Prime Day is no longer about midsummer discovery—it has become the ultimate test of household logistics. As inflationary pressures tighten, today’s shopper has evolved into the “Home Supply Chain Analyst.” They are no longer buying on impulse; they are buying with precision, trading premium novelties for high-utility staples and calculating the burn rate of their pantry with the efficiency of a procurement officer.
Is your brand ready to meet them there?
Our latest white paper, The Utility Pivot, provides the intelligence you need to navigate this shift and protect your market share during Amazon’s most critical shopping event of the year.What You’ll Learn
We’ve audited the 2026 landscape to help you move beyond the traditional event-day playbook and respond like a professional supplier. Inside this guide, you will discover:
For CPG brands, loyalty is increasingly fragile in an operational shopping cycle. Your customers aren’t just comparing products—they are comparing budgets. This white paper outlines exactly how to position your SKUs, optimize your multi-pack strategy, and adjust your retail media spend to ensure your brand remains the default choice in the “Home Supply Chain.”
Download the full report for deep intel on this year’s Prime Day predictions.
Mother’s Day is one of the most emotional, yet most mis-marketed, moments of the year, leaving shoppers struggling with the pervasive fear of getting the gift wrong.
Brands often default to generic messages, but the key to winning this high-stakes moment lies in better decision design, not just better messaging.
In our white paper, The Psychology Behind Getting Mother’s Day Right, we introduce our proprietary Nudgenomics™ methodology, which blends behavioral science with strategy design to reframe marketing as a system of nudges. Using implicit testing, we developed the Nudge Impact Score™ to measure real-time decision-making signals like speed and purchase intent, bypassing conscious opinions to find out what truly moves consumers to act.
We reveal that two key psychological triggers—narrative transportation and elevation—consistently outperform others by dramatically reducing shopper doubt and promising a successful outcome. Download this paper to learn the four critical implications for CPG brands, and start replacing endless options with the confidence-building signals shoppers are desperately seeking.
Download the full white paper to get all the insights.
If you only read the headlines, you’d think Gen Z isn’t drinking. They are, just not always in the ways the category expects.
The default role of alcohol has shifted. Nights are smaller, more intentional, and built around connection first. With drinking often no longer the centerpiece, it’s a choice, shaped by mood, moment, and context.
That creates a growing gap. While many brands still rely on scale, spectacle, and sameness, Gen Z is operating with a different calculus, one that blends moderation, selectivity, and a sharper definition of what’s actually worth their spend.
In Reaching Today’s Gen Z Drinkers, we explore four dynamics reshaping the category—and what it takes for brands to stay relevant.
Download the full white paper to see what comes next.
The era of relying solely on brand equity is over. With consumer sentiment at historic lows, inflation a stubborn drag, and private labels gaining ground, today’s shoppers are laser-focused on value.
Your promotions need to do more than just offer a discount—they need to reinforce value, nudge choice, and create a reason for repeat consideration.
This exclusive white paper from the AMP Promotions Center of Excellence reveals a proven framework for success, treating promotion planning like a successful event.
The modern marketer would be forgiven for thinking that retail and commerce media remain a chaotic land grab. Your favorite airline and bank are now media platforms? They may very well be as more brands turn our attention into media touchpoints to be planned and monetized for the shopper journey. Yet, continued fragmentation aside, this year promises a leveling up of the landscape.
Our latest white paper explores the five shifts redefining the industry—from omnichannel integration to the rise of agentic commerce—to help you identify how to capitalize on one of the most important investments brands can now make to reach their audiences.
Download The Next Phase of Retail Media: Five Shifts Defining 2026 to get the clear roadmap you need to drive measurable impact for your brand.
Just as millions of visitors flock to Las Vegas for the chance to find their fortunes in a desert oasis, marketers make the annual journey to the tech extravaganza that is CES to look into the future. Our team of AMPers covered miles of exhibits, met with senior tech leaders, and took in both the pragmatic and bombastic at countless presentations to separate the hype from the actionable.
After the whirlwind of it all, the takeaway for our team was clear: we have officially entered the Execution Era for AI. If 2025 was about experimenting with what AI could do, 2026 is about how it’s poised to influence multiple facets of our lives—from infusing the shopping experience with ease, personalization, and predictive powers to empowering marketers and brands to act faster, smarter, and more cohesively.
With a big picture perspective, we looked at the show through multiple lenses. Here are the four macro-shifts that will influence the marketplace this year.
The Agency Take: We’ve seen plenty of flashy “smart” appliances at CES before, and yet in reality, few of our homes are quite so Jetsons-like in 2026. Still, the promise of unleashing a complicated or mundane task on large language model tools is already shifting the definition of “search” and that is its own form of modern digital wizardry.
Success depends on ensuring brand content is LLM and “agent-ready”—structured and optimized so these systems select your brand when a consumer says, “Plan my meals for the week.” Now’s the time to ensure that brand data is structured, machine-readable, and “agent-friendly” so that our brands are the ones selected when the machine does the shopping.
Retailers like Target and Walmart are working through the kinks to move AI beyond simple data comparisons and into real-time, responsive audience targeting. The mandate is to test now or risk being outmaneuvered by faster competitors already exploring potential efficiencies.
The Agency Take: The most impressive innovations were those that made the physical store feel like a high-tech (but human) media channel. Albertsons stood out here with shoppable end-caps and anonymized tracking that connects “dwell time” to the basket without feeling like a digital billboard. The goal is seamlessness: influencing the shopper journey without disrupting their experience.
Another manifestation of this trend is evident in the AI systems we saw showcased that use real-time signals—such as weather or local inventory—to allow brands to adjust in-store creative content instantly, a development we are already exploring and enthusiastic about.
At an industrial and product innovation level, companies like Caterpillar and Bosch are integrating autonomy into heavy machinery and appliances, while humanoid robots are being positioned as practical solutions for logistics and labor shortages.
Agency Take: We saw a “softer” side of robotics, too—companion bots for wellness and elderly care that felt less like machines and more like intuitive partners. Prioritizing the human in these innovations aligns with our own emphasis on centering innovation on real human needs and desires.
From smart rings that monitor emotional well-being to digital health tools that help both humans and pets live longer, we saw examples of tech becoming a daily, seamless lifestyle-support system for the enhancement of health and wellness.
Agency Take: More than ever, consumers are open to tech that promises a systemic perspective on health. And they want efficiency and wellness in a combined package. Brands that can simplify daily tasks while promoting health will win, and tech is enabling this benefit.
The 2026 Summary for Our Clients:
Innovation is no longer about the gadget; it’s about the integration. Whether it’s an autonomous semi-truck or a shoppable recipe screen, the winners of 2026 will be the ones who use technology to remove friction and add value to the human experience, not just create more noise.
The world of marketing has fundamentally changed. The linear customer journey from awareness to decision is over. Today, many of the most consequential choices consumers make happen before they ever encounter your brand message. They are shaped by algorithms that rank, recommend, summarize, and predict.
Our new white paper, “The Algorithmic Imperative: Designing Brands for Predictive Growth,” dives deep into this shift, offering a critical perspective for marketing leaders.
In an algorithm-first world, most marketing organizations are losing because their processes are slow, fragmented, and reactive. Key performance signals are interpreted after the moment has passed, and decisions are based on yesterday’s data. By the time brands react, the algorithms have already moved on, and consumer choice has been shaped elsewhere.
The uncomfortable truth is this: Growth depends on whether your brand is designed to anticipate outcomes.
The brands that win are what we call Predictive Brands: brands designed to anticipate demand, respond in real-time, and earn preference within the complex systems that shape consumer choice.
To help your organization make this shift, we’ve outlined the three foundational capabilities—the Three Defenses for Predictive Growth—that every modern brand must build. Without this three-pronged defense rooted in behavioral science, operational structure and the right data set, brands are vulnerable to the pitfalls of systems outside their control.
Don’t let your brand’s growth be decided by anything but your brand. This white paper is for marketing leaders navigating the new standard of staying human and distinctive while being competitive in environments that reward prediction over reaction.
Check out the full white paper above and learn how to build the systems that work with the algorithms, stay human, and keep pace with how decisions are actually made today.
The retail landscape is perpetually, rapidly evolving: Consider the explosion of AI in the last twelve months, the advent of ecommerce in the 00s, and the relentless race for data that is never-ending. With the light-speed pace of innovation, it’s all too easy for brands to lose sight of the fundamentals. Christi Geary, Head of AMP Agency and EVP Advantage Solutions, insists that, while tech is ever-changing, the core truth of retail remains unchanged through it all: It’s all about the human.
In a recent conversation with Wendy Liebmann, CEO of WSL Strategic Retail, Geary offered a unique, broad-ranging view on the biggest shifts and surprising constants shaping how we shop. The discussion served as a powerful reminder for brands and retailers: While technology dictates how we transact, human nature still dictates why we buy.
The most obvious shift in retail is, of course, technology. Yet, Geary points out, it follows a predictable lifecycle, much like the introduction of loyalty card data before it, or AI now. It becomes an integral part of what we do.
However, the biggest challenge created by this technological rise is the shrinking attention span. In a world of constant digital noise, truly figuring out how to break through and create lasting relationships with people has become a much more demanding task.
In contrast to the pace of digital change, Geary notes that humans haven’t really changed. We are constantly balancing acts of bipolar needs: the convenience of digital and the enduring need for physical and emotional connection. The core foundational elements of Maslow’s hierarchy—the need to feed and care for our family, to feel safe and secure, to self actualize —remain as important as ever.
Both Liebmann and Geary agree on a critical area of missed opportunity: physical retail.
Physical stores are not disappearing—they will always have a role in commerce because humans crave actual connection and experience. But the race for reinvention stopped. Retailers fell into a trap of familiarity, looking at the stores and thinking, “I get it,” while the shopper has moved light-years ahead in their approach to shopping.
“We are long overdue for a balancing of the effort and the creativity in the space of physical retail, how do we start to transform both aspects in a world of shoppable everything?” – Christi Geary
Malls are returning, and consumers are “thirsting for the ability to come back together,” but the physical environments look the same. The time is ripe for an investment that truly reinvents commerce-driven physical interaction and experience, making it “pretty cool” for a generation that loves both digital ease and real-world immersion.
A major casualty of the pursuit of efficiency and profit is the human element in-store. The speakers lamented the undervalued role of the store associate, who is an asset capable of engagement, not just a person stocking shelves or manning registers.
This principle extends to the application of new technology like AI. Geary advises clients to see AI not as a tool for efficiency over effectiveness, but as a model for enhancement and augmentation.
“We always minimize the need for that human creativity, that human engagement, and my personal favorite, the unpredictability that will continue to be the number one thing that separates us…keeps us human.” – Christi Geary
Businesses must find the “beautiful center”—the happy medium where art and science, technology and human creativity, physical and digital, all work together more effectively.
A recurring theme of misalignment in corporate strategy is the problem of silos. Companies are still organized by channel, with different metrics and functional diagnostics, often unaware that others are working toward the same ultimate goal.
Geary’s model for agency success and client focus is simple and human-centric:
This approach requires an environment comfortable with chaos and integration—one where being proven wrong is seen as a gift that leads to making something better, like a rapid prototyping model of constant testing and learning.
As an agency leader, Geary recommends a set of non-negotiables for thriving in the new era of commerce. These three areas are where she focuses her efforts and where she believes the greatest potential lies:
Ultimately, the future of brand building is about creating harmonious storytelling across all engagement points. It is a “whole offer” that leverages technology to embrace the human moment, whether that’s through a puff of fragrance on a city sidewalk or a personalized recommendation online. In a world where everything is shoppable, commerce and technology are here to stay. The challenge is immense, but the opportunity is even greater: to finally put the human (shopper + consumer) at the center of a truly integrated ecosystem.