Sponsored Brands — the headline above the grid.

If Sponsored Products is the workhorse, Sponsored Brands is the billboard. On most first-page results in Amazon's main categories, the very first thing under the header is a wide banner: a brand logo on the left, a short headline next to it, and three product tiles to the right. Clicking the logo or headline routes to your Brand Store; clicking a product opens the detail page for that ASIN. It is the largest single piece of paid real estate on the SERP, and the only one that sells the brand rather than the product.

What Sponsored Brands does on the SERP

Sponsored Brands serves three jobs simultaneously, which is why it does not compete cleanly with Sponsored Products for budget:

• Brand awareness. Your logo and headline are the largest single asset on the page above the fold — typically four to five times the footprint of a single product tile.
• Multi-product visibility. Three tiles in one impression, so you can pair a hero ASIN with two cross-sell candidates or a new-launch ASIN with two proven sellers to lend it social proof.
• Store funnel. The logo and headline click out to your Brand Store, a curated environment without competitor tiles. This is the only ad format on Amazon that can take a shopper out of the open SERP and into a closed brand environment in a single click.

Who can run it — the Brand Registry gate

Sponsored Brands is restricted to sellers and vendors enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry. That means a registered trademark (live, not pending, in at least one of Amazon's accepted IP offices) and verified ownership of the brand inside Seller Central or Vendor Central. Without Brand Registry, the format is simply unavailable in your campaign manager — there is no workaround and no agency trick to unlock it.

This is the single biggest practical argument for completing Brand Registry early. Sellers without it are locked out of three high-value surfaces simultaneously: Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display targeting, and A+ Content. Vendors are enrolled by default through their VC contract.

The two creative formats

Sponsored Brands ships in two distinct creatives today, with very different roles:

1. Product collection (the classic banner). Logo + headline + three product tiles, served at the top of the SERP. Best for categories where the shopper recognises the brand and the three featured products tell a coherent story (e.g. a starter set + refill + accessory).
2. Sponsored Brands Video. A short autoplaying, muted video tile (6–45 seconds, MP4) that drops inside the organic grid, usually around positions 4–6. Smaller real estate than the top banner, but very high engagement because video autoplay catches the eye mid-scroll.

A third variant — the Store Spotlight — features sub-pages of your Brand Store instead of individual ASINs, and is the right choice once your Store has at least three well-built category sub-pages worth showcasing.

The creative specs Amazon enforces

Sponsored Brands composes the banner from assets you upload — and rejects creatives that don't meet spec. The hard limits to know:

• Headline: 50 characters maximum, no all-caps, no superlatives ("#1", "best-selling"), no claims that can't be substantiated on the destination page.
• Brand logo: minimum 400 × 400 px, square, PNG or JPG, transparent or white background, your registered brand mark only.
• Custom image (optional): 1200 × 628 px lifestyle image; required for the lifestyle-image variant of the banner.
• Video (Sponsored Brands Video): 6–45 seconds, MP4 / MOV, 1920 × 1080 or 1280 × 720, under 500 MB, with no overlaid logos in the first second and no end-card CTAs ("buy now", "click here") — Amazon rejects them.

Creative review is human-moderated and typically takes 24–72 hours. A rejected creative blocks the entire campaign from serving until the asset is replaced, so it pays to get the headline and logo right on first submission.

The listing assets it depends on

Sponsored Brands does not generate creative — it composes what you already have. Three listing-side weaknesses show up constantly in underperforming campaigns:

• A low-resolution or noisy logo. Amazon's renderer doesn't enhance what you upload. A 400 × 400 px logo that was screenshotted from a Word document will look like it on a 1920-px display.
• A Brand Store that is essentially a catalogue dump. If the headline click lands shoppers on an unstructured grid of every ASIN, the funnel collapses. The Store needs at least a structured home page and one curated category sub-page per featured product family.
• Featured ASINs with weak main images. The three product tiles inside the banner use each ASIN's own main image. If two of the three look unprofessional, the whole banner looks unprofessional.

Fix all three before pouring spend into the format. The click does not buy you a do-over on first impression, and Sponsored Brands clicks typically cost two to four times a Sponsored Products click.

Seller vs Vendor — same format, different friction

Both Sellers and Vendors run Sponsored Brands through the same Amazon Ads console. The differences are operational. Sellers control the destination Store directly and can iterate on it any day. Vendors usually share the brand with multiple internal stakeholders inside Amazon and need Brand Specialist sign-off on Store edits, which slows iteration. Vendors also routinely have higher Sponsored Brands budgets approved as part of their annual marketing development plan with Amazon Retail — money Sellers do not have an equivalent for.

What to take into the next episode

Sponsored Brands owns the top banner above the grid. Sponsored Display — the next episode — owns the right rail, the under-the-fold carousels, and a growing set of off-Amazon placements, with a very different targeting model based on shopper audiences rather than keywords. Together with Sponsored Products, the three formats are the full paid surface every seller needs to understand before deciding what to spend where.