Preparing for Holiday 2025 on Amazon: Building Media Success on a Retail Foundation

While traditional media planning often begins with budgets and channel selection, success on Amazon requires a more holistic approach that closely integrates media strategy with retail readiness and optimization. This means every media investment must be viewed through the lens of the entire Amazon marketplace, where success depends on campaign performance and on the strategic use of media spend to amplify and complement core retail operations.

Successful brands on Amazon are ones that forge strong partnerships between media teams and retail stakeholders, ensuring alignment across inventory, merchandising, pricing, and creative execution to maximize demand capture and drive profitability.

For the 2025 holiday season, brands that leverage Amazon’s unique ecosystem will have a significant advantage in their ability to seamlessly integrate awareness and conversion into a unified customer journey. Unlike traditional retailers, Amazon’s platform enables brands to drive both discovery and purchase simultaneously, thus creating a seamless path from initial exposure to final sale.

Inventory readiness is the number one controllable factor for holiday success. The most sophisticated campaigns cannot drive results if stock runs out during peak periods. Top performers will:

Prioritize hero SKUs by analyzing year-over-year holiday sales, recent run rates, and promotional performance to forecast realistic sell-through volumes.

Plan for promo-driven spikes on exclusive items and aggressive discounts. There’s a jump from normal run rates to many multiples during events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Prime Big Deal Days.

Close the loop across teams to ensure supply chain, revenue planning, and marketing budgets are aligned on promotional timelines, budgets, and inventory quantities.

From a merchandising standpoint, securing the right promotional vehicles is critical. Time-limited deal types, such as “Best Deals” and “Top Deals,” on Amazon offer brands special placements and deal badges. These deals stand out to deal-hunting consumers on search pages, unlocking access to curated deal pages and category placements.

Eligibility can be limited to certain deal types, but more traditional “Prime Exclusive Discounts” still deliver valuable badging that can materially influence conversion rates.

Brands that silo media execution from retail optimization risk underperformance. Instead, campaign planning should start from the product and promotional calendar, then flow into channel and format choices:

Search is the holiday workhorse: Ensure high-priority generic and brand terms are fully funded, particularly for top historic performers or SKUs on deal.

Audience targeting in search (via AMC) is a big differentiator in 2025: This capability allows brands to bid more aggressively to target high-value audience segments rather than overspending on a broad base.

Avoid capping out on budget and missing out on late promo sales: Work with teams to remain “as uncapped as possible” within your predefined efficiency targets. If budget is fixed, concentrate spend on the highest-priority SKUs rather than spreading thin across the entire product catalog.

Holiday 2025 will see continued pressure on margins, with tariffs and cost inflation shaping brand behavior. Many brands pull back from historically steep discounts, which means:

Consumers will intensify value-seeking behavior by either trading down or trying unfamiliar brands that deliver on both price and perceived quality.

The criteria for success may shift from year-over-year revenue growth on Amazon to profitability at scale. This shift further underscores the importance of precision in both promotional planning and media efficiency.

Importantly, this opens opportunities for brands that can offer competitive discounts to gain share while competitors hold back.

Brand awareness and differentiation are crucial in categories where private-label and low-cost international entrants are gaining traction. Additionally, Amazon’s search results are becoming more homogenized, making it harder to stand out on anything other than price.

We recommend the following strategic considerations: 

Early investment in upper-funnel media: Connected TV, Fire TV placements, and online video can prime consumers to search for your brand before peak promotion periods. Deal pages on Amazon have become increasingly personalized. Engagement with your brand in the pre-event period can help better surface your deals during peak periods.

Creator and affiliate partnerships that drive to and convert on Amazon: Leveraging Amazon’s Creator Connections, PR-driven listicle placements, and social amplification can drive off-Amazon discovery that converts on Amazon. 

Sponsored Brands Video (SBV): Use product-forward creative with text overlays to tell the product story directly in search results. This is a performance-oriented way to differentiate from static ads.

Yes, CPCs and CPMs will spike during tentpoles. They always do, but there are tactical levers to maintain efficiency and performance:

Programmatic guaranteed deals for CTV can lock in both price and premium inventory ahead of time

Shift spend to less competitive windows within events by front-loading or back-loading, depending on competitor behavior and inventory constraints.

Point paid and organic social media content, creator content, and PR placements to Amazon exclusive offers. These serve as lower-cost awareness channels when CTV budgets are unavailable.

The last 365 days of performance data should anchor your decision-making. On Amazon, this means:

Using search query performance data to uncover revenue-driving head terms

Aligning historical promo performance with inventory and spend planning to avoid over- or under-investment.

Trusting the data you’ve built through daily demand planning and category tracking. And also remaining agile enough to adjust when trends shift in season.