Amazon doubles down on AI-powered advertising at Cannes Lions
4 July 2026
By Jennifer Hodgkinson – VP of Advertising & Client Strategy
If there was one clear message from Amazon Ads at Cannes Lions this year, it was that AI is no longer a feature, it’s becoming the operating system behind advertising. Rather than unveiling a single headline-grabbing product, Amazon introduced a connected suite of innovations spanning creative production, media activation and customer engagement, all designed to help brands move from campaign creation to conversion faster and with less manual effort.
The announcements centred around three themes: using AI and commerce signals to create and optimise advertising creative, making campaign activation more effortless through agentic workflows, and creating new advertising opportunities within conversational AI experiences. New capabilities included Dynamic TV Creative on Prime Video, which personalises ads using shopping and viewing signals, video optimisation within Amazon DSP, and expanded interactive experiences across Alexa+, Fire TV, Twitch and podcasts. Together, they reinforce Amazon’s vision of advertising that is not only personalised, but increasingly interactive and capable of moving customers from discovery to purchase within a single session.
For brands, the implication is that competitive advantage is shifting beyond campaign optimisation towards creative optimisation. As AI takes on more of the heavy lifting across planning, production and media execution, the quality of creative assets, product content and first-party data becomes an even greater differentiator. Brands that can provide rich inputs for Amazon’s AI to work with will be best positioned to benefit from these increasingly automated workflows.
Our biggest takeaway is that Amazon is connecting the dots between many of the AI capabilities it has launched over the past 18 months. Rather than standalone tools, we’re beginning to see an integrated ecosystem where creative generation, media buying, audience intelligence and conversational shopping all work together. It’s a significant step towards a future where campaigns are not just AI-assisted but continuously optimised across every stage of the customer journey. For advertisers, the question is no longer whether AI will become part of the workflow, but how quickly they can adapt to make the most of it.