By Shopsense Cofounder and President Bryan Quinn
People dislike personalized ads, but they like relevant ads. Is the public confused? Or is there a bigger difference between “personalized” and “relevant” than most marketers realize?
This distinction explains one of the most astonishing, and least understood, feats in modern media: Amazon’s ability to run as many as 25 Sponsored Product ads on a single page without irritating shoppers. Scroll through search results for air fryers or vitamin C serum and you’ll see ad, ad, ad … yet shoppers keep scrolling, keep clicking, and keep buying. Amazon has pushed ad density far beyond what any publisher could dream of. Rather than revolt, consumers treat the ads as trusted content.
Why? Because Amazon doesn’t rely on personalization to drive performance. It relies on relevance. And relevance doesn’t feel creepy. It feels helpful.
Personalization is about you. Relevance is about the moment.
Personalized ads track identity. They follow you around the Internet and resurface products you looked at months ago. They target demographics, behaviors, and inferred characteristics. They’re anchored to “who you are,” which is why so many people find them off-putting. (The industry has spent more than a decade building identity graphs designed to know everything about you.)
Relevant ads, by contrast, focus on “what your intent is right now.” On Amazon, that almost always means shopping. If you’re searching for running shoes, an ad for a 4.5-star-rated, best-selling running shoe isn’t invasive. It’s useful. It helps answer the question you’re actively trying to solve.
This is the part the industry often gets wrong. Shoppers don’t hate ads. They hate interruptions. They hate ads that impose someone else’s agenda on their moment. But when the ad aligns with intent, when it becomes an extension of the content, interruptions don’t feel like interruptions.
A new study bears this out. According to Bain & Company and its research partner ROI Rocket, 61% of U.S. consumers don’t mind seeing sponsored ads for brands or products. Among millennials, the figure jumps to 70%. (Gen Z and Gen X hover right around the average. Only baby boomers meaningfully dip below it, at 54%, which is still a majority.)
When sponsored placements reflect real intent, they stop feeling like advertising and start functioning like assistance. That’s why 53% of respondents say sponsored ads can be helpful when done well.
Amazon has mastered that alignment better than anyone.
Amazon’s Sponsored Products are no longer ads. They’re UX.
Amazon’s ad products are engineered to behave like normal product recommendations. They’re native in form, native in function, and tuned to the same data signals that determine organic ranking. What shows up in a Sponsored slot often looks better than what appears organically. That’s not because Amazon is tilting the table, but because the advertiser is paying to surface something genuinely competitive.
The trust Amazon has built around this is remarkable. And it’s not an accident.
You will never see a 2.5-star product boosted into a top placement. Amazon simply won’t allow it. Even if a seller is willing to pay a $20 CPC. The reason is not moral; it’s economic. Bad ads destroy conversion, degrade user experience, and undermine confidence in the marketplace, which ultimately hits the bottom line. Amazon’s ad marketplace doesn’t sit outside the shopping journey. It is the shopping journey.
This is why Amazon can carry extraordinary ad density without penalty. It treats ads as part of the merchandising layer.
Density is maxed. The next frontier is seamlessness.
All that said, Amazon knows it has reached the upper limit of how many ads a page can support before the layout becomes absurd.
What it’s been able to achieve offers an important lesson for publishers across the open web. If your ad experience clashes with the content, users will reject it. If it complements the content, users reward it. Relevance drives efficiency, and efficiency drives earnings.
Performance means saying “no,” even to high bids.
This principle highlights something the industry doesn’t talk about enough: True performance requires discipline. The highest bid shouldn’t automatically win. If a placement won’t improve the user experience or generate engagement, it doesn’t belong on the page, no matter how attractive the offered rate looks in isolation.
And we’re seeing the cost of getting this wrong in real time. A recent Reuters report detailed internal Meta documents indicating the company knowingly tolerated significant volumes of scammy and other prohibited ads tied to China because Meta’s leadership wanted to minimize “revenue impact” from stricter enforcement. Such an approach, of course, trades trust for short-term dollars.
Performance is about maximizing outcomes. And outcomes are only possible when relevance is non-negotiable.
The platforms that keep the user experience clean, native, and aligned with shopper intent consistently deliver better long-term results. High-quality placements create value. Low-quality ones destroy it.
The future belongs to platforms that make ads disappear
As the wider industry fixates on identity-driven personalization, Amazon keeps winning by anchoring itself to the intent of the user in the moment. It’s not trying to predict who the shopper is. It’s trying to understand what the shopper is trying to do, and then help them do it faster.
That’s why Amazon can run 25 ads on a page not only without backlash, but while delivering world-class performance at scale. Ads that feel like content are trusted.
In a world where attention is ever scarcer and AI is reshaping discovery, trust is the key.
