Most Upfronts sell you a vision and hope you don’t ask for the numbers. On Wednesday night in Sydney, Amazon did the opposite. They put three brands on stage and made them show the receipts.
That’s the part that made me put my drink down. Because underneath the sizzle reels and the jazz hands, this Upfront was quietly settling the argument every marketer I know has been having for a decade. Brand on one side, performance on the other. Two teams, two budgets, two dashboards that never quite met in the middle. We built the whole industry around that gap and spent our careers trying to reach across it.
On Tuesday, the wall came down. Not “is coming down,” not in a five-years-out, vision-statement way. Three brands, three sets of real numbers, one structural shift underneath all of them.
I had a good seat for it. I was backstage with a mic, interviewing Willie Pang and L’Oréal Groups’s Georgia Hack, and it was a proper night. Luke Hemsworth talking The Terminal List, Teresa Palmer on the submarine thriller she just wrapped on the Gold Coast, Sophie Molineux fresh off captaining the Aussie women to an undefeated T20 World Cup. The slate they teased is stacked too: Fourth Wing, the Rebecca Yarros romantasy the internet has lost its mind over, and Tomb Raider with Sophie Turner as Lara Croft, from Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Great theatre. But the theatre wasn’t the story. The receipts were.
01 — The open internet, in one place
The headline most people will miss because it landed in the last ten minutes: you can now buy Netflix and Spotify through the Amazon DSP.
Sit with that. The trillions of Amazon shopping, streaming and browsing signals now apply across Netflix. Spotify’s Ad Exchange plugs straight in, so you plan audio next to your video and display. Add Disney, HBO Max, Paramount, the Aussie broadcasters, the local audio networks (SCA, ARN, Nova), and a pilot to run ads through ChatGPT via a new OpenAI partnership, and the picture gets clear fast.
→ So what: the thing that made cross-channel advertising a nightmare was never the channels. It was the seams between them. Different targeting, different measurement, different logins. Amazon isn’t adding another screen to your plan. It’s removing the seams. Planned, bought and measured from one place, wherever the audience actually is.
I actually got Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Ads in the same room for a podcast on the back of this. The visual alone tells the story: three ad platforms that used to compete, on one couch, talking about how they now work together. Episode’s linked at the bottom.
02 — L’Oréal proved you don’t have to choose
The L’Oréal Paris x Elle results were revealed on stage for the first time, and Georgia Hack, Chief Digital and Marketing Officer of L’Oréal Group, framed it better than any marketer I’ve heard this year: the math and the magic.
The magic was a 90s beauty integration inside the Legally Blonde prequel. Scrunchies, chihuahuas, nostalgia, an actual product integration built from products that existed in 1995. The math: over a million viewers on Prime Video, a 95% completion rate, 5,000-plus branded searches, 1,600 purchases, and a 25% lift in unaided brand recall.
→ So what: reach or outcomes has always been a false choice we made because the tools forced us to. When the same system that builds the cultural moment also closes the loop on the transaction, you stop trading one for the other. Georgia’s line, “you can actually have both,” isn’t a slogan. It’s a receipt.
03 — You don’t even need to sell on Amazon
The one I keep thinking about is CommBank. An Australian first: Amazon Ads built a bespoke propensity model on AWS and Amazon’s first-party signals to work out who was actually in-market for a credit card, refreshed every 24 hours, served the right card creative in real time.
A bank. Not a product you buy on Amazon. The results were the strongest brand lift Pat Crowley’s team had seen in years, a 2x lift in credit card consideration, and a 15% jump in customers adding a CommBank card to their Amazon wallet.
→ So what: this is the part that reframes everything. If a bank can win here, the “but we don’t sell on Amazon” objection is dead. The signals aren’t about what you sell in the store. They’re about understanding people, and every category gets to use them.
A quick aside, because I promised myself one
The agentic AI stuff is real too, and I don’t say that lightly about anything with “agent” in the name. Willie demoed the Amazon Ads agent doing campaign management by voice. “Lift the bids on campaigns pacing below 75%,” and it does it, no SQL, no manual grind. The MCP server went open beta globally, so whatever you’re building in Claude or ChatGPT plugs straight in.
For everyone who spends their life squeezing two percent out of a campaign, that’s your afternoons back. I’ll believe the fully autonomous version when I see it. But this bit, I saw.
The read
Three brands. Three sets of real numbers. One structural shift underneath all of them. That’s not a coincidence of scheduling, it’s the whole argument.
The wall between brand and performance was never really about strategy. It was about tools that couldn’t talk to each other, so we split the work to match. Once they can talk, the split stops making sense. It’s just a customer, and a system that follows them from the thing they watched to the thing they bought.
So here’s my question for the room. If that wall is actually coming down, the one we’ve organised our teams, our budgets and our entire careers around, what are we still building separately out of habit?
The full podcast with Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Ads is linked here. Go watch three industry heavy hitters share a couch.
Brooke x
MOODY is Australia’s answer to the serendipity Americans take for granted. The room where founders, operators, corporates and creatives are in the same group chat, and it turns out they needed each other. These are the girls who get it and we are in a MOOD.
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