A shopper experience consultant who has tracked Amazon since the company's founding in 1995 has published a pointed analysis arguing that the Amazon Ads business has quietly abandoned the customer-first philosophy that defined Jeff Bezos's e-commerce operation - even as the advertising division generated $56 billion in revenue in 2024.

The critique, authored by Jean-Christophe Solus and dated May 2025, targets three specific structural problems in how Amazon presents paid and organic content to shoppers: the opacity of product badges like "Amazon's Choice," the invisibility of manufacturer brand content, and the prevalence of sponsored placements that carry no discernible claim or product promise.

The document arrives at a moment when Amazon's advertising machine is operating at full speed. Amazon's full-year advertising revenue reached $68.6 billion in 2025, more than double the $29 billion generated four years earlier. Amazon reported Q1 2026 advertising services revenue of $17.2 billion, up 24% year on year. The platform has simultaneously rolled out a consolidated Campaign Manager, AI-powered creative agents, and unified DSP infrastructure - all aimed squarely at advertisers. What Solus asks, implicitly, is whether anyone has been designing for the person on the other side of the screen.

The customer obsession gap

Amazon's leadership principles are not private. Customer obsession sits at the top of the list, above frugality, ownership, and every other internal value. Solus acknowledges this publicly stated hierarchy but suggests the advertising arm operates by a different logic.

According to Solus, "Customer obsession is Amazon's #1 principle, but the widely successful Amazon Ads business ($56bn in 2024) seems convinced that the motto is for the e-commerce guys only, not theirs."

That is a specific charge - not that the advertising products fail to work for brands, but that they have been designed without serious consideration of what shoppers experience. The distinction matters because Amazon has historically positioned its advertising business as uniquely trustworthy precisely because it sits inside a shopping environment. Ads on Amazon, the argument goes, are relevant because they appear when someone is already searching for a product. Solus does not dispute the relevance argument. He disputes whether that relevance is being communicated clearly enough to the people making the purchase decisions.

Mysterious badges: automation without explanation

The first problem Solus identifies concerns the small labels that appear on product thumbnails throughout Amazon's search results - labels like "Amazon's Choice," "Best Seller," and "Exclusive." These badges have existed for years, and their presence on a listing is generally understood by marketers to reflect some combination of sales velocity, rating thresholds, and return rates.

The criteria, according to Solus's analysis, include a product being rated four stars or higher, being purchased frequently, and being returned infrequently. The system is automated, operating at scale across millions of listings. What the badge does not do, at least historically, is explain itself to the person reading it.

According to Solus, Amazon's approach to these labels has been one of opaque automation: "In pure Amazon style it is completely automated. Unfortunately they forgot to explain this to customers."

He notes there has been a partial improvement. For some captions, Amazon now surfaces an explanation panel - the screenshot in the document shows a mobile overlay reading "Amazon's Choice: Overall Pick" followed by three bullet points: rated 4+ stars, purchased often, returned infrequently. That granularity is precisely what Solus is asking for. The question he raises is why the same treatment has not been extended uniformly to all badges, including "Best Seller" and "Exclusive."

The practical stakes for the marketing community are not trivial. Brands investing in Amazon Ads campaigns have long understood that winning a badge can dramatically affect conversion rates. But if shoppers do not understand what the badge means, the signal erodes. The badge becomes decoration rather than a decision-making tool, which also reduces its value to the advertiser who earned it.

Ghost brand pages: premium content with no entrance sign

The second issue involves what Solus calls "ghost brand pages" - the rich manufacturer-produced content that appears deep within Amazon product detail pages. Brands can upload this material at no additional cost. It typically includes high-quality imagery, structured product storytelling, and design elements consistent with the brand's own visual identity. The content is well-produced. It is also effectively invisible to anyone not already scrolling deeply through the page.

According to Solus, the tension here is structural: "Over the last 30 years the product pages have grown tremendously and this premium content is lost in a sea of other things. Too bad there is no way for the shopper to browse Amazon and look on purpose for this quality communication."

He identifies the competitive backdrop: Amazon knows that direct-to-consumer websites, notably Shopify-powered storefronts, give brands complete control over the presentation of their identity. The ability to upload brand content on Amazon is partly Amazon's response to that competitive pressure. Brands stay on the platform, in part, because they can maintain some version of their visual language there. But the discoverability problem undermines the arrangement. The content exists. Nobody navigates to it.

This has a direct advertising implication. Brands spending heavily on Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands to drive traffic to Amazon listings may find that traffic landing on pages where the most distinctive and convincing content - the brand's own crafted narrative - is essentially hidden below multiple scrolls of technical specifications, seller information, and competitor listings.

Zero promise ads: the claimless search result

The third strand of the critique is the most commercially pointed, and the most relevant to practitioners running Amazon advertising campaigns.

According to Solus, a substantial portion of Amazon's sponsored placements carry no claim whatsoever. When a shopper types "shaver," "detergent," or "battery" into Amazon's search bar, the first three results are paid placements. The products paying to appear there are not making any argument about why the shopper should choose them over the next result. They are simply paying to exist at the top of the list.

According to Solus, "The sad truth is that Amazon Ads relies for a huge chunk of its activity on claimless ads. The sponsored content only impacts the appearance rank. In other words when you type 'shaver' or 'detergent' or 'battery', the first three products pay to be there. There is no benefit for the customer."

He invokes David Ogilvy to establish the baseline: advertising, at its core, should make a claim on behalf of the product being advertised. Ogilvy built campaigns around specific promises - the product does something for you, delivers a measurable result, earns your preference for a reason. A sponsored placement that simply occupies space does not do that.

What makes the point sharper is Solus's observation that Amazon already possesses the infrastructure to change this. The badge system, whatever its current limitations, is a mechanism for associating a product with an evaluated characteristic. Pairing sponsored placements with a brand-selected badge stating the relevant claim would cost relatively little technically. According to Solus, "It would not be hugely difficult for Amazon to follow its internal guidelines and pair paid advertising with a brand selected badge stating the desired claim. The Advertising business would not change much but the shopper would benefit."

The observation that Walmart has replicated the claimless model - a screenshot in the document shows Walmart.com search results following a similar format - suggests this is not a problem unique to Amazon but one Amazon is well-positioned to address first, given its stated principles.

The flywheel that stopped spinning for shoppers

Solus frames all three problems within the context of what made Amazon's original growth model work. The flywheel metaphor - lower prices and better selection bring more customers, more customers bring more sellers, more sellers bring lower prices - depended on every part of the business genuinely improving the shopping experience. Badges, brand pages, and product copy were all, in their original conception, ways of reducing friction and helping shoppers make better decisions.

The argument is that these tools have not kept up. The badge system scaled without a corresponding investment in consumer education. Brand content was welcomed but not promoted. And the advertising business grew so fast - from $29 billion four years ago to $68.6 billion in 2025 - that refining what the sponsored results actually communicate may have felt less urgent than building the next ad format.

Amazon has concentrated significant development effort in 2025 on tools for advertisers: the unified Campaign Manager, Ads Agent for automated campaign management, creative generation tools, and a revamped homepage hero package with fractional share-of-voice options. These developments serve the brands and agencies placing the money. What is harder to point to is a comparable investment in helping the shopper understand what they are looking at.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For digital advertising practitioners, the analysis carries a practical dimension beyond its philosophical one. The effectiveness of Amazon advertising is ultimately downstream of shopper trust and comprehension. If the person encountering a sponsored result does not understand why it is there, or if a badge they see carries no legible meaning, the click rate and conversion rate for that placement are lower than they would otherwise be. That makes the investment less efficient.

Amazon's Sponsored Products have remained the largest single contributor to advertising revenue through every quarter tracked. The core of the business is a product that functions primarily through search-intent matching - someone types a term and sees paid results. If those results carried more information about why each product merits attention, the advertiser's spend would work harder.

Separately, the retail media model Amazon pioneered has now been licensed to other retailers, with Macy's among the first major department stores to implement the Retail Ad Service. As the underlying technology spreads, so do its structural assumptions. If claimless sponsored results become the default architecture for retail search advertising across multiple platforms, the question Solus is raising becomes one of industry-wide convention rather than a single company's product decision.

The Amazon Ads business recorded Q4 2024 revenue of $17.3 billion, an 18% year-on-year increase, with sponsored products continuing as the largest segment. The full-year 2024 figure was approximately $56 billion, the number Solus cites in his analysis. The business has grown substantially on the current model. That growth does not address whether the model could be improved for shoppers - and, as a consequence, for the advertisers whose returns depend on shopper decision-making.

Jean-Christophe Solus held the position of CIO at Groupe Roederer, parent company of Champagne Louis Roederer, from February 1998 to February 2008. He describes himself in the document as a shopper experience expert who has "followed and studied retail since the birth of Amazon in 1995 and even before that." His current work focuses on helping brands design technically feasible customer experience solutions.

Timeline

Summary

Who - Jean-Christophe Solus, a shopper experience consultant and former CIO of Groupe Roederer (Champagne Louis Roederer), who has monitored Amazon's retail model since 1995.

What - A structured critique of Amazon Ads arguing that the advertising division has diverged from Amazon's stated customer obsession principle across three areas: the unexplained use of product badges like "Amazon's Choice," the invisibility of manufacturer brand content on product pages, and the prevalence of sponsored search results that carry no product claim.

When - The analysis was written in May 2025 and circulated publicly on LinkedIn on or around May 25, 2026.

Where - The critique examines the Amazon.com shopping environment, primarily on mobile, with additional observations about Walmart.com following the same patterns in sponsored search results.

Why - Solus argues that while Amazon's flywheel model originally required every component - including advertising - to improve the shopper experience, the advertising business has grown large enough ($56 billion in 2024, $68.6 billion in 2025) to sustain itself on the current model without investing in clearer communication to shoppers. The implication is that this divergence reduces the effectiveness of advertising spend and undermines the trust-based rationale that distinguishes Amazon Ads from search advertising on other platforms.

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