At Cannes Lions this year, Amazon introduced an ad format that doesn't run a script. It holds a conversation. Alexa+ Agentic Ads use a language model to respond to what a customer actually says, rather than playing the same fifteen seconds regardless of who's watching. Papa Johns and The Orchard are among the brands beta-testing it.
It's tempting to file this under "big brand media innovation, not relevant to me." That would be a mistake. The format is new. The underlying shift it represents isn't, and it applies whether or not you ever run a conversational ad unit.
The shift isn't the format, it's the exposure
A scripted ad only has to survive one version of scrutiny: does the 15-second cut work. A conversational ad has to survive an open-ended one: does the brand hold up across whatever the customer decides to ask it.
That's a much higher bar, and it's the same bar that's quietly being applied to brands everywhere else AI mediates a customer interaction, chatbots, AI shopping assistants, search engines that summarise rather than link. If a customer can ask a follow-up question, the brand's answer has to be consistent with everything else it says, or the gap becomes visible immediately.
A tone-of-voice guide tells you how to say something. It doesn't tell you what the brand actually believes.
Most brand guidelines were never built for this. They cover a logo, a colour palette, a few approved taglines, and a paragraph on tone of voice. They weren't built to answer "would this brand say that" for an unlimited number of unscripted questions, because until recently nothing needed them to.
What this actually requires
If any part of your customer interaction is going to be mediated by AI, whether that's your own chatbot, a marketplace's shopping assistant, or eventually something like Amazon's format, the brand needs a decision framework that goes deeper than the guidelines document usually goes:
- What would this brand never say, regardless of how the question is phrased?
- What's the actual point of view, not just the tone, that should shape an answer?
- Where are the lines it won't cross to make a sale, the questions a discount-hungry customer might ask that the brand should decline rather than accommodate?
This is strategy work, not a copywriting exercise. A tone-of-voice guide tells you how to say something. It doesn't tell you what the brand actually believes, which is what's needed to generate a consistent answer to a question nobody scripted for.
The smaller-brand opportunity
There's a genuine advantage available to smaller, newer brands here. Large, established brands often have decades of inconsistent messaging to reconcile before an AI-mediated interaction can represent them coherently. A newer brand that does the positioning work properly from the outset can be more consistent across an open-ended conversation than a legacy competitor ten times its size.
That's a real, defensible advantage, and it has nothing to do with media spend.
If you're building a brand that needs to hold up under unscripted scrutiny, whether that's an AI tool, a sales call, or a curious customer, the Brand Clarity Scorecard is a free five-minute way to check whether the underlying positioning is solid enough to survive it.