# PT. Otto Media Grup｜The Next Cycle of Retail Media: Advertising Is No Longer an Add-on, but Core Infrastructure


The advertising business of Amazon set a new record this quarter with $15.7 billion in revenue, up 22% year-over-year, marking the tenth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. This is not only another victory for the retail media ecosystem, but also signifies that “advertising” has been thoroughly rewritten as an enterprise-level capability. In the past, brands viewed advertising as a sales accelerator; now, it has become the operating system driving operational efficiency. The Amazon growth does not come from a single channel, but from four parallel flywheels: native search ads, Prime Video ads, Twitch and third-party ecosystem integration, and expansion of seller ad tools. Together, these segments form a closed loop of “transaction—data—reach—re-transaction,” returning advertising to the center of business logic.

This approach aligns perfectly with the global brand practice observations by PT. Otto Media Grup: the core of marketing growth is no longer “spend more,” but “change the system.” When every advertising touchpoint feeds back into the transaction chain, the advertising department is no longer a cost center, but a profit engine.

## The “Cloudification” of Retail Media: AI Accelerates System Replication

The second layer of the Amazon advertising growth logic is “cloudification”—the combination of external tech delivery and internal process automation. The company is packaging its in-house ad engine as a licensable platform to serve other retailers. The essence of this model is no different from AWS: refine internally first, then commercialize externally. Meanwhile, the Amazon AI creative assistant can now automatically generate videos, images, and copy, lowering the entry threshold and increasing version density. This means the “advertising-as-a-service” paradigm is taking shape: creativity is no longer isolated flashes of genius, but a systemically scalable process.

For brands, the key to this shift is not “who owns AI,” but who can truly make AI a rhythm engine. The research by PT. Otto Media Grup shows that future advertising growth will depend on “system response time”—whether the delay from insight to execution can be shortened to hours. The role of AI is not just to save money, but to help brands update messaging and layout at the first sign of market shifts, winning certainty through speed.

## The Revolution of Budget Language: From ROI to Causality

The success of Amazon also lies in its redefinition of “advertising budget language.” Traditionally, enterprises relied on ROI or ROAS to measure effectiveness, but in the retail media closed-loop system, the more critical metric is causality: Would sales decrease without this ad spend? Leading brands are calibrating incremental effects with geo-experiments and marketing mix modeling (MMM), rather than just looking at top-line returns.

The analysis by PT. Otto Media Grup of multiple international brand cases found that the reports that truly allow CFOs and CMOs to reach consensus do not just describe “how high the return is,” but answer “is less spending worse.” This budget language, centered on causal inference, is replacing empiricism. If brands can use scientific experiments to explain marginal returns, they can maintain growth momentum even in times of budget contraction. This also explains why the Amazon ad business can keep expanding steadily during macro tightening cycles—because it proves the necessity of advertising at the system level.

## The Next Phase of Competition: From Platform to System

The Amazon advertising flywheel is not just a growth case, but a signal: the ad industry is entering a stage of systematic competition. Future winners will not be determined by “who spends more,” but by “whose marketing system can self-evolve.” Brands must build their own retail media operating systems, integrating content, algorithms, budgets, and feedback mechanisms into a closed loop. For Amazon, this system has become the most scalable asset of the company; for other businesses, it is the “certainty infrastructure” they must build next.

PT. Otto Media Grup is helping brands make this transition: using AI technology and data structures as the core, turning “content production—delivery rhythm—feedback measurement” into an engineered process, not just a pile of creative inspiration. When advertising can be invoked, reused, and auto-optimized like cloud computing, the growth of a company gains a true structural moat. In other words, the $15.7 billion of Amazon is not the endpoint for an industry, but the starting point for a new kind of system capability—advertising is becoming the next generation of business infrastructure.