For brands, especially in B2C, the old playbook of launching one campaign and letting it run is no longer enough.
You need a strategy that can adapt in real time. We’re marketing through a moment, sustaining interest and driving return visits across multiple days.
This year, we’ve observed some really big changes from Amazon around Prime Day, such as the 96-hour duration.
Amazon’s debut of Alexa+ was easy to miss unless you were watching closely. Amazon introduced Alexa+, its next-generation voice assistant, as part of the Prime Day experience.
You can now ask Alexa to find and track deals, and it responds based on purchase history, preferences, and even delivery speed.
That’s a fundamental change to the discovery journey.
If more product searches happen through voice or AI assistants, that means fewer are happening through visual channels like search ads or on-site browsing. That forces marketers to think differently. What keywords surface your brand in a voice-first world?
The biggest near-term implication is in high-intent, low-consideration categories: CPG, everyday household essentials, low-ticket electronics. But over time, as trust in AI shopping agents grows, we’re likely to see more discovery behaviours happening through assistants.
That changes the nature of competition. Brands will no longer win based on visual merchandising or attention-grabbing creatives, but on how effectively they surface in algorithmic recommendations.
Success will depend on structured, accurate product data, real-time inventory signals, and a presence within ecosystems like Amazon.
Another thing Amazon is testing and executing quite well is value differentiation.
With this year’s 10% cashback for Prime for Young Adults members, we’re seeing a shift away from generic discounts and toward identity-based incentives.
Instead of mass offers, they’re crafting incentives that resonate with specific customer segments based on what those groups care about.
In this case, they are value-conscious Gen Z and younger millennials.
That changes the core question for performance marketers from “How do I target this audience?” to “What economic value does this customer expect to receive in exchange for their engagement, attention, and action?”
Broad discounts will continue to lose efficiency.
But a tailored incentive, strategically timed and contextually relevant, can shift conversion dramatically.
This is about designing the commercial offer as a function of identity and behaviour. And as performance marketing becomes more integrated with lifecycle marketing, metrics will need to evolve too.
Marketers will need to monitor value-per-segment, offer efficiency, and long-term retention curves by incentive type.
This is a much more intelligent and customer-centric model. But it requires tighter data integration between performance, CRM, and loyalty.
The brands that build that connective tissue now will be far better positioned as the shift toward personalised value becomes the norm.
One of the more underappreciated innovations this year is what Amazon is doing with Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC).
Brands now have access to real-time insights, targeting tools, and the ability to shift budgets during the Prime Day event itself. That creates a very different operating model for performance marketing.
It rewards brands that can act fast, those who have internal alignment between media, data, creative, and decision-making.
If you're still running campaigns on a weekly reporting cadence, you're already behind.
This shift is especially important in high-volume, high-velocity B2C verticals like electronics, home appliances, and fast fashion, where price elasticity and competition fluctuate constantly.
The biggest challenge with multi-day events like Prime Day is keeping a sense of urgency alive. Amazon has thought this through.
By releasing new, themed deals each day and creating tighter windows for the best discounts, they’re able to make urgency feel fresh even over four days.
This is something B2C brands need to study closely.
If urgency is static, it fades quickly. But if you layer in progression, new deals, expiring bundles, daily themes, you build momentum.
That keeps consumers engaged.
This kind of engineered urgency matters especially for brands in premium categories, where decision cycles are longer and impulse behaviour is lower. You want your campaign to pull people forward.
Taken together, all these changes point to a new performance marketing landscape.
You need to start thinking of performance marketing not as media buying, but as orchestrated consumer engagement across channels, touchpoints, and contexts.
Amazon is showing us that performance doesn’t live in one place. It lives in how everything works together, across time, technology, identity, and behaviour.
