One month after Amazon retired the Amazon DSP name, the agencies paid to spend money inside Amazon's advertising products are still trying to work out what replaced it. Destaney Wishon, chief executive of the Amazon advertising agency btr media, tried today, in a LinkedIn post that opened with "Me trying to explain what in the hell is going on with Amazon Ads Agent and DSP / DVA" and conceded two lines later: "I'm still not 100% clear." Amazon's own pages show why. The company named its entire advertising platform after an AI agent that remains in closed beta, folded three products into a fourth without saying so in its launch announcement, and made the automated route the default while the manual controls experienced buyers relied on reach only some US advertisers.

In Short

Amazon renamed the tools businesses use to buy its ads, and even agencies that use them every day cannot say for certain what is called what, or who is allowed to use which part. The whole system is now called Amazon Ads Agent, yet the actual AI agent is only switched on for some advertisers, and the easiest way to buy hands most decisions to Amazon's software while the hands-on controls are rationed. The Trade Desk tried a similar AI-first overhaul and spent years fighting complaints from the people who buy through it, so the open question is whether Amazon's mess is temporary or whether confusion is doing a job for the AI products.

A map drawn on a conspiracy board

The post carried the conspiracy-board scene from the television comedy It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, an image that summed up the subject better than Amazon's documentation does. Within two hours it had drawn 48 reactions and 15 comments, many of them from people who manage Amazon advertising for brands, and few of them any less lost.

Wishon laid out seven points, and after the fourth the statements turn into questions. "Everyone can request access to their own DSP seat. No barrier to entry," the first reads. "DSP is no longer DSP. It is DVA." Sponsored Display "is no longer Sponsored Display, it is now merged with DVA." Then: "DVA covers campaigns in search but also under traditional DSP through DVA+ Manual controls."

After that, certainty runs out. "DSP is now also Amazon Ads Agent? According to the link in the comments." "But from what I understand Amazon Ads Agent is just the all encompassing interface that houses DVA and Search?" And finally: "Amazon Ads Agent is also an actual agent, not just the name of the platform? But not all brands have access to the agentic part of Amazon Ads Agent just yet?"

The post ends with a verdict on the product Amazon has been describing as simpler. "Ad Agent / Ads console is slow," Wishon wrote. "And the UI seems more confusing to me, not less."

This is not a newcomer struggling with a self-serve form. btr media has a head of DSP. If an agency built around Amazon advertising needs a public post to reason out what Amazon sells, the problem is not the reader.

The agent that is not there

The deepest source of confusion is a naming decision, and it belongs to Amazon.

Ads Agent began as the name of an assistant. When Amazon introduced Ads Agent on November 11, 2025, it built campaign structures from uploaded media plans and translated plain-language questions into Amazon Marketing Cloud queries, with campaign features limited to US users of Amazon's multimedia and DSP products. A day earlier, Amazon had merged sponsored ads and Amazon DSP into a single Campaign Manager, in a beta that required contacting an Amazon Ads executive.

Ten months later, at unBoxed on September 29, 2026, the name moved from the assistant to everything. According to the frequently asked questions on Amazon's Ads Agent page, Amazon brought sponsored ads and Amazon DSP together into one platform called Amazon Ads Agent, available to advertisers whether or not they sell in the Amazon store. AdExchanger's James Hercher reported the same day that the Amazon DSP product name had been replaced by DVA, for display, video and audio.

The agent itself did not come along for the ride. Amazon's September 29 announcement of the conversational experience states that it is in closed beta for eligible self-service and managed-service advertisers, in 25 countries, with availability varying by eligibility, capability, marketplace, language and campaign type. Advertisers who want it are told to express interest through their Amazon Ads account team. A month later, Amazon's product page for the feature still calls it a rolling closed beta.

So Amazon has put the word Agent on every advertiser's login screen and put the agent behind a request to an account team. Wishon's question - "Why is DSP / DVA available to all brands but the core product / re-brand of 'ads agent' still limited to some? If Ad console was rebranded as ads agent, wouldn't that mean everyone had access to it?" - has a simple answer that Amazon's marketing does not give: everyone has the platform called Ads Agent, and only some have the thing it is named after. "I can't figure out where this cross up is happening here," Wishon added. The cross-up is the name.

Amazon's pages do not agree with one another

Amazon cannot blame agencies for misreading its documentation when its documentation disagrees with itself.

Sponsored Display. Amazon's September 29 DVA+ announcement did not mention Sponsored Display at all, PPC Land noted at the time; the closest it came was saying Sponsored Ads advertisers were eligible. Amazon's DVA+ product page now describes DVA+ as a unified campaign type that brings together what was previously created through Amazon DSP, Sponsored Display and Sponsored TV. The Ads Agent page, answering what happened to Amazon DSP, says the programmatic capabilities now live in DVA+ with advanced settings and sit alongside Sponsored Display and Sponsored TV. Is Sponsored Display inside DVA+ or beside it? Wishon reached the sensible reading - "Yes SD falls under DVA, but it is not the core" - and noted that "multiple posts" had called DVA a rebranded Sponsored Display. "What got lost in translation during that roll out that has people so confused," the post asks. The translation Amazon published, in two versions.

The open beta. Amazon's launch announcement promised a DVA+ open beta in late October. As of today, that announcement still describes DVA+ as in closed beta in the United States. Common Thread Collective, an ecommerce agency, wrote on October 24 that the open beta had begun that day, without citing an Amazon source. PPC Land found no Amazon announcement settling it.

The countries. Amazon's DVA+ page says advertisers in 21 countries who previously used Amazon DSP will keep seeing the Amazon DSP experience. In July, Amazon had converted DSP-only accounts into advertiser accounts across 34 countries. Markets in the larger list but missing from the smaller one, such as China, Israel and New Zealand, get no explanation. Asked in the comments whether the changes apply only in the US, Wishon replied: "don't even get me started on timing international rollouts as well, ha!"

The results. The DVA+ product page sells the product with performance figures, among them a 68% improvement in cost per acquisition and 34% higher return on ad spend for sellers. Its data notes cite Amazon internal data from February 2025 and from January to March 2025, more than a year before DVA+ was announced. PPC Land reported on September 29 that none of the launch figures was labelled as a DVA+ result, and that the same 68% figure was described in two different ways.

Search. Wishon's claim that DVA covers search does not match Amazon's own descriptions. Search on Amazon is sponsored ads: the Ads Agent page describes them as placements in shopping results and conversational experiences, and lists them as a campaign type of their own, separate from DVA+, which covers streaming TV, online video, display and audio. Wishon's other line, that Ads Agent is the interface "that houses DVA and Search," is the accurate one. The only campaign type that puts search and the DVA formats into a single campaign is the third, Full-Funnel Campaigns. It is an understandable mistake. When the platform is called Agent, the DSP is called DVA, and a third product called Full-Funnel spans both, the wrong box is easy to tick.

Simple for whom?

Amazon's pitch for the restructuring is simplicity. AdExchanger quoted Kelly MacLean, Amazon Ads' vice president of engineering, science and product, saying Amazon believes it now has the simplest experience in the industry. The simplicity, on inspection, runs one way.

The automated route is open. Amazon's DVA+ page says DVA+ uses cost-per-thousand billing with no minimum spend, and getting started means registering for an Ads Agent account and choosing DVA+. No Amazon retail presence is required. On that narrow reading, Wishon's "No barrier to entry" holds.

The manual route is not. According to the same page, DVA+ with advanced settings - the toggle where the old demand-side platform controls now live - is available to a limited set of advertisers in the US, with plans to expand. The September 29 launch terms spelled out the rationing: advertisers with programmatic experience got both tiers, new advertisers and Sponsored Ads advertisers got the automated DVA+ only and had to ask an account manager for advanced settings, and agencies with existing entity access got both. Audience targeting, deal IDs, publisher inclusion and exclusion lists and frequency capping all sit behind that toggle.

The pattern runs through the year. Full-Funnel Campaigns, the most automated product, went live for US advertisers at a $100 daily minimum, and according to Digiday reporting cited in PPC Land's October 15 analysis, advertisers approve creative but cannot pick individual channels or audiences. In July, Brand+ stopped running streaming TV prospecting on a single pre-configured deal, with automatic deal selection switched on by default and several model updates turned on without advertiser action. In June, unified reporting reached general availability, with the standalone DSP and Sponsored Ads report pages scheduled to retire on December 31, 2026.

Is the confusion selling the AI? There is no evidence that Amazon designed it to. The effect is harder to dismiss. An advertiser who cannot work out what the products are called will take the path the interface offers first, and in Amazon Ads Agent that path ends in the automated product every time. The alternative requires knowing what advanced settings are, that they exist, and whom to ask for them. PPC Land's coverage of an ADOTAT column on October 18 made the same argument about defaults a month ago. Amazon's own pages have since confirmed the toggle is not open to every US advertiser.

The Trade Desk ran this experiment first

Wishon did not mention The Trade Desk. The parallel is hard to miss.

The Trade Desk launched Kokai, its AI-centred buying platform, on June 6, 2023, and then spent more than two years moving buyers off its older Solimar interface. The buyers pushed back. In March 2025, PPC Land reported that Bill Simmons, a former vice president of product, had left days after a wave of public scepticism about Kokai, following a fourth-quarter 2024 revenue miss - $741.01 million, with growth slowing to 22.3% - that was partly attributed to slower-than-expected Kokai adoption. By August 2025, The Trade Desk was steering Solimar users into Kokai with prompts to create all new campaigns there, media buyers were calling the interface overloaded and unintuitive, and one agency said it was moving spend to DV360 and Yahoo for 2026 because of functionality and trader time rather than price. In September 2025, after months of complaints, The Trade Desk partly retired the periodic table that had been Kokai's signature screen.

The cost showed up later. On August 6, 2026, The Trade Desk's shares fell 24% after hours when second-quarter revenue grew 3% to $715 million and third-quarter guidance pointed to a decline of roughly 12%. In early September it cut about 575 jobs, roughly 15% of staff, and lost its place in the S&P 500. Kokai was not the only cause; fee disputes with holding companies weighed too. But the company spent those years asking buyers to relearn their main tool, accept AI defaults and trust that the controls they wanted still existed somewhere.

Amazon is now making a similar request, with three differences that so far work in its favour. It is not forcing a global switch: 21 countries keep the DSP experience. It has been winning share: Amazon's portion of tracked programmatic spend rose from under 10% to just under 20% in about fifteen months through the first quarter of 2026. And its advertising business is growing fast, up 26% to $19.8 billion in the second quarter of 2026.

Share gains and fast growth buy patience. By 2026 The Trade Desk had neither, and its buyers had somewhere else to go.

The chorus

The replies under Wishon's post read like a focus group Amazon did not commission.

Patrick Z., a programmatic account director whose profile lists previous work at Amazon, offered an explanation for the name: "DVA is/was naming convention only used internally at Amazon Ads. It was an easy way for folks to say 'anything but Sponsored Ads'." Then the judgment: "Bringing it to the platform is very confusing and not how users have interacted with the DSP to date." PPC Land has not been able to confirm the internal usage. Wishon replied with a list of acronyms the business has cycled through - "AMG, DSP, DVA / HSA, PT, SDA, DVA" - and "The OG'ers get it." According to PPC Land's October 15 analysis, the Amazon Advertising Platform became Amazon DSP in September 2018, the DSP and console became Campaign Manager in November 2025, and the platform became Ads Agent in September 2026.

Chris Hall, an ecommerce director, saw a direction rather than a muddle: "Yes, everything seems to becoming more controlled by Amazon without a lot of insights. They want to simplify it but to me it looks like it's going backwards." Gregory Yeadon, an ecommerce executive, wrote that "it's unclear why this isn't more customer centric (the ads customer that is)," and added: "We're #1, right? Right?? :)" Ken Strong, head of retail media at Mass Culture: "Glad I'm not alone in the utter confusion of it all." Gabi Viljoen, an ecommerce adviser: "ya no they lost me..."

The most-liked comment came from inside Wishon's own agency. Gibby H., head of DSP at btr media, wrote: "Legacy view still holds my heart."

Manahil Zaidi, a sales representative at MakeBrandsBig, put it in the form of a request Amazon has so far not met: "Clearer communication around DVA and Ads Agent access would make a huge difference."

Who owns the seat

The practical consequence Wishon draws is about control of the account, not the interface. "If you do not own your DSP seat, I would recommend making the transition to own your seat sooner rather than later," the post states. "Unless Amazon announces a plan to make the merging process easier, we are pushing brands to set up an advertiser account asap, and then migrate campaigns post holidays." The one exception: "I don't really see a reason NOT to own your own seat unless you have more favorable payment terms with an agency floating spend" - an agency paying the media bill up front and recovering it from the client later, which matters while DVA+ is billed by invoice only, with credit cards not due until the first quarter of 2027.

Here the rationing bites again. Under the September 29 terms, agencies with existing entity access received advanced settings by default, while new advertisers received only the automated tier and had to ask for the rest. A brand that takes its seat in-house, as Wishon's agency urges, may start with fewer controls than its agency had. Amazon's pages do not say how long a request takes or what decides it.

Keith Harmon, who works in brand protection and commercial contracts, framed the stakes: "Owning the account seems like the bigger decision here. Agencies can change. The brand shouldn't have to start over every time that happens."

Trust is the other cost

Amazon is asking advertisers to hand more of the bid, the audience, the deal and the channel split to its own systems at an awkward moment. On August 31, 2026, the FTC and 22 states sued Amazon, alleging that for seven years it secretly overrode the results of its own advertising auctions with an undisclosed reserve applied after a winner and runner-up had been produced. According to the complaint, the share of clicks charged at the advertiser's own bid rose from about 4% in late 2020 to 79.1% in 2024. Amazon rejects the case and says no advertiser pays more than its bid. No court has ruled, and the figures concern Sponsored Products rather than programmatic buying.

It still frames the ask. A platform defending claims that it charged advertisers more than they understood is the same platform now telling them to let its AI decide more, under names some of its own customers cannot keep straight.

Why this matters

Amazon's advertising business does not need agencies to understand it in order to grow; the second-quarter numbers show that. But the restructuring shifts real money - who owns accounts, which tier a brand lands in, how much buying is delegated to agentic AI - at the moment when the people managing that money say they cannot read the map. PPC Land found no Amazon document that reconciles its own pages. Until Amazon publishes one, every brand that moves its seat in-house, every agency planning post-holiday migrations, and every advertiser in the 21 countries still on the old DSP is working from a LinkedIn post that ends with a question mark.

The Trade Desk learned how long buyers will tolerate a difficult product once growth stalls. Amazon is now testing how long they will tolerate a confusing one while its own growth holds.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Amazon Ads, whose restructured advertising platform is the subject; Destaney Wishon, chief executive of the Amazon advertising agency btr media, who published the post; and commenters including Patrick Z., Chris Hall, Keith Harmon, Ken Strong and Gibby H. of btr media. The Trade Desk serves as the comparison.

What: An agency chief executive publicly struggled to explain Amazon's September rebrand, in which Amazon DSP became DVA and DVA+, Sponsored Display and Sponsored TV were folded in, and the whole platform was renamed Amazon Ads Agent. Amazon's own pages show the agent the platform is named after is in closed beta, the manual DSP controls are limited to some US advertisers while the automated route is open to all, and different Amazon pages describe the same products in different ways.

When: The post was published today. Amazon announced the changes on September 29, 2026, promised a DVA+ open beta in late October that its launch announcement still lists as closed beta, and targets general availability in 35 markets in the first quarter of 2027.

Where: DVA+ and its advanced settings are US-only for now. Advertisers in 21 other countries who used Amazon DSP keep the old experience, and the AI agent's closed beta covers 25 countries.

Why: The confusion falls on decisions that move money - who owns advertising accounts, which tools a brand-owned account receives, and how much buying is handed to automation - and every default in Amazon's new setup points to the automated product. The Trade Desk's two-year fight over Kokai shows what forcing buyers onto an AI-first platform can cost; Amazon's rising programmatic share and 26% ad growth have so far protected it from the same reckoning.