Amazon’s Andy Jassy is Cannes Lions’ 2025 Media Person of the Year

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has announced Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon, as the recipient of its 2025 Media Person of the Year Award. This accolade, which recognises individuals who have made a significant impact on the creative communications industry, will see Jassy join a roster of past honourees including YouTube’s former CEO Salar Kamangar, Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey, former Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Jassy is set to take the stage at the Debussy Theatre on 18 June for a fireside chat before collecting the award at that evening’s show. The decision, according to Cannes Lions organisers, reflects Amazon’s evolution from e-commerce juggernaut to global media force, reshaping not just the retail landscape but the advertising and tech ecosystems as well.

Philip Thomas, Chair, Lions, noted, “Historically, each year, Cannes Lions has honoured outstanding leaders who have reshaped the media industry. This year, we are proud to recognise Andy Jassy and the entire Amazon organisation.” He added that not only is Amazon the largest media platform globally, “but it has also set new standards for scale, creativity, and influence, effectively creating a new model for media.”  

A new model for media

Jassy’s leadership of Amazon has coincided with a period of substantial transformation — and profitability — for the tech giant. While Amazon long faced criticism for its razor-thin margins and lack of profitability, its recent financial performance tells a different story. In the fourth quarter of 2024 alone, Amazon posted a record net profit of $20 billion, nearly double the $10.6 billion it reported for the same period the previous year.

Under Jassy’s watch, Amazon has expanded aggressively into advertising — a move that has had notable ramifications for media owners and marketers alike. Its ad revenue grew 24% year-on-year in Q3 2023, rising from $38 billion in 2022 to $47 billion. A significant driver was its Sponsored Product ads, designed to blend seamlessly with its retail listings. Adding to this is Amazon’s push into big-brand TV advertising through its Prime Video streaming division.

Amazon’s advertising portfolio has evolved with the addition of Sponsored TV in 2024 — a self-service tool enabling brands to create campaigns across more than 30 streaming platforms, including Amazon Freevee and Twitch. The tool comes with no minimum spend, widening access for advertisers. In tandem, in the same year, Amazon introduced ads into its Prime Video shows and movies, creating inventory that reaches over 200 million monthly viewers.

Amazon’s advertising arm shows no signs of slowing down. A WARC Media forecasts put its retail media ad revenue at $60.6 billion in 2025 — and that’s without counting spend on Amazon’s own platforms like Prime Video and Twitch. By 2026, this figure is expected to reach $69.7 billion.

GenAI at the core of Amazon’s next phase

Jassy has been candid about Amazon’s ambitions in AI infrastructure — a sector he describes as “probably the biggest technology shift and opportunity since the internet.” Speaking to analysts in February, he revealed that Amazon plans to spend around $100 billion or more on capital expenses in 2025 — up at least 20% from 2024 — with the “vast majority” directed at artificial intelligence infrastructure.

“Content will continue to migrate from linear formats to streaming. Globally, hundreds of millions of people who don’t have adequate broadband access will gain that connectivity in the next few years. Last but certainly not least, Generative AI may be the largest technology transformation since the cloud (which itself, is still in the early stages), and perhaps since the Internet. Unlike the mass modernization of on premises infrastructure to the cloud, where there’s work required to migrate, this GenAI revolution will be built from the start on top of the cloud. The amount of societal and business benefit from the solutions that will be possible will astound us all,” Jassy stated.

The numbers back up Amazon’s AI intentions. The company’s capital expenditure puts it ahead of Alphabet’s planned $75 billion spend for 2025. Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to fuel these efforts, with 2023 revenues up 13% year-on-year from $80 billion to $91 billion.

Jassy’s AI vision spans multiple touchpoints across Amazon’s consumer and enterprise ecosystems. “We invented and delivered a new service (Amazon Bedrock) that lets companies leverage existing FMs to build GenAI applications. And, we launched the most capable coding assistant around in Amazon Q. Customers are excited about these capabilities, and we’re seeing significant traction in our GenAI offerings,” said Jassy.

On the consumer side, GenAI applications include Rufus, an AI-powered shopping assistant; smarter iterations of Alexa; and enhanced advertising tools that use natural language prompts for generating creative assets. The company is also building several apps in AWS, including an early GenAI use case — a coding companion. It launched Amazon Q in April last year, which writes, debugs, tests, and implements code on AWS, “while also doing transformations (like moving from an old version of Java to a new one), and querying customers’ various data repositories (e.g. Intranets, wikis, Salesforce, Amazon S3, ServiceNow, Slack, Atlassian, etc.) to answer questions, summarise data, carry on coherent conversation, and take action” according to Jassy.

Operating discipline and profitability

It’s not just top-line growth that defines Amazon’s current position. The company has kept a tight lid on costs, with operating expenses rising only 6% in 2024 even as total revenue rose 11%.

Amazon’s fourth-quarter revenue surpassed $187 billion. Its net profit of $20 billion in Q4 2024 represents an 88% increase year-on-year, further underscoring the company’s financial momentum. The business mix — from retail to cloud to advertising — has proven resilient, helping Amazon shore up its position as both a tech and media powerhouse.

For advertising and marketing professionals, Amazon’s journey under Jassy offers both opportunities and challenges. Its rapid expansion into media, streaming, and AI-backed advertising solutions is reshaping how and where consumers engage with content — and where marketers can place their bets. As Amazon tightens its grip on ad budgets across formats, it’s clear the platform is no longer just a retail giant, but a central player in the global media and marketing economy.

Jassy’s recognition at Cannes Lions 2025 serves as a reminder of the shifting sands in the media world — one where tech platforms are not just distribution pipes but media companies in their own right, with growing influence on the creative and commercial outcomes of brand communication.