A Q&A with Kate McCagg of Amazon Ads Brand Innovation Lab

In today’s rapidly evolving advertising landscape, brands face unprecedented challenges: fragmented customer attention, technology disruption, and changing media consumption habits. Kate McCagg leads Amazon Ads Brand Innovation Lab, the creative innovation engine that helps brands connect with customers across Amazon’s entire canvas—from Prime Video and Amazon Music, to Alexa and Fire TV, and even delivery packaging. 

In this interview, McCagg shares insights on creating meaningful consumer connections, building seamless full-funnel experiences, and balancing technological innovation with authentic storytelling and performance benchmarks. 

Q: The advertising landscape is evolving rapidly with new technologies and shifting consumer behaviors. How can brands best navigate these changes to create meaningful connections with their audiences? 

The brands that thrive aren’t those chasing every new technology, they’re the ones grounding innovation in genuine customer understanding. At Brand Innovation Lab, we’ve observed several key approaches that drive success.

First, start with deep audience understanding, not technology. Without this foundation, even the most innovative application risks missing the mark. Second, balance data-driven decisions with human creativity. Insights provide precision and can help ensure relevance, but emotional resonance comes from the creative storytelling aspect.

It’s also vital to adopt a ‘test-and-learn’ mindset. Rather than making enormous bets on unproven approaches, experiment in contained environments before scaling what works.

Think beyond traditional advertising formats. Today’s audiences engage with brands through countless touchpoints, so consider how your brand can create valuable experiences across diverse contexts—whether they’re streaming content, shopping, or using voice technology.

Finally, maintain consistency across touchpoints while adapting to channel-specific behaviors. Remember that customers rarely move through the funnel in a linear way. What we’ve consistently observed is that the most successful brands do three things well: they integrate first-party insights with creative innovation; they maintain strong brand-building elements even in lower-funnel marketing; and they create audience connections that feel both personalized and emotionally resonant.

Q: How do brands maintain consistency across the full funnel? Can you share an example of how Amazon Ads Brand Innovation Lab has helped brands create seamless experiences from awareness through conversion? 

While brands need a strong narrative, customers rarely engage with it linearly—they jump between channels in a journey that’s anything but straightforward. The challenge is therefore creating a cohesive experience regardless of where customers encounter your brand.

An example is our full-funnel campaign with Junta de Andalucia—the Spanish region’s tourism board. We showcased Andalusia’s beauty across Amazon’s canvas, guiding potential travelers from discovery to booking and reaching 17 million unique users in just 18 days.

For awareness, we built “The Andalusia Crush Quest,” a custom Minecraft world on Twitch where popular streamers navigated iconic landmarks while viewers influenced gameplay in real time. This interactive approach generated 11.1 million minutes of viewership and 156,000 chat interactions.

For deeper consideration, we developed an Alexa audio tour showcasing regional sounds, as well as a Prime Video documentary exploring Andalusia’s cultural heritage. The Alexa experience achieved a 98% completion rate, demonstrating how channel-authentic content drives sustained attention.

To bridge digital exploration with action, we also extended the experience to physical touchpoints during Black Friday, with QR codes on Amazon Fresh bags that transported shoppers into augmented reality versions of Andalusian landmarks. All elements directed visitors to a branded page where they could explore further and arrange visits.

By layering Andalusia’s first-party insights with Amazon’s audience signals, we ensured the campaign reached relevant audiences at each stage of the funnel, achieving click-through rates 3.6 times higher than tourism industry standards. The key was maintaining thematic consistency while adapting to the unique strengths of each channel.

Q: What are the key struggles marketers face when building advertising campaigns today, and how can they overcome these?  

At Brand Innovation Lab, we see marketers facing two primary challenges: balancing technological innovation with authentic storytelling; and reconciling creative experimentation with dependable performance benchmarks.

For the storytelling challenge, we follow a fundamental principle: technology should enhance the narrative, not replace it. We start with the emotional core of what a brand wants to communicate, then identify technologies that amplify that connection. This ensures innovation serves the story rather than overshadowing it. For instance, our recent “Love Your Mind” mental health awareness campaign with the Ad Council didn’t just promote a message—it used interactive elements and voice experiences to create spaces where audiences could genuinely reflect on their mental wellbeing, making technology the enabler of meaningful conversations, rather than just a delivery mechanism.

For the performance challenge, marketers often hesitate to experiment when they have metrics that already “work.” The solution lies in creating measured testing opportunities—carving out small portions of campaigns for experimentation while maintaining reliable metrics for the majority of spend.

Success comes when technology feels invisible; when audiences are so engaged they don’t notice the innovative technology enabling their experience, and when new approaches are gradually incorporated into measurement frameworks rather than abandoning proven metrics altogether. This balanced approach delivers both authentic connections and reliable results.

Q: The relationship between brands, agencies, and technology platforms continues to evolve. How do you see the role of creative and media agencies changing in today’s complex advertising ecosystem?

Today’s most successful brand-agency relationships have evolved from traditional service models to strategic innovation partnerships characterized by integration and specialized expertise.

As technology grows more complex, the agencies that develop deep capabilities in emerging technologies—from interactive storytelling to voice experiences—deliver unique value alongside their strategic capabilities. We’re seeing the walls between creative, media, data, and technology disciplines dissolve, creating more cohesive approaches to today’s non-linear customer journeys.

Looking forward, flexible partnership models will therefore be critical. Brands need customized approaches that assemble the right expertise for specific challenges, not rigid, one-size-fits-all relationships.

At Brand Innovation Lab, our collaborative framework ensures agencies maintain their strategic leadership while gaining an understanding of how customers engage across Amazon. This partnership model enables agencies to deliver breakthrough results, ultimately amplifying their value rather than diminishing it.

Q: Looking ahead to the next few years, what emerging advertising trends or technologies are you most excited about, and how might they change how brands connect with consumers? 

Perhaps most significant is the evolution of immersive storytelling across entertainment environments. As boundaries blur between content and commerce, brands have unprecedented opportunities to create meaningful narratives that become welcome parts of the entertainment experience.

Our campaign for the Prime Video series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” demonstrates how we help brands align with shows and films to deliver unique experiences fans wouldn’t otherwise enjoy. The key is enabling brands to enhance the viewing experience, adding genuine value.

Looking forward, I’m particularly interested to see more responsible applications of AI that enhance creative development while maintaining human connection. AI should enhance creativity by simplifying processes and providing insights that improve outputs When we use AI to make stories more dynamic and responsive to customer preferences, we’re balancing technology and creativity in ways that enhance the human element.

Finally, interactive experiences that transform passive viewers into active participants represent another exciting frontier. Technologies that invite audience co-creation deepen engagement significantly, as we saw with the Andalusia campaign, where Twitch viewers directly influenced gameplay in real time. The rise of interactive streaming services like Twitch as mainstream advertising channels creates opportunities for brands to connect authentically with engaged communities through participatory storytelling.

At Brand Innovation Lab, we aim to be a creative insights engine for brands—testing emerging technologies in controlled environments, then scaling successes across our advertising business. Even our largest campaigns don’t just come to life in individual campaigns; the best parts of them make it possible for us to democratize creative innovation for advertisers of all sizes. We’re creating a future where advertising delivers both exceptional customer experiences and measurable business outcomes—that’s the real power of innovation.