The Maze: Amazon retail media is moving up-funnel without abandoning its conversion engine. Pacvue's benchmark shows Sponsored Brands rising from 13.0% to 14.0% of Sponsored Ads spend between Q2 2025 and Q2 2026. DSP video makes the bigger jump, from 23.8% to 28.6%. Sponsored Products still holds almost 85% of Sponsored Ads budgets. The change is not a pivot away from performance. It is a second layer being built on top of it.
Two media systems are changing at different speeds. Sponsored Brands non-video and video gain 0.9 percentage points of Sponsored Ads spend year over year. DSP video gains 4.8 points. The first shift moves more budget into brand-led placements close to the Amazon shelf. The second moves a larger slice of programmatic investment into motion and storytelling across Amazon's broader DSP inventory.
The conversion core remains enormous. Sponsored Products declines only from 85.1% to 84.8% of Sponsored Ads spend. That is not displacement; it is portfolio expansion. Brands still need product-level coverage, retail readiness and disciplined bidding. But those capabilities no longer complete the plan. As discovery fragments, marketers also need creative assets and audience strategies that influence demand before the exact product search.
Video's path is upward, but not straight. DSP video peaks at 30.8% in Q1 2026 before easing to 28.6% in Q2. That sequential drop matters. It argues against calling every quarterly move structural. The stronger signal is the five-quarter comparison: video remains 4.8 points above the prior year. Budget owners appear willing to fund upper-funnel inventory, but allocation still moves with seasonality, pricing, inventory and campaign objectives.
Sponsored Brands is changing internally. The combined share reaches 14.0%, but Sponsored Brands video falls from 5.6% to 5.1%. Non-video rises from 7.4% to 8.9%. Amazon's brand layer is gaining spend, yet the gain is not coming from every creative format equally. Teams need format-level measurement, not a single blended story about “brand spend.” Amazon's Sponsored Brands video guide shows how video can route shoppers to Brand Stores or product pages; the commercial job still spans consideration and conversion.
Retail media is becoming a creative operating model. Product ads reward feed quality, price, availability and bid control. Video adds scripts, production, iteration and sequential storytelling. Amazon DSP also extends beyond the marketplace into web and app inventory, according to its official specifications. That forces retail, performance and brand teams to share audiences, creative calendars and measurement rules. Otherwise, more formats create more reporting, not more learning.
Why it matters: The next retail-media advantage will not come from choosing performance or brand. It will come from connecting them. Sponsored Products remains the demand-capture machine. Sponsored Brands and DSP video widen the surface where demand can be created. Brands that keep those budgets, assets and metrics in separate departments will pay twice for the same shopper and learn half as fast. Pacvue's public benchmark page does not disclose the full sample or weighting, so the exact shares should be read as a directional advertiser benchmark, not a market census. The operating implication is still clear: Amazon advertising now needs a portfolio, not one heroic keyword campaign.
