CES wrapped last week, and if you skimmed the headlines, you might think Amazon just rewrote the rules of retail media. Alexa goes to the web. Fire TV gets faster. Ring cameras can spot smoke. The narrative writes itself: ambient AI, frictionless commerce, the future is now.
Except that's not quite what happened.
What Amazon actually showcased was an ecosystem expansion designed to keep users inside its walled garden longer and give the company more surfaces to monetize. For brands, that's not necessarily good news dressed up as innovation. It's a signal that the complexity of operating on Amazon is about to increase, and the question isn't whether to chase every new surface, but which ones actually justify the investment.
Strip away the keynote enthusiasm and here's what's real.
These are iterative updates to existing products, with one common thread: Amazon wants more touchpoints between you and a purchase decision. The company is banking on the idea that if Alexa lives in your browser, your car, your TV, and your coffee maker, you'll default to Amazon for more transactions.
That might be true. But it also means brands now have to decide whether to staff up for a dozen new ad placements or accept that some of these surfaces won't matter for their category.
Amazon announced partnerships with BMW, Samsung, Bosch, Oura, HERE Technologies, and TomTom. The pitch is that Alexa+ will be everywhere. The reality is that "everywhere" means fragmentation. Each integration has different capabilities, different user contexts, and different measurement standards.
If you're a supplement brand, does an Oura integration matter? Maybe.
If you're selling automotive accessories, does Alexa in a BMW represent a real opportunity or just another checklist item that divides your testing budget into smaller, less conclusive pieces?
The answer depends on your customer data, not Amazon's product roadmap. Yet most CES coverage treats these announcements like mandates rather than options.
That sounds transformative until you ask the uncomfortable question: how much of this is actually new demand versus captured existing demand?
If someone was already going to buy protein powder this month and Alexa+ suggests it a week earlier, that's not necessarily incremental revenue. That's timing arbitrage. The customer acquisition cost might even be higher because you're now paying for placement in a conversational interface plus your existing search and display strategy.
This doesn't mean predictive surfaces are worthless. It means the ROI calculus is more complicated than "be there before the search happens." You need baseline data on purchase frequency, prompted versus organic discovery rates, and customer lifetime value across channels before you can honestly say whether these placements perform.
Most brands don't have that data yet because most of these surfaces are too new to measure properly.
Not all CES announcements are created equal. Here's where the actual near-term opportunities and risks live.
Fire TV's redesigned interface matters if you're in video advertising. The content-type organization and cross-subscription browsing could change how customers discover streaming ads. If you're running Amazon Streaming TV campaigns, this is worth testing in Q2 once the rollout completes.
Ring Appstore is interesting for home services and security adjacent brands. If you sell smart locks, insurance, or monitoring services, third-party Ring apps could create partnership opportunities that didn't exist before. This is less about ads and more about distribution strategy.
Alexa.com is a testing ground, not a mandate. The web expansion gives you a lower-stakes environment to experiment with conversational commerce before committing budget to voice-first strategies. If your category sees any traction here, then you evaluate automotive and appliance integrations. Not before.
The Bee acquisition signals Amazon's long-term play in wearables and health data. This won't impact your 2026 media plan, but if you're in wellness, fitness, or health-adjacent categories, Amazon is clearly building toward a world where your brand needs a point of view on wearable integrations.
Amazon's CES presence reflects Amazon's priorities: more touchpoints, more data, more reasons to stay inside the ecosystem. That's smart business for them. It's not automatically smart business for you.
The brands that win in retail media aren't the ones that chase every new placement. They're the ones that understand their customer journey well enough to know which surfaces actually influence purchase decisions and which ones are just noise with a CPM attached.
Before you add "Alexa+ strategy" to your roadmap, answer these questions honestly. Where in your funnel are customers actually getting stuck? Is it awareness, consideration, or conversion? What's your current CAC across Amazon channels, and what would a new surface need to deliver to justify pulling budget from what's already working?
If you don't have those answers, no amount of CES innovation is going to fix your performance problem.
CES is over. The news cycle moves on. But the decisions you make in the next sixty days about which Amazon announcements to take seriously will shape your retail media effectiveness for the rest of the year.
Don't let tech announcements dictate your strategy. Let your customer data and unit economics dictate your strategy, and use announcements like these as a filter for what's worth testing.
Amazon wants you on every surface they launch. Your job is to figure out which surfaces your customers actually use and whether the incrementality justifies the complexity. That's less exciting than "AI is changing everything," but it's a lot more likely to protect your margins.
At Channel Bakers, we're not chasing every shiny object that comes out of Vegas. We're helping brands separate signal from noise and build retail media strategies that actually scale profitably.
If you need help figuring out what from CES deserves your budget and what doesn't, let's talk.
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