Venture Forge's Beyond the Listings panel is joined by Xnurta's Luis Martinez to unpack the growth of Amazon's advertising business for established brands: what DSP actually is and how it differs from Sponsored Ads, why Amazon becoming the world's #2 ad platform changes your planning, how audience data offsets rising CPCs and why most brands scale DSP before their account can convert the demand.

Plus a live Q&A on measuring DSP, placement data and winning the Buy Box before you spend...

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The DSP Evolution: the growth of Amazon's advertising business - and what it means for established brands planning beyond Sponsored Ads...

For years, most established brands have treated Amazon as a place to sell. That's changing - Amazon's advertising arm has quietly grown into the second-largest demand-side platform in the world, behind only Google, and that shift changes how brands should plan advertising, budget and full-funnel strategy well beyond Sponsored Ads.

In this Beyond the Listings session, the Venture Forge team was joined by Luis Martinez (MD UK & EU, Xnurta) to unpack what the DSP evolution actually means for established Amazon brands: not a masterclass, but a strategy-led read on where Amazon advertising is heading.

The argument at its heart is a simple one - most brands scale DSP before their account can actually convert the demand it creates, and the budget leaks away.

Across the hour, the panel worked through what to get right, and in what order:

• What Amazon DSP actually is, and how it differs from the Sponsored Ads you already run.
• Why Amazon becoming an advertising powerhouse - now the #2 DSP behind Google - changes your planning now, not later.
• What's new and worth knowing, from the Netflix partnership to AMC and what audience data now makes possible.
• What's really driving rising CPCs, and how DSP and audience targeting offset them rather than adding to them.
• Why you can't advertise into a listing that doesn't convert - and why Buy Box, availability and retail readiness come first.
• How to know if DSP is right for your brand yet, at what budget, and where to start.

And we closed with a live audience Q&A covering how much visibility you get into where DSP ads are served, how to measure real impact when you're not always winning the Buy Box and how to read placement and audience data to sharpen your creative.

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Want to check your foundations before you scale?

⁠Take our free Amazon Foundations assessment ⁠and pinpoint exactly what's working, what's not and where to focus next...

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Venture Forge⁠ is the award-winning Amazon agency behind £100m+ in annual client sales, helping established brands (£2m+ on Amazon) grow revenue and margin, defend market share and build foundations that hold up at peak.

Revenue for vanity, profit for sanity...

Here, Venture Forge's Beyond the Listings panel runs a mid-year checkpoint for established Amazon brands: how to read the harder half of your P&L, what's driving rising CPCs and the shift to DSP, how to tell an ads problem from a retail-readiness one and where Amazon's AI shift is starting to change what converts.

Plus a live Q&A on spotting real ad investment vs inefficiency, and what to fix first before peak.

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Every year starts with an ambitious Amazon forecast. By August, something's changed - competitors, Amazon itself, your own business have all moved the goalposts - and the brands that win the second half are the ones that spot it early and realign before the Golden Quarter, where so much of the year's profit is won or lost.

In this Beyond the Listings session, the Venture Forge team ran a mid-year checkpoint for established Amazon brands: not a retrospective, but a strategy-led readiness check for what's coming.

The argument at its heart is a simple one - most brands review the wrong half of the P&L at mid-year.

Across the hour, the panel worked through what you should be reviewing once the first half is banked:

• How to read the harder half of your P&L, and why a great revenue number can hide an "iceberg" of eroding profit underneath
• Why the category growing faster than you is a red flag hiding inside a healthy revenue line - and why market-share data matters more this volatile year than most
• What's really driving rising CPCs, and how Amazon's push into DSP and retail media is reshaping advertising efficiency and blended cost
• How to tell an advertising problem from a retail-readiness problem - and why you can't advertise your way out of a listing that doesn't convert
• What consumer and repeat-purchase data is telling you about demand, and how to use it to plan the second half
• Where Amazon's shift to AI-driven search and discovery - Rufus, richer product attributes, AI-assisted analysis - is starting to change what actually converts

And we closed with a live audience Q&A covering how to tell necessary ad investment from genuine inefficiency, what to check first with only weeks before peak and how to think about deals and discounting without racing to the bottom.

Want to run this check on your own account? Take our free 6-minute Amazon Foundations Scorecard: https://the-amazon-foundations-scorecard-from-venture-forge.scoreapp.com

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Venture Forge is the award-winning Amazon agency behind £100m+ in annual client sales, helping established brands (£2m+ on Amazon) grow revenue and margin, defend market share and build foundations that hold up at peak.

What did this year's earlier, four-day Prime Day really tell established Amazon brands?

Our Beyond the Listings panel - with brand-side insight from USN - gets into reading post-event data properly: flexible ad budgets over set-and-forget, conversion and retail-readiness signals, remarketing to Prime Day browsers, putting non-hero SKUs to work and how mini-peaks like back-to-school fit a smarter 12 month calendar.

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Prime Day gives established Amazon brands a concentrated view of shopper demand, traffic quality, advertising performance and product-level opportunity.

But the real commercial value comes after the event, when brands take the data and turn it into better decisions so, in this Beyond the Listings session, our panel unpacks what this year's Prime Day actually told brands - and how to act on it.

Across the hour, the panel covers when to increase, hold or pull back ad spend and why flexible budgeting beats a set-and-forget approach; how to read conversion and retail-readiness signals when traffic arrives but doesn't convert; remarketing to Prime Day browsers and buyers to keep momentum going; benchmarking against competitors when Amazon gives you little to work with; and how mini-peaks like back-to-school - now a confirmed Amazon Tier 1 event - fit into a smarter twelve-month promotional calendar.

It’s Venture Forge’s classic strategic Amazon perspective teamed up with brand-side insights from USN.

On the panel:

* Travis Chappell - Head of Operations, Venture Forge (host)

* Emma Pickard - Head of Client Services, Venture Forge

* Mike Godsiff - Head of Advertising and Media, Venture Forge

* PJ van Rooyen - Head of E-commerce and Brand, USN

If you'd like support reviewing your Prime Day performance and turning the data into a clearer Amazon growth plan, we’d love to chat.

Get in touch at hello@ventureforge.co.uk