1 Day 1. Korea: 1.92%

The first day featured an ‘Agency Training Summit’—a session providing advertising training for agencies. Even though I’m not with an agency, I attended, determined to make the most of the opportunity at an event I might never get to attend again. The morning sessions featured brand companies and their partner agencies presenting their success stories in an interview format with Amazon advertising representatives. Several brands were showcased, but as a beauty brand seller, I was particularly impressed by the ‘Dermalogica¹⁾’ representative and their advertising agency. Their focus on Amazon advertising differed from mine, and in this field where there are no definitive answers, seeing countless best practices accumulate made me realize how much I still have to learn.

The afternoon brought a game session in which we solved advertising quizzes to determine the winners. I’m far too competitive, so I try to avoid all competitions whenever possible. I go all-out even in casual board games with friends. While I’ve mellowed with age and become more flexible about losing, I still don’t like entertaining the possibility of defeat. So when I faced this competition after such a long time, naturally, I started without considering any outcome other than first place.

The game worked like this: teams of six participants each tackled quizzes individually, with the highest combined team score winning, plus an individual winner with the highest personal score. I didn’t just fail to win—I didn’t even come close to placing. In my defense, the quiz was quite tricky because it was designed for agencies, and I missed some answers from the morning session due to my spotty short-term memory. I was frustrated, of course, but I rationalized away my anger: “With all these outstanding agencies in the room, if a mere seller like me won first place, what would that say about the agencies?”

Only 1.92% of the session attendees were Korean. Given the participant cap, that’s fewer than ten people. There was this inexplicable pride in being one of that 1.92% of Koreans in a room where people from around the world had gathered around a single shared interest: Amazon advertising. And there was the thrill of learning and competing with the other 98.08% from diverse countries on the same topic.

1) A global derma skincare brand that has expanded professional treatment experiences into everyday skincare based on dermatological science.

2 Day 2. AI in Everything, Everything in AI

The second day kicked off with the opening ceremony, and various new Amazon advertising features were introduced. Most of these new features were AI-based solutions, to the point where you could barely describe them without mentioning AI. I’ll introduce two new features that will be used across every stage of Amazon advertising, from creative development and campaign creation to results analysis.

Amazon advertising includes Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), an advertising data analytics environment where you can analyze impression, click, and purchase data from across your advertising in an anonymized form. Previously, it was only accessible through Demand-Side Platform (DSP)²⁾, an advertising tool operated by Amazon-certified agencies, but a recent update has opened it up to all advertisers.

Through AMC, you can not only analyze advertising effectiveness in detail at each funnel stage—such as the number of customers who saw an ad but didn’t click, or those who added items to their cart but didn’t purchase—but also define your own audience segments and then activate them in your ad campaigns. Using the AI tool in AMC, you describe the audience you want to create, and it writes the corresponding SQL query³⁾ for you. Input that query into the Audience Builder, and it’s created. Beyond that, if you tell it what you want to analyze—whether it’s which ad products are effective for acquiring new customers or click-through rates by ad impression frequency—it generates queries that can provide those answers.

Amazon prioritizes customer data above all else and never provides sellers with the purchase data. However, they do offer features, such as AMC, that let you indirectly infer their purchase journey. It’s fascinating to use these to understand how customers discover and purchase our brand and products, or at which stage they drop off before completing a purchase. When you take a deep dive and find answers, nothing’s more thrilling. When you lose your way, that competitive spirit kicks in: “Let’s see who wins.”

2) An advertising platform that enables brand advertising across various channels, both inside and outside Amazon, based on shopping behavior data from Amazon.
3) A standard command language used to query, organize, and analyze data stored in databases, allowing you to set specific conditions to extract exactly the data you need.

Next is ‘Ads Agent’. This AI-powered advertising assistant automates and streamlines everything—from campaign planning, execution, and optimization through to analysis. When advertisers upload a media plan or describe their products, ‘Ads Agent’ structures what advertising campaigns are needed based on that information, establishes targets and budgets for each campaign, and automatically creates the campaigns. Even after creation, it takes actions based on advertiser commands—like turning off targets below a certain ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) or investing more budget in high-performing keywords. It also continuously recommends new targets suitable for the campaigns. Additionally, with the AMC feature integrated, when you give ‘Ads Agent’ a command for an audience requiring complex analysis and creation, it automatically generates it, significantly reducing the time spent writing complex queries. Setting up and creating advertising campaign plans after product launches has been time-consuming, and processing data for advertising analysis has required relentless effort—I’m eager to see whether ‘Ads Agent’ can truly handle the legwork for advertisers like me.

3 Day 3. Seeing is Believing

The purpose of attending events like Unboxed isn’t just to gather information—meeting various agencies and Amazon employees and establishing connections is equally important. That’s why the Unboxed event includes a ‘Connections Hub’, a space where you can directly interact with Amazon or the agencies at their booths. I made it my mission to meet as many agencies and Amazon representatives as possible, exchanging business cards, but to add some light entertainment to this long piece, I’ll share what I actually experienced at the ‘Connections Hub’.

A booth run by Prime TV⁴⁾. You take a photo, insert a Prime TV content title logo, and it prints that image onto a cookie.

4) Refers to Prime Video, Amazon’s streaming service, one of the Amazon Prime membership benefits that provides access to video content like movies, dramas, and sports.

There was also a machine that turns your photo into an album cover using AI. You take a picture, select your preferred music genre and album cover vibe, and it creates a surprisingly realistic album cover. So compelling, in fact, that I somehow ended up with a sneaker in my hand. Heeyoung and Jeongbin, who attended with me, both debuted as impressive hip-hop artists.

At ‘Product Experiences’, you could try out various new Amazon advertising features. There was a quiz in particular where you matched advertising objectives with the right advertising solutions, and if you scored above a certain threshold, they gave you a Stanley tumbler. My competitive streak kicked in as usual, and combined with an unintentionally awakened desire for free stuff, I walked away with three tumblers. On the last day, feeling a bit guilty, I gave an Amazon advertising representative an ILLIYOON Ato Cream as a gift—I hope they tried it and were satisfied.

There was also a space where you could actually use the ‘Ads Agent’ I mentioned earlier. You could click on a brand and interact with ‘Ads Agent’ to create advertising campaigns.