Amazon and OpenAI Announce Strategic $50B Partnership: What It Means for AI, Marketing, and Commerce

This week's Amazon updates touch nearly every part of the ecosystem: PPC automation, DSP measurement, B2B growth, and voice shopping. The biggest story is Amazon quietly testing AI-driven targeting inside manual Sponsored Products campaigns, a signal of where PPC management is heading. Here's what changed and what it means for sellers and brands. 📌 Contents Amazon Tests AI-Powered Targeting Automation in Manual Sponsored Products Campaigns Amazon Rolls Out Ten New Features for Brand+ and Performance+ Amazon Adds Free Omnichannel Attribution to Advertising Console Amazon Business Hits $60 Billion in Sales Alexa+ Now Recommends and Sells Products in the UK Alexa Pulls YouTube Influencer Videos Into Shopping Conversations Amazon Tests Showing More Buying Choices Directly in Search Results   1. Amazon Tests AI-Powered Targeting Automation in Manual Sponsored Products Campaigns A new "Targeting strategy" beta lets AI add up to four new keywords or product targets to manual Sponsored Products campaigns every twelve to twenty-four hours, at or below your existing bids. It also auto-pauses targets using rules like no impressions in three days or twenty-plus clicks with no conversion in fourteen days. This is opt-in for now, but it expands the auctions Amazon can monetize and turns every participating campaign into training data. The likely path is that this becomes default, then merges with the ROAS-based bidding already in console. Sellers should test it on a smaller campaign first to understand the behavior before wider rollout. Read more here by Mansour Norouzi 2. Amazon Rolls Out Ten New Features for Brand+ and Performance+ As of July 20, Amazon began rolling out ten features across Brand+ and Performance+. Advertisers can now feed first-party audience data into Ads Data Manager as optimization input at no extra cost. Brand+ Audio is now fully available across sixteen countries, and Performance+ gets audio for the first time in beta. Brand+ STV line items can auto-select premium deals in the US, and AMG accounts get a new proposal builder. Worth reviewing which of these are already live on your account. Read more here by Oleksandr Kovalov 3. Amazon Adds Free Omnichannel Attribution to Advertising Console Amazon added a free measurement tool called OCM directly inside the Advertising Console, showing which specific retailers a brand's DSP campaigns drive sales at beyond Amazon. It blends first-party Shopper Panel data with third-party signals, using exposure-based attribution. This kind of cross-retailer visibility used to require custom MMM work costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's not a full MMM replacement, but it gives brands without that budget real evidence that upper-funnel Amazon media is working elsewhere. That's useful ammunition in budget conversations with finance. Read more here by Destaney Wishon 4. Amazon Business Hits $60 Billion in Sales Amazon Business, Amazon's B2B marketplace, has crossed sixty billion dollars in sales, up from thirty-five billion in 2022 and ten billion in 2018. Despite the scale, many sellers still don't know it exists. It runs on Amazon's existing infrastructure and catalog, layered with B2B features like payment terms, and now includes groceries. Amazon isn't chasing every corner of B2B trade, but so little of it happens online today that there's real room left to grow. Read more here by Juozas Kaziukėnas 5. Alexa+ Now Recommends and Sells Products in the UK Alexa+ has started surfacing full product recommendations in the UK, with reviews, pricing, and Add to Basket buttons pulled from a shopper's own order history. It's in early access now, ahead of a wider rollout across the Amazon app and browser. Early testing suggests Alexa is roughly twenty-seven percent more likely to make a personalized recommendation than Rufus is in the US. For brands selling into Europe, how you appear in these AI-generated recommendations is becoming a real variable to watch. Read more here by Nancy Morgan   6. Alexa Pulls YouTube Influencer Videos Into Shopping Conversations Amazon has started surfacing YouTube influencer content inside Alexa shopping conversations, triggered from a standard product page prompt. In one example involving the brand SALT & STONE, a normal chat prompt led into an Alexa conversation that included an influencer's YouTube video. This follows Amazon's continued push into video and is one of the clearest signs yet that influencer content could feed directly into Alexa's shopping experience. Read more here by Christian Rich 7. Amazon Tests Showing More Buying Choices Directly in Search Results Amazon is testing a search experience where shoppers can view reseller offers without opening the product detail page, using "More Buying Choices" beneath the Add to Cart button. This lets shoppers compare sellers, prices, delivery dates, and ratings straight from search. It gives resellers more visibility earlier in the buying journey and pushes price competition further upstream. Brands should treat this as a reason to audit pricing consistency across resellers now. Read more here by Will Haire That's a lot of Amazon news to track in one week. If you want these updates delivered every week without digging through LinkedIn yourself, subscribe to the ANavigator blog. We'll keep breaking down what changed and what it means for your account. If you want to stay updated on Amazon changes, subscribe to our blog. If you need support with PPC, DSP, AMC, analytics, or a long-term growth strategy, contact the ANavigator team at info@anavigator.co  Book a call to get a FREE AUDIT by the link below:     Book a call – FREE AUDIT   Follow my Weekly Newsletter on LinkedIn:  / amazon-digest-for-brands-7232361008185372672   Follow me on LinkedIn:  / ookovalov  Follow ANavigator on social media:  / anavigator    /@anavigator_official  / anavigator7    / @anavigators     LinkedIn page to contact us:   Author: Oleksandr Kovalov Role: Founder & CEO @ ANavigator — The ANavigator Team

On July 20, 2026, Amazon released a significant update to Brand+ and Performance+ — ten new capabilities spanning audience data integration, expanded audio formats, streaming TV automation, and AI model improvements. Most will roll out over the coming weeks to Open Beta or General Availability. This is not a minor product refresh. Several of the changes alter the fundamental structure of how these campaign types work — and two of them are active by default on every eligible campaign without any action required. Here is what the update actually contains and what brands running DSP should pay attention to. Your First-Party Data Can Now Feed the AI Directly The most strategically significant change in this update is Audience Signals — available now for both Brand+ Prospecting and Performance+ Customer Acquisition and Unified Consideration, at no additional cost. Until now, first-party audiences in Brand+ and Performance+ functioned as hard targeting constraints. You defined a segment, and the AI optimized within those boundaries. Audience Signals works differently: your audience data enters the campaign as an optimization input, not a targeting fence. The AI uses it to accelerate learning — identifying high-value customer patterns faster — while retaining full freedom to discover users beyond your uploaded segments. Advertisers can bring AMC audiences, DMP segments, or custom-built cohorts connected through Ads Data Manager into Brand+ and Performance+ as optimization inputs in the same way they bring in conversion event data today. The upload path runs through Ads Data Manager — hashed customer lists connected through ADM, then activated as advertiser audiences in Amazon Ads or built as custom segments in AMC. For brands that have been running Brand+ and Performance+ without first-party data integration, this is a meaningful gap to close. The AI optimizes faster when it has signal. Feeding it your actual customer data — purchase history cohorts, high-LTV segments, category buyers — gives it a head start that generic audience models cannot replicate. Audio Is Now General Availability for Brand+ — and Entering Open Beta for Performance+ Audio campaigns drive 43% incremental reach compared to Streaming TV campaigns, and when paired with other Amazon Ads formats, drive 1.8x higher consideration and 2.2x higher purchase intent. When combined with video, Audio improves ROAS efficiency by 6.7–8.7%. Audio for Brand+ moves from Open Beta to General Availability with this update, with expanded third-party exchange open exchange supply now included alongside first-party and third-party Amazon Publisher Direct sources across 16 locales. More importantly, Audio for Performance+ enters Open Beta for the first time — bringing AI-optimized audio to mid- and lower-funnel tactics including Customer Acquisition, Remarketing, Retention, and Consideration. Audio was previously a reach-only format. It is now available as a performance channel. For brands not yet running audio in their Amazon DSP campaigns, the combination of incremental reach and measurable mid-funnel lift makes this worth testing. The format extends into screen-free moments — commutes, workouts, household tasks — that streaming TV and display simply cannot access. Two Model Upgrades Running Automatically in the Background Two of the ten capabilities are enabled by default and require no advertiser action. Both have direct implications for campaign performance. Brand Outcome Optimization predicts user likelihood to take brand-relevant actions — branded search, detail page views, add-to-cart — and optimizes toward those outcomes rather than reach alone. It is active by default on all Brand+ Reach goal line items. Brand advertising has historically been measured on impressions and reach because those were the only metrics available. Brand Outcome Optimization replaces that proxy with actual commerce behavior as the optimization target — a structural improvement in how Brand+ campaigns spend. Prime Video Signal Integration enriches Brand+ ranking with Amazon Prime Video streaming behavior data for improved ad relevancy on Prime Video Ads supply. Amazon's authenticated audience graph now reaches 90% of US households, connecting streaming behavior, shopping activity, and purchase signals across devices. Adding streaming behavior as a ranking signal for Prime Video placements makes those placements more relevant — and more likely to reach shoppers in a receptive context. Both upgrades apply automatically to eligible campaigns. You do not need to activate them. But knowing they are running changes how you should interpret campaign data going forward — performance improvements that appear in reporting over the next few weeks will partly reflect these model changes, not just your own optimization decisions. Automatic Deal Selection for Brand+ STV Brand+ STV line items are now auto-enabled with Automatic Deal Selection — an AI-powered feature that automatically activates and optimizes a group of premium streaming TV deals based on Brand+ audience context and campaign targeting criteria. It expands supply access from a single, pre-configured APD deal to a broader, continuously optimized set of deals across Amazon and the open internet. ADS is enabled by default on new Brand+ STV Prospecting lines and requires no manual activation. The practical impact is expanded reach in premium streaming TV inventory without the manual deal management that previously came with STV campaigns. Amazon's system selects and optimizes deals dynamically based on audience context rather than requiring advertisers to pre-select and monitor individual deals. What This Update Means for How You Run Brand+ and Performance+ Three practical implications stand out. First, if you are running Brand+ or Performance+ without first-party data, the Audience Signals update makes that integration a priority. The feature costs nothing to activate and directly improves AI optimization speed. The longer you wait, the more campaign spend goes toward slower, cold-start learning that your own customer data could have shortcut. Second, audio deserves a place in your DSP plan for Q4. Audio is a full-funnel multiplier, not just an incremental reach play. With Audio for Performance+ now in Open Beta across Customer Acquisition, Remarketing, and Consideration tactics, brands can test audio-driven mid-funnel performance in Q4 — the highest-stakes period of the year — while the format is still early and auction competition is lower than it will be once General Availability arrives. Third, check your Brand+ Reach line items. Brand Outcome Optimization and Prime Video Signal Integration are already active on eligible campaigns. If you are running Brand+ STV, Automatic Deal Selection is also live on new Prospecting lines. Review what is running under the hood before assuming your campaign structure is unchanged. More automation does not remove the need for strategy. It increases the importance of knowing what to feed the system — which audience goal, which creative, which product, which retail destination, and which measurement window. Brand+ and Performance+ are becoming more capable, but they still require the right inputs. The advertisers who get the most out of this update will be the ones who feed the AI better data, not just the ones who turn more features on. If you want to stay updated on Amazon changes, subscribe to our blog. If you need support with PPC, DSP, AMC, analytics, or a long-term growth strategy, contact the ANavigator team at info@anavigator.co  Book a call to get a FREE AUDIT by the link below:     Book a call – FREE AUDIT   Follow my Weekly Newsletter on LinkedIn:  / amazon-digest-for-brands-7232361008185372672   Follow me on LinkedIn:  / ookovalov  Follow ANavigator on social media:  / anavigator    /@anavigator_official  / anavigator7    / @anavigators     LinkedIn page to contact us:   Author: Oleksandr Kovalov Role: Founder & CEO @ ANavigator — The ANavigator Team