Affiliate Idea Factory

AI recommendations are becoming the new digital shelf as people search and shop within LLM chatbots. The change has left the ad industry scrambling to determine what an ad strategy looks like without clicks, landing pages or traditional search results.

At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this year, Amazon announced what it’s calling a new ad format: Alexa+ Agentic Ads. With this framework, Amazon users see an ad and can complete a purchase all without leaving the ad — from food delivery to concert tickets. What makes it agentic is the LLM’s ability to hold what’s supposed to be a natural conversation with a customer rather than advertiser scripts and prompts to answer customer questions, said Charlotte Maines, vp of devices, content and advertising at Amazon. 

These announcements — timed to Prime Day — have brands like Papa Johns pizza and The Orchard, a Sony subsidiary ticket purchasing company, signed on to beta test. (Neither Papa Johns nor The Orchard responded to requests for comment.) For now, Amazon and its beta partners are working out the kinks — things like success metrics and transaction completion rates — to prove the value of the agentic ads. Amazon would not divulge pricing.

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Ask anyone on the Croisette this week what’s transforming the industry and you’ll get the same words, delivered with the same confidence, regardless of who’s talking. AI. Efficiency. Agentic. Orchestration. Spend a few hours listening to the version of the conversation that happens after the panel ends — at dinner, over a second bottle of rosé nobody ordered — and a different story starts to surface, one with considerably less polish. 

“No one really admits openly as to how much they’ve been burning to develop,” said Ian Maxwell, CEO at ad tech business Converge Digital, on the discourse around the cost of AI at the festival. “We know in our own use case if you throw a whole code base at it the costs become absolutely astronomical and with the rise in token costs it’s now a case where it is vastly more costly than simply having engineers.”

For him, the point is that AI augments his engineers in a supervised and managed manner. Or as he put it: “It means we can still get three times the productivity — real world of course, not the 10 times claims that float around in the ether — which only really exist for super specific use cases without exposing everything to the AI, and thus avoiding those massive costs.”

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