In the final edition of our 2025 #AskVector series, we turn the question on ourselves. It has been a year of significant change in the Amazon advertising ecosystem, and a year in which Vector has grown in capability, team and impact. Here is our summary of the highlights before we head into the Christmas break.

Amazon DSP: all premium streaming under one roof

The single most significant platform development of 2025 has been the rapid expansion of Amazon DSP's inventory portfolio. What began the year as a streaming advertising platform centred on Prime Video has ended it as the most comprehensive programmatic gateway to premium streaming inventory in the UK.

Amazon DSP now provides access to Netflix, Spotify, DAZN, Disney+, Paramount, HBO Max, Samsung TV Plus, Rakuten TV, Bloomberg and News UK - all through a single platform, with Amazon's first-party shopper data at the centre of targeting and measurement. For our brand partners, this means genuinely unified reach across the content environments where UK audiences are spending their time, planned and bought in one place.

New ad formats: supercharged engagement

Alongside the expansion of inventory, 2025 brought a new generation of interactive ad formats that meaningfully change what is possible within streaming environments.

Interactive video ads allow viewers to add products directly to their Amazon cart from within a streaming ad. Interactive carousels enable browsable product discovery while content is playing. Interactive pause ads appear when viewers pause, turning a moment of natural attention into a brand interaction. Home page takeovers on Fire TV place brands at the very first point of contact when a viewer turns on their device.

Taken together, these formats shift Amazon advertising from a passive impression model toward something closer to a shoppable media experience. We have been working with our partners throughout the year to understand where each format fits and how to deploy them most effectively.

VIP: continued development of our audience methodology

2025 has been an important year for the continued development of our proprietary VIP (Vector Intelligence Powered) audience modelling methodology. VIP combines shopper signals from Amazon Advertising APIs with retail intelligence software to build multi-dimensional audiences that consistently outperform standard platform targeting across all ROI measures.

The results we have seen - including a 270% increase in new-to-brand customers and a 75% improvement in conversion rate among clients using VIP audiences - reflect how much performance is available when targeting is grounded in real purchase behaviour rather than demographic inference. Developing and refining this methodology has been one of our most important areas of focus this year, and it will continue to be in 2026.

Category growth: endemic and non-endemic

One of the things we are most proud of in 2025 is the breadth of the work we have done. We have partnered with brands across a genuinely wide range of categories including coffee, skincare, wellbeing, alcohol, fashion, household products, petcare, financial services, travel and education.

This mix of endemic clients (brands that sell directly on Amazon) and non-endemic clients (brands using Amazon's audience data and reach to drive outcomes beyond the platform) reflects the full scope of what the Amazon ecosystem can deliver. The same data and programmatic infrastructure that helps a skincare brand drive conversions on Amazon can help a financial services brand reach the right audience across Prime Video and beyond.

Our team

This year we welcomed two new members to the Vector team. Andrew Holland joined as Customer Success Manager, and Zoe joined as Marketing Director on a fractional basis. Both have made an immediate contribution to how we work with our brand partners and how we communicate what we do.

We are a small, focused team and every addition matters. We are heading into 2026 with more capability and capacity than we started 2025 with.

Positive impact: 40,000 sea turtles and counting

At Vector, commercial performance and environmental responsibility are not separate priorities. We commit 2% of our total income to our sustainability fund in partnership with Pinwheel, channelling that investment into rigorously vetted conservation and restoration projects around the world.

In 2025, our partnership contributed to protecting over 40,000 sea turtles across Costa Rica, Kenya, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Mexico and more. That figure is not an abstraction - it represents real, measurable conservation outcomes that would not have happened without sustained investment in the field.

Our brand partners can also choose to match our commitment and direct funding toward projects of their own choosing. As the Amazon advertising ecosystem continues to grow, so does our ability to make this kind of contribution meaningful at scale.

Looking ahead

2025 has been a year that confirmed the direction of travel for Amazon advertising: greater reach, smarter data, more immersive formats, and a measurement framework that connects media investment to purchase outcomes more completely than any other platform.

We head into 2026 with a clearer view of the opportunity than we have ever had, and with the capabilities to help our partners take advantage of it.

Season's greetings from everyone at Vector. We look forward to seeing you in 2026.

Ready to make 2026 your strongest year yet on Amazon? Get in touch with the Vector Retail Media team.