Your Amazon plan is a spreadsheet of keywords and bids
Somebody should probably tell it what happened last week.
Happy Monday!
Your Amazon plan is a spreadsheet of keywords and bids. Somebody should probably tell it what happened last week.
On the Q2 call, Amazon said that shoppers who click a Sponsored Prompt convert to a sale 48% more often and spend 21% more than shoppers who don’t. A Sponsored Prompt is a suggested question, placed inside a conversation, that a brand paid to have asked.
The surface underneath it got big quietly. Over 350 million people used Alexa for Shopping in the last twelve months, active users nearly doubled in the quarter, and interactions rose more than fivefold year over year.
Amazon Ads did $19.8 billion in the quarter, up 26%.
One caveat worth saying out loud, because Amazon won’t. Every one of those engagement numbers is a cohort of people who chose to use an assistant, compared against people who didn’t. Some of that higher spend is the kind of shopper, not the tool.
The part you can act on is smaller and duller. Something is now reading your product copy aloud to a buyer and deciding which question to put in their mouth. Go read your own detail page the way a machine would, with no photography and no layout, and see whether it still argues for you.
TALK ON THE MARKET
Andy Jassy, on the same call, on where AWS is heading:
“We long believed AWS could become a few hundred-billion-dollar revenue business and now believe it will be at least double that, and very possibly be a $1 trillion annual revenue business for us in time.”
He said it about cloud, and the market added roughly $360 billion to Amazon on the day. Read it as a media buyer instead. Your fastest-growing retail media partner just got told it can spend whatever it wants for the next several years.
NUMBERS MATTER
53%. Share of US consumers who plan to shop this holiday season exclusively at stores they used last year, in Optimove Insights’ Holiday Shopping Report 2026, published 5 August, based on a survey of 648 consumers fielded in spring. Half the market has already decided where it’s going. The other 47% is the entire prize.
DAILY PROMPT
Here is my product detail page copy, stripped of images: [paste title, bullets, description, A+ content]. Act as an AI shopping assistant that must answer “which one should I buy” using only this text. Tell me: which three buyer questions this copy answers well, which three it can’t answer at all, what a competitor would need to say to beat it, and the one attribute a shopper cares about that I never actually stated in words.
Use this before your next Amazon content refresh, and run it on your two closest competitors’ pages in the same sitting. Most detail pages were written to be looked at. The thing ranking them now can only read.
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CMO CORNER
If you’re always reacting, you’re not leading. You’re lagging.
Amazon has been building this surface for two years in public. Nothing about last week was a surprise to anyone who was watching, and almost everyone found out from an earnings call. Pick the two platforms that own your demand and put an hour a month against their product releases. That hour is the difference between planning for a change and being told about one.
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TOOL UPGRADE
If a machine is going to assemble the ad, get better at feeding it. Three tools for teams running paid at volume:
Holo — best for generating on-brand ads straight off your own website, so the machine starts from your product rather than a blank prompt. Try Holo here →
Birch — best for rules that scale and pause campaigns across platforms without someone watching a dashboard at 11 pm. Try Birch here →
Adwisely — best for smaller teams who want the optimization handled and would rather approve than operate. Try Adwisely here →
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LEARN THIS
If a suggested question is now a buying signal, it’s worth having a system for the rest of them: the Revenue Signal Playbook.
It works off one pattern: signal triggers AI action, which produces output, with a categorized table of the signals most teams notice too late or act on inconsistently. For the marketer who has the intent data and no repeatable thing that happens when it arrives.
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That’s it for today!
See you next time,
— Peter & Torsten
