What Amazon Ads Announced at Cannes Lions 2026

Cannes Lions has long been where the advertising industry signals its next move. In 2026, Amazon Ads used the festival to lay out a clear strategic direction: creative, media, and commerce are converging, and AI is the accelerant.

The announcements spanned AI-powered creative production, Dynamic TV on Prime Video, Interactive Video Ads, location-based personalisation, and the early stages of conversational shopping through Alexa. Taken together, they represent a significant shift in what Amazon advertising can do, and what brands need to do to stay competitive within it.

This article breaks down each major update and what it means in practice for brands selling on Amazon.

The Three Strategic Pillars Behind the Announcements

Amazon Ads framed its Cannes activity around three themes:

Uncover the insight, shape the story, deliver the impact. Amazon's first-party signals across shopping, streaming, and browsing are being used to build campaigns informed by real customer behaviour, not assumed intent.

Effortless activation across every format. AI-powered and agentic tools are designed to reduce the friction between strategy and execution, making it easier for brands and agencies to activate campaigns across more placements with less manual overhead.

AI meets intent, at scale. As shopping becomes more conversational, Amazon Ads is positioning itself to help brands appear inside those moments, from Alexa-powered discovery to interactive streaming environments.

These are not independent themes. They reflect a coherent bet that the brands which will win on Amazon over the next few years are the ones that can connect insight, creative, and execution more tightly and more quickly.

AI-Powered Creative: Speed and Relevance at Scale

Creative production has historically been one of the biggest constraints on campaign performance. Different placements, audiences, formats, and objectives all demand different assets. For most brands, that means either underinvesting in creative variation or producing assets that do not perform as well as they should.

Amazon Ads' AI-powered creative tools are designed to address this directly.

The tools help brands move from a core creative concept to launch-ready assets faster, generating, adapting, and resizing assets across placements using Amazon's commerce signals. But the more significant point is not speed. It is relevance.

When creative is informed by real shopping and streaming behaviour, it can be built around what audiences are actually doing rather than what a brief assumes they want. That changes the quality of the test, not just the volume of it.

For agencies working at scale, this also means more room to iterate. Rather than running one or two creative routes, brands can test across multiple variants, identify what is working, and optimise based on real performance data.

Dynamic TV Creative on Prime Video

Amazon Ads announced Dynamic TV Creative for Prime Video, allowing brands that sell on Amazon to personalise ad creative using shopping signals.

In practice, this means different viewers can be served different creative depending on where they are in the customer journey. A viewer who has browsed a product gets a different message from someone discovering the brand for the first time. Someone who has added a product to their basket sees something different again.

This closes a gap that has existed in TV advertising for a long time. Linear and streaming TV have traditionally operated on the assumption that everyone watching sees the same thing. Dynamic TV Creative brings the kind of audience logic that digital advertisers expect from display and search into a premium video environment.

For brands selling beyond Amazon, this capability is also being expanded. Starting with the travel category in a closed US beta, creative can be adapted based on what viewers are watching rather than their shopping history. This points to a broader direction of travel: personalised TV at scale, tied to real audience signals.

Interactive Video Ads: From Passive Viewing to Direct Action

Interactive Video Ads continue to expand across Amazon's advertising ecosystem.

The formats are designed to reduce the gap between attention and action. Features such as Add to Cart and Send to Phone allow viewers to respond to an ad in the moment, without needing to search for the product later or rely on memory to drive a purchase.

For brands selling on Amazon, this creates a more direct conversion path from video engagement to basket. For brands without an Amazon presence, Send to Phone and similar features can bridge the gap to another destination.

This summer, Amazon Ads is extending core Interactive Video Ad features to Samsung TV Plus in the US through Amazon DSP. This expands reach beyond Prime Video into additional ad-supported streaming inventory, giving advertisers more scale without increasing production complexity.

The significance of this is worth underlining. Connected TV is no longer just an awareness play. With the right creative and the right measurement framework, it can contribute meaningfully to consideration and conversion.

Location-Based Creative at Scale

Amazon Ads is expanding location-based Interactive Video Ads globally, allowing brands to transform a single national campaign into thousands of localised variants.

For brands with regional offers, store locations, or market-specific messaging, this represents a material improvement in what national campaigns can do. Instead of producing separate assets for each region, brands can adapt key elements based on location, keeping the reach of a national buy while adding the relevance of a local message.

For categories such as retail, grocery, travel, automotive, and consumer goods, this is particularly useful. Local relevance has traditionally been difficult to achieve at scale through video. Location-based creative makes it significantly more accessible.

Responsive eCommerce Creative Now Supports Video

Responsive eCommerce Creative on Amazon DSP now includes video support.

This format already helps brands generate and optimise display creative using Amazon product data and campaign inputs. The addition of video means advertisers can activate motion-based creative at greater scale, with Amazon Ads testing and selecting top-performing video variants for each impression.

For brands with limited video production budgets, this lowers the barrier to entry meaningfully. It is not a replacement for strong original video assets, but it allows brands to scale video-led creative more efficiently without requiring a full production build for every campaign variation.

Conversational and Agentic Commerce: The Longer Game

The most forward-looking element of Amazon Ads' Cannes announcements is its focus on conversational discovery.

Through Alexa for Shopping and Alexa+ devices, Amazon is exploring how brands can appear inside AI-powered shopping experiences, where customers are asking detailed questions, comparing options, and making decisions rather than typing simple search queries.

This matters for two reasons.

First, it represents a genuine shift in how discovery works. If more purchasing decisions begin with a conversational AI interaction rather than a search result, the rules for how brands get found change significantly.

Second, it raises the importance of structured, high-quality product content. AI-powered shopping experiences surface recommendations based on what the product is, what it does, and why it is trustworthy. Brands with weak listings, thin A+ Content, or unclear positioning will be harder to recommend.

Amazon Ads is also extending interactive advertising across Twitch, podcasts, Fire TV Premium Takeover, and Amazon FAST Channels, with the aim of moving audiences from passive discovery to active engagement across the full attention ecosystem.

What This Means for Brands on Amazon

The direction Amazon Ads is heading is clear: creative and media are becoming inseparable, and AI is what makes the connection work at scale.

But the opportunity these tools create is only as strong as the foundations behind them. Poorly structured product content, weak creative, and disconnected campaign activity will not improve just because the automation layer has become more powerful.

Brands that will benefit most are those that have:

• Strong product listings, A+ Content, and Brand Store assets already in place
• A clear creative strategy built for the full customer journey, not just Sponsored Ads
• Amazon DSP activity that is connected to broader retail objectives
• A testing framework that can act on creative performance data quickly
• Measurement tools such as AMC in use to understand attribution across the funnel

These updates also create a practical checklist for agencies advising clients. If a brand is not yet building video for performance as well as awareness, this is the moment to start. If Amazon DSP is operating in isolation from the wider retail strategy, that is a gap worth addressing now.

Key Takeaways

• Amazon Ads used Cannes Lions 2026 to announce significant updates across AI creative, Prime Video, Interactive Video Ads, and conversational shopping
• Dynamic TV Creative allows brands to personalise Prime Video ads using real shopping signals
• Interactive Video Ads are expanding to Samsung TV Plus, making streaming more directly shoppable
• Location-based creative tools allow national campaigns to be localised at scale
• Alexa-powered conversational shopping signals a longer-term shift in how discovery and purchase decisions will work
• Strong product content, creative strategy, and measurement foundations are essential to take advantage of these capabilities

At Toucan, we help ambitious brands build Amazon Ads strategies that connect creative, DSP, retail media, and AMC measurement across the full funnel. If you want to understand how these updates apply to your business, get in touch.