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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 proba