You bring the budget. That's it.

Happy Friday,

A media plan used to be a list of decisions. Which format. Which shopper. How much to each. What the ad looks like.

Amazon has got it down to two fields.

The product is called Full-Funnel Campaigns, and Amazon Ads announced it on September 29. Here is what it asks of you, in full.

Your products. A daily budget, reportedly no less than $100. Creative, unless you would rather Amazon made it, in which case it will generate the images and a TV-ready video from your product page. And a ROAS threshold, which is optional.

Here is what it decides.

Whether your money goes to sponsored ads, display, video or streaming TV. How much goes to each. When that changes, which is in real time. Which shoppers count as worth reaching. And, if you took the offer, what the ad says and looks like.

It also asks for patience. Amazon describes a learning period of about two weeks. At the reported minimum, that is $1,400 spent while the system finds out what your products are.

You used to brief the campaign. Now you fund it and wait to be told how it went.

Now follow where the decisions went.

They did not disappear. Someone still chooses between a search ad and a television ad. That someone is now the company that sells both, along with the other two. Agencies at the event compared it to an auto campaign for the whole account: easier to run, with the trade-off being control and the ability to see why.

And the report card comes from the same place. The headline result, 67 percent better than campaigns you configure yourself, is measured on a twelve-month estimate of future sales.

The decision-maker, the vendor and the scorekeeper are now one login.

Now the honest part.

This is optional. It runs beside your existing campaigns, and Amazon says advertisers can stay in full control or hand over as much as they like. For a brand with no media buyer and no time, an allocator that works at three in the morning is a real improvement on nothing. It may well split a budget better than a person does. And you can set the ROAS threshold, which is a brake.

Read that as fairness. The mechanic is still the mechanic: four decisions left your desk, and they went to the seller.

This Week In Amazon

Amazon will now advertise the installer. Sponsored Services, announced at unBoxed with Yelp as anchor partner, puts local service providers in front of shoppers on Amazon. If your product needs fitting, mounting or wiring, someone else's ad is about to sit next to the purchase. Find out where before you decide whether that helps your returns rate or competes for the click.

Branded Conversations is reportedly due in January. It lets a shopper hold a back-and-forth with your brand inside Alexa for Shopping, starting from a Sponsored Brands ad, and is reportedly billed on the first prompt click. It answers from the product guides and compatibility details you supplied. If those are thin, so is the conversation you are paying for.

October 6 — Walmart put its label rates in ShipStation. Marketplace sellers can buy Walmart-negotiated US domestic labels there, with up to $100 of lost-item protection. If you ship your own orders on both channels, re-quote the Walmart ones before peak rather than after.

Thirty minutes, before anyone clicks Create. Give it to whoever runs your ads.

Write the fence first, on one page.

The test line. One product line with steady sales and its own campaigns. Not your hero, and not the one that has never worked. A line that barely sells gives you nothing to read.

The control line. A second, similar line you will not touch. November lifts everything, and the control is how you tell the campaign from the calendar.

The number. For each line, ordered product sales for its ASINs from Business Reports, divided by the spend of every campaign that advertises them. Pull it now for the four weeks ending October 3, which keeps Prime Big Deal Days out.

The end. Six weeks from launch: two of learning that you ignore, four that you read. At the reported minimum that is $4,200. Write the figure down.

Artifact: a one-page fence — test line, control line, both baseline numbers, the end date and the cost, signed before launch.

The verdict is the gap: how the test line's number moved against the control's over the same four weeks, never the campaign's own dashboard. It tells you what happened in a month, not what a twelve-month estimate claims, and brand ads can lift the control line too. If one campaign advertises both lines the spend cannot be split, so pick lines that do not share one. And do not pause what is working to "give the AI room." The product is built to run alongside.

Amazon will plan the campaign, make the ad, place it and tell you how it did.

You still get to say which products, and when it stops. Keep those two.

See you Tuesday.

Any questions? Book a meeting with me here.

Dan Head

Founder, AMZ Elite