AMC is Amazon Marketing Cloud, a clean room in which advertisers write SQL against pseudonymised records of the ads Amazon served for them and the shopping, browsing and streaming events connected to those ads. No individual record leaves the environment. Queries return aggregated tables, and audiences assembled by the same queries activate in Amazon's buying tools without the advertiser seeing who is in them.

The product exists because Amazon stopped short of shipping log-level data to advertisers and offered controlled computation instead. Standard reporting answers fixed questions with fixed metrics. AMC answers custom ones: how many buyers saw a streaming ad before a sponsored search click, what a second exposure adds, which customers bought twice in a year.

Inside an instance

Each advertiser works in a dedicated instance linked to specific Amazon DSP and sponsored ads accounts. A demand-side platform, or DSP, buys display, video and audio inventory programmatically; sponsored ads are the formats sold inside Amazon's store. Both feed the same tables. AdLabs, which publishes a public AMC reference guide, documents seven core tables and 761 columns covering traffic events, attributed conversions, segment membership and custom attribution. Amazon puts the figure at hundreds of fields.

Query syntax is a restricted dialect. SELECT * is rejected, forcing every column to be named, and rows describing too few people are dropped before the result is returned. Amazon documents built-in aggregation thresholds without publishing a figure; practitioner guides, including Tinuiti's, put the usual requirement above 100 unique users per output row. Suppression is silent: a row missing because a segment was too small looks identical to one missing because nobody behaved that way, the most common source of misread AMC output.

Advertiser signals arrive through separate plumbing. Onboarding APIs stream or upload pseudonymised first-party records, with identity fields hashed before transmission. Ads Data Manager, documented in a walkthrough Amazon published on May 1, 2026, sits underneath that step, described by Mayank Arora of Amazon Ads as "a stand-alone solution for managing advertiser first party data across Amazon ads". One data set uploaded once reaches Amazon DSP, Events Manager and AMC.

Outputs go two ways. Reporting APIs run workflows on demand or on a schedule, returning aggregated files. Audience APIs build rule-based and lookalike audiences from the same signals, activated across sponsored ads, video and display.

The signals available

Campaign events form the base layer: impressions, clicks and attributed conversions from Amazon DSP, Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display and Sponsored TV. Further signal sets have been added at a steady rate. Amazon Live signals entered a limited United States beta in June 2025, bringing shoppable live video into the same joins. Prime Video viewership signals followed on November 11, 2025 in open beta across the United States, Canada, Japan and Australia, supplying content title, content type and show-level engagement, with five European markets scheduled for the first quarter of 2026.

Third-party signals sit behind a subscription tier called Paid Features, drawing on Amazon's own data and on providers including Experian and NCS. Nielsen segments arrived through Zeotap Data Distribution on December 8, 2025.

Time depth changed twice. The ad traffic lookback window moved from 13 months to 25 months on November 11, 2025, opening in the United States and Canada first, with the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, Austria, Turkey and Japan following in the first quarter of 2026. Two full years allows a like-for-like comparison of consecutive peak seasons rather than one. Retail purchase history runs longer: Amazon's measurement expansion post describes a five-year retail lookback, aimed at categories such as laptops, replaced at multi-year intervals.

Origin and evolution

Amazon's own account of when AMC started is inconsistent. A September 2025 Amazon Ads post states that the product launched in 2019, while the beta was announced on January 5, 2021 for eligible agencies, advertisers and tool providers in North America, Europe, Japan and Australia, with eligibility criteria never published. Both statements come from Amazon.

The competitive context was clear at launch. AMC read as Amazon's answer to Google's Ads Data Hub, announced in beta on 24 May 2017 after Google removed log-level identifiers from data transfer files. Each platform replaced exported data with a query environment it controlled. Activation was the commercial point from the start: speaking to AdExchanger in 2022, Amazon's Ashish Sharma said of AMC audiences that "We created this linkage specifically for the Amazon DSP".

Friction came off steadily after that. A code-free High Value Audiences builder appeared in beta in mid-2024, segmenting by past spending without a query. At unBoxed on October 15, 2024, bid adjustments for AMC audiences arrived, letting shoppers who had seen a streaming ad be bid on differently. A SQL generator was announced at CES on January 15, 2025, turning plain-language descriptions into query code and reaching all AMC customers during the first quarter.

The largest access change came on September 16, 2025, when AMC became directly available to sponsored ads advertisers inside the Amazon Ads console, removing the partner or representative step that had gated entry. Before that, a DSP relationship and an analyst able to write SQL were the practical requirements, which confined the tool to large spenders.

Two months later, at unBoxed 2025, an Ads Agent skill for AMC arrived on November 11, 2025, generating analytics SQL from conversation and requiring human review before execution. It shipped alongside a wider agent covering campaign creation and targeting recommendations, and with AMC Custom Models, which allow proprietary algorithms to be trained on instance signals.

Infrastructure shifted underneath. Amazon now states that AMC is built on AWS Clean Rooms, and offers a variant for advertisers preferring to query from their own cloud environment. Merkle reported expanding a target audience by 60% through that route, a partner-supplied figure, not independently verified.

Why it matters for media teams

Retail media budgets are judged on outcomes that standard reports attribute crudely. Research by Incremental in June 2026 found that siloed retailer attribution misses between 36% and 53% of total retail media impact, rising to 80% for off-site video. AMC is where an Amazon advertiser builds the custom attribution, frequency and path analyses standard reporting cannot express.

Access is bundled rather than negotiated. The advertiser account upgrade announced in August 2026 provisions AMC by the upgrade itself, removing separate registration and allowing campaign and events data from across Amazon's products globally to be analysed in one instance. Some features require it outright: the Geographic Insights and Activation API lists AMC access as a prerequisite.

Pricing is the loudest signal. AMC is free to eligible advertisers, and on June 2, 2026, Amazon made its own paid-feature signals free to query until December 31, 2026, with third-party signals such as Experian's still requiring a subscription. Free querying at rising volumes is an infrastructure cost Amazon absorbs, a tension visible in AWS's agreement to acquire the creator of the DuckDB analytical engine.

Limitations and disputes

The aggregation floor is the binding constraint on granularity. Narrow segments, small geographies and low-volume products return nothing, and the threshold applies row by row, so one detailed dimension can empty an otherwise usable report. Comparable systems set the bar differently, which shows how much of it is policy: Google's Ads Data Hub drops rows below roughly 50 unique users, falling to 20 with noise injection and 10 for clicks and conversions alone, while AWS Clean Rooms lets the data provider pick any minimum between 2 and 100,000.

Activation remains closed. Audiences built from Amazon signals can be bought through Amazon's channels, not a rival DSP, which turns measurement work into spend on the platform being measured. The same criticism applies to the Google and Meta equivalents. Amazon also reports on the performance of media Amazon sold, a conflict partly addressed elsewhere: on May 15, 2026, more than 50 third-party measurement products became self-serviceable for Amazon DSP advertisers across 18 countries.

Lowering the skill barrier creates a different problem. Natural-language generation produces SQL a trained analyst would have written differently, and neither cost nor correctness is visible to someone who cannot read it. Coverage is uneven too, with signal sets and lookback extensions reaching the United States months before Europe.

Not the same as

Ads Data Hub is Google's equivalent, tied to Google and YouTube campaign data, with its own thresholds and its own activation path.

AWS Clean Rooms is the general-purpose collaboration service any two companies can use on Amazon Web Services. AMC is built on it and ships Amazon Ads signals with it.

Amazon Marketing Stream delivers hourly campaign metrics through push messaging for near real-time optimisation, whereas AMC is built for historical analysis over long windows.

Amazon Publisher Cloud is the sell-side counterpart, letting publishers combine their signals with Amazon Ads datawhen building deals.

Ads Data Manager onboards and routes advertiser first-party data. AMC is one of its destinations, not a substitute for it.

Outside ad tech, the same three letters denote AMC Networks and AMC Entertainment. Both sell advertising. Neither has any relationship to the clean room.

Recent developments

The pattern through 2026 has been consolidation rather than new analytics. Ads Data Manager was documented on May 1, third-party measurement opened to self-service in mid-May, free first-party paid features followed on June 2, and August's single global advertiser account wired clean room access into the account structure across 34 countries.

The shape of the bargain has not changed. Amazon supplies computation over data it will not release, sets the aggregation floor, defines the schema and controls where the resulting audiences can be spent. Everything made cheaper since September 2025 has made that arrangement easier to enter, not different in kind.

Timeline

  • 24 May 2017: Google announces the Ads Data Hub beta, establishing the walled garden clean room model
  • 2019: Date Amazon gives, in a September 2025 post, for the launch of Amazon Marketing Cloud
  • January 5, 2021: AMC beta opens for eligible agencies, advertisers and tool providers in North America, Europe, Japan and Australia
  • 2022: Amazon confirms AMC audience activation is built for Amazon DSP only
  • 2023: Amazon Publisher Cloud launches as the sell-side clean room product
  • Mid-2024: Code-free High Value Audiences solution enters beta
  • October 15, 2024: unBoxed adds bid adjustments for AMC audiences in Amazon DSP
  • January 15, 2025: SQL generator announced at CES, with rollout to all AMC customers in the first quarter
  • June 2025: Amazon Live signals enter limited beta for United States advertisers
  • September 16, 2025: Direct self-service AMC access opens to sponsored ads advertisers
  • November 11, 2025: Ad traffic lookback extends from 13 to 25 months; Prime Video signals enter open beta; Ads Agent and AMC Custom Models announced at unBoxed
  • December 8, 2025: Nielsen segments reach Amazon DSP and AMC via Zeotap Data Distribution
  • May 1, 2026: Amazon publishes its Ads Data Manager technical walkthrough
  • May 15, 2026: More than 50 third-party measurement products become self-service for Amazon DSP advertisers in 18 countries
  • June 2, 2026: Amazon first-party paid feature signals become free to query through December 31, 2026
  • August 2026: Advertiser account upgrade across 34 countries provisions AMC access automatically

Summary

Who. Amazon Ads operates AMC. Advertisers, agencies and software partners registered on the Amazon Ads Partner Network use it, with sponsored ads advertisers self-serving since September 2025 and Amazon DSP advertisers provisioned through their account. Agencies including Flywheel, Artefact and VML and vendors including Pacvue and LiveRamp build services on top of it.

What. A clean room in which pseudonymised Amazon Ads events, retail signals and advertiser-uploaded records can be queried in SQL, returning aggregated output only, and converted into rule-based or lookalike audiences for activation in Amazon's buying tools.

When. Amazon dates the launch to 2019 and announced the beta on January 5, 2021. Access opened broadly in September 2025, the ad traffic lookback doubled in November 2025, and first-party paid features became free to query in June 2026 through the end of that year.

Where. Inside a dedicated instance built on AWS Clean Rooms, reachable through the Amazon Ads console, the AMC APIs or an advertiser's own AWS environment, and available in roughly 20 marketplaces across North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific.

Why. Amazon holds shopping, streaming and advertising signals it will not export, and advertisers need cross-channel measurement that standard reports cannot produce. AMC resolves both by moving the computation to the data, at the cost of aggregation floors, an Amazon-defined schema and audiences that can only be spent where Amazon sells media.