‘Less pitching, more listening’: What Amazon is really doing at CES
By Seb Joseph • January 5, 2026 •
Ivy Liu
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CES has become the ad industry’s first real gut check of the year. For Amazon’s ad team, that means less pitching and more listening.
That posture can read as contrarian given the concentration of big agency leadership and CMOs. Internally, however, Amazon treats the show less as a sales opportunity and more as a read on how closely agency and advertiser priorities track with its own plans for the year ahead.
If the gap is too wide, there’s still time to adjust. That was the case last year, when marketers said they wanted Amazon’s performance data and closed-loop signals but could only use them partially because upfront budgets were locked into publisher-specific deals and flexible dollars were scattered across too many systems to manage intelligently. Amazon’s response was telling. It built tools that let advertisers keep their upfront deals intact while quietly repositioning Amazon as the brains behind how those budgets are paced, optimized and measured.
“Without a doubt, we see our partners as being critical innovators and important to how we continue to go to market, whether they’re building on top of what we have or leveraging our agentic capabilities into their own ecosystem,” said vp of Amazon Ads Kelly MacLean.
This year that feedback is expected to coalesce around four pillars:
The identity wedge
First is Authenticated Graph, Amazon’s deterministic identity tool that launched in the fall and ties logged-in households, devices and email addresses to a single verified account. Amazon says it now reaches roughly 90 percent of U.S. households.
At CES, much of the listening will focus on how much agencies buy into that clarity and scale, and whether it is enough to move more of their clients’ money. The pitch is a single operating layer for managing frequency, attribution and performance across Amazon and non-Amazon inventory bought through its ad tech. The trade-off, however, is greater reliance on Amazon that some advertisers may be comfortable admitting.
So far, the early response to Authenticated Graph has been positive, according to MacLean, though she declined to provide specifics. Even with the limited detail, the appeal is evident: the ability to connect ad exposure directly to commerce activity without relying on probabilistic IP-based inference.
Turning live sports into a performance channel
Given how much feedback Amazon execs heard about CTV at CES last year, they’re arriving this time with something more concrete: it’s previewing the Live Events Optimizer, a feature in the Amazon DSP designed to make it easier to buy ads around major live moments — think sports games like the NBA, NFL or the Winter Olympics — rather than treating them as generic streaming inventory.
Instead of spreading spend evenly across long programming windows, the tool lets advertisers tie budgets to specific games and time slots where attention spikes. It pulls premium inventory from Amazon and other media owners into one place and automates pacing and reporting at the event level. It also uses the same targeting and frequency controls already available in Amazon DSP which means marketers can manage how often people see their ads around a specific game without juggling multiple systems of publisher deals.
“The biggest opportunity we’ve heard from marketers is that this [live sports] is the last captive audience,” said MacLean. “The challenge, though, is that DSPs have historically found it really difficult to understand who you’re reaching when those moments matter.”
From retail DSP to open web buying system
After cutting deals that opened Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, Paramount+ and Spotify inventory to Amazon DSP, the ads team is using CES to gauge whether the platform can be treated as a premiere buying system for premium streaming and audio, not just a retail performance add-on.
“We have many large brands who use this as their primary DSP, even if they’re not selling anything on Amazon,” MacLean said.
Her comment tracks with what media buyers reported across 2025 as non-endemic advertisers gradually became a meaningful driver of Amazon’s ad growth.
“It’s [Amazon ad spending is] very healthy and probably higher than expectation,” said John Shea, head of commerce at PMG. “Overall, I think you’re going to see another close to 20% year over year growth figure in Amazon ad spending.”
The AI rebuild
Finally, Amazon will use CES to help with a broader shift in how its ad business is meant to operate. The company is in the middle of rolling out a rebuilt platform that collapses programmatic buying, full-funnel advertising, creative, analytics and optimization into a single, AI-led system.
At the show, Amazon will introduce two different ways Amazon can use that system. Smart Mode is designed to automate much of the setup and optimization for advertisers looking for a lighter-touch workflow. Meanwhile, Expert Mode preserves more traditional controls for agencies and advertisers that want to stay closer to the levers. Both are supported by Amazon’s AI agents built to generate creative, adjust campaigns and analyze results.
“There’s just so much fragmentation that we have a massive opportunity to completely simplify how customers are thinking, how they measure results and how they launch campaigns,” said MacLean.
CES will serve as a read on how much control advertisers are willing to cede, how much transparency they still expect and where automation makes them uneasy.
The bigger bet
The subtext across all four threads is consistent. Amazon is not coming to Las Vegas to announce features. It is coming to see whether the market is ready to let it become the operating layer for how the best of everything outside Google and Meta is actually bought.
“We really work deeply with holding companies, independent agencies and ad tech providers — that’s a huge part of our business,” said MacLean. “We’re working with them very closely on how they’re integrating our tech and our MCP servers so that they can expand their AI applications with our systems.”
