Owning the Rails Part 1: Amazon Take Over of Progrommatic Advertising
Friday November 7, 2025
At Forgelight Marketing, I track advertising topics, trends, etc. with as much attention as creatives and media buyers. I recently read this article Amazon’s next frontier in advertising: the cloud infrastructure it runs on (while quite technical and in-depth its information is something everyone should be paying attention to). Amazon’s recent move into R.T.B. (Real Time Bidding) - infrastructure via A.W.S. (Amazon Web Services) RTB Fabric is meaningful for every marketer, agency, and ad-tech vendor in the B2B space.
Here are my key takeaways — and what this means for our clients moving into the back half of the year:
1. Infrastructure matters more than ever. The media world is often focussed on impressions, clicks and creative, but what powers those metrics is just as critical. Amazon’s RTB Fabric shows that latency, integration friction and cost of data movement are real performance levers. If your technology stack is slow or overly complex, your paid channels become less efficient. At Forgelight, we always start media planning by assessing the “plumbing” behind the campaigns.
2. Plug-and-play becomes a differentiator. One of the differentiators of the RTB Fabric is the broker layer, reducing partner integration from months to hours. That kind of agility is gold in Q4 when timing matters. We’re advising our clients: don’t just plan campaigns, plan partnerships. If you can activate fast and reach high-intent segments earlier than competitors, you gain real advantage.
3. Cost savings = higher ROI potential. With Amazon promising substantial reductions in networking costs, the implication is clear: more of your ad budget can go into media rather than overhead. For B2B advertisers who already face rising CPMs and compression in performance, shifting efficiency from infrastructure into execution is a compelling path. At Forgelight, we’re re-evaluating our media stack and tech partners to capture that upside.
4. Ecosystem control = strategic power. Another factor: What’s fascinating about this move is that Amazon isn’t just chasing incremental ad revenue—it’s positioning to own the rails. As ad-tech architectures migrate onto AWS’s fabric, Amazon gains volume, data, and a competitive moat. For marketers, that means choosing the right platforms and partners becomes strategic - not just tactical.
5. Risks still exist. No infrastructure is immune to disruption. The more you rely on a single cloud ecosystem, the greater the risk of systemic failure. Also, adoption by the broader ad-tech landscape isn’t guaranteed, it must scale beyond early adaptors. We already include redundancy and flexibility in any of our clients media/tech strategy.
Final Word
For brands and agencies preparing for Q4 and beyond, don’t treat your ad tech stack as a background concern, treat it as a strategic channel. At Forgelight Marketing, we’re already helping clients audit their infrastructure, align media and tech readiness, and activate campaigns with speed and precision.
To the “layperson” what this means is that Amazon is positioning itself to own the railroads (i.e. the infrastructure that programmatic advertising is built on). Hence anyone wanting to ride MUST go through them OR build their own railroad.
I think you’ll start to see, starting Q4 2025, more programmatic advertising slowly but steadily shifting to Amazon and its affiliates.