ahead of the competition.

Richer Media: Standing Out in Search and Beyond

Amazon introduced several new ad formats and creative capabilities that give brands more sophisticated ways to connect with shoppers. These innovations focus on making advertising more visually engaging, contextually relevant, and easier to produce at scale.

• Sponsored Products Video brings video directly into product search results, allowing shoppers to watch demonstrations and compare features without leaving search. This format bridges the gap between education and conversion at the exact moment shoppers are considering options.
• Sponsored Brands - Collection enables advertisers to feature up to 10 related products in a single, shoppable ad unit. Brands can hand-pick products to create relevant groupings tailored to campaign goals and shopper intent, with AI helping to surface the right product to the right customer.
• Creative Agent is an AI tool within Creative Studio that generates campaign-ready video and TV ads from ASINs or product URLs in hours rather than weeks. The system analyzes product information and brand assets, then uses conversational collaboration to refine outputs across display, video, and streaming TV formats.
• Sponsored Brands - Reserve Share of Voice lets advertisers reserve top-of-search placements for their branded keywords at a fixed, upfront price. This feature provides predictable visibility and protects branded search real estate in an auction-based environment.

What This Means for Your 2026 Strategy

Sponsored Products Video represents the next evolution in search advertising. Video in search results helps shoppers make faster, more confident purchase decisions by showing product features inaction. This format will help you stand out among competitors in search results before categories become saturated with video content. Brands that move quickly on video adoption will capture disproportionate attention while the format is still novel.

Creative Agent lowers the barrier to premium creative execution by compressing production timelines from weeks to hours. Production speed matters because it enables testing velocity. When you can generate video variations quickly, you can test different messages and creative approaches to learn what resonates faster. Sponsored Brands - Collection offers a smarter way to feature your products alongside brand assets, creating more engaging shopping experiences that showcase your brand's breadth while helping shoppers discover complementary products. Sponsored Brands - Reserve Share of Voice gives brands strategic control in competitive categories, allowing you to plan more precise strategies around high-value search moments.

The actionable takeaway: Prioritize video adoption in search placements and test Collection formats now. Focus on products with clear differentiation and create videos that answer specific purchase questions rather than generic brand storytelling. Reserve your branded search placements where maintaining consistent visibility matters most.

Smarter Optimization: AI-Powered Efficiency Across the Funnel

Amazon's optimization announcements center on unified workflows and AI-assisted decision-making that reduce manual overhead while maintaining strategic control. These tools address the complexity of managing campaigns across multiple formats, audiences, and channels.

• Unified Campaign Manager brings Sponsored Ads and Amazon DSP into a single workspace with AI-powered predictive machine learning, smart search functionality, and consolidated reporting. Advertisers gain access to 15 months of daily insights plus six years of monthly data in one interface.
• Full-Funnel Campaigns is a new AI-powered campaign type launching in 2026 that activates across display, video, and streaming TV in one workflow. The system dynamically optimizes creative, targeting, and budget allocation for both new-to-brand customer acquisition and sales impact.
• Ads Agent is an AI-powered targeting assistant that suggests audience segments and keywords using natural language inputs. The system provides full transparency into why each recommendation was made, then can execute approved actions like bid adjustments.
• Ad Agent Skills for AMC enhances Amazon Marketing Cloud with natural language query capabilities and automated analysis. The lookback window expanded from 13 to 25 months, enabling comprehensive year-over-year analysis without requiring SQL expertise.
• Unified Reporting Hub consolidates Sponsored Ads, DSP, and streaming TV metrics into one customizable dashboard.Instead of pulling reports from multiple systems, advertisers can see cross-campaign performance in a single view, making it easier to identify patterns and make smarter allocation decisions across ad types.

What This Means for Your 2026 Strategy

These announcements represent Amazon's bet on AI-assisted decision-making to manage complexity that teams may struggle to keep up with manually. Unified Campaign Manager and Full-Funnel Campaigns reduce operational friction, but the shift to AI-powered optimization does not eliminate the need for strategy. Instead, it amplifies the impact of smart strategic inputs. AI can determine which audience segment should see which creative at what time, but humans still decide which products to promote, what messages to communicate, and how tactics fit within broader business objectives.

AMC's expanded capabilities make advanced measurement accessible to mid-market advertisers, not just enterprise teams with dedicated data science resources. The 25-month lookback window and natural language queries remove technical barriers that previously limited adoption. Organizations that invest in understanding AMC insights and full-funnel attribution will outpace competitors still optimizing in silos.

The actionable takeaway: Test Full-Funnel Campaigns against existing multi-campaign setups to measure whether automated optimization aligns with your goals. Use AMC to identify which combinations of tactics drive genuine incrementality rather than redistributing existing demand. Leverage Unified Reporting to spot cross-format opportunities, but remember this shows Amazon performance. A complete picture requires understanding how Amazon fits within your broader media mix.

Expanded Reach & Precision Targeting

Amazon's reach announcements demonstrate the scale and precision now available for connecting with shoppers across premium inventory and verified audiences.

• Prime Video expansion now reaches over 315 million global ad-supported viewers, including more than 130 million in the United States. The platform's expanded live sports lineup includes NFL, NBA, WNBA, and NASCAR, creating major opportunities for brand storytelling across high-engagement premium inventory.
• Authenticated Graph extends audience recognition across all channels available to advertisers, connecting them to 90% of U.S. households through verified, privacy-safe signals. This deterministic reach enables more accurate cross-channel targeting and measurement.

What This Means for Your 2026 Strategy

Prime Video's scale transforms streaming TV from a brand-awareness play into a measurable, performance-driven channel with clear retail outcomes. The combination of premium content and authenticated audience data means upper-funnel streaming investments can now be evaluated with the same rigor as lower-funnel tactics. Authenticated Graph's 90% U.S. household reach fundamentally changes cross-channel targeting precision, enabling audience extension beyond Amazon properties while maintaining privacy standards.

The actionable takeaway: Explore upper-funnel streaming investments with clear measurement frameworks to prove incremental lift beyond impressions. Use Authenticated Graph capabilities to test whether audience strategies that work on Amazon can scale efficiently to other channels. Focus on connecting streaming exposure to downstream conversion rather than treating video as an isolated awareness tactic.

How Xnurta Helps You Implement These Strategies

These unBoxed announcements validate the direction Xnurta has taken as an AI-native retail media platform. While other solutions layer AI onto legacy systems, Xnurta was built from the ground up for this exact future. Our unified workflow across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and Amazon DSP connects seamlessly to AMC for full-funnel insight, positioning you to capitalize on the innovations and future Amazon is building for its advertisers.

Our AI Copilot handles real-time optimization across eight AI actions, including bid and budget day-parting, keyword harvesting and negation, and rapid testing. Advertisers tune AI personality from conservative to aggressive and maintain full transparency with detailed logs for every optimization. This approach aligns perfectly with Amazon's vision: AI handles execution complexity while you maintain strategic control.

The AMC Hub removes technical barriers with a drag-and-drop interface and nine prebuilt models covering budget allocation, audience paths, cross-product association, and lifetime value analysis. With automatic monthly refreshes and granular ASIN-level outputs, you can act on AMC insights without writing SQL. As Amazon makes advanced measurement more accessible, Xnurta's pre-built, customizable models give you a head start in implementation.

Our recent success at unBoxed 2025 demonstrates proven execution of these exact strategies. Xnurta brought home 2 Amazon Ads Partner awards this year: Brand Storytelling in APAC for transforming UGREEN into a culturally relevant gaming lifestyle brand, and Full-Funnel Advertising in the Americas for elevating Wuffes from newcomer to top 10 category leader through AMC-powered streaming TV, video, and display integration.

These wins validate our approach to the future Amazon is building. As you plan your 2026 strategy around richer media, smarter optimization, and expanded reach, Xnurta's platform and expertise can help you adopt these innovations faster than competitors still working with fragmented tools.

Ready to discuss how Xnurta can help you take advantage of these opportunities and stay ahead in 2026? Reach out to our team to explore how our AI-native platform aligns with your goals.

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