Retail Media, Without the Hype: What It Actually Looks Like to Build an RMN from Scratch
Joel Traugott, Alium Researcher
I had the chance to chat with the retail media lead at a national pharmacy chain who’s been standing up their RMN almost solo. One person, no dedicated team—and yet, they’ve gone live with sponsored products, banner placements, and email integration across a national footprint.
But let’s be clear: this isn’t some bespoke in-house stack. Criteo is the engine behind the ad delivery, campaign execution, and much of the attribution. That said, the work being done internally—from POS integration to creative exclusions to legal review of data sharing—is anything but passive.
Here are some real-world insights from someone living it day to day:
1. The hardest part isn’t media delivery—it’s stitching together the data.
The program pulls from POS feeds and web activity via site tags, but like many legacy retailers, in-store transactions don’t capture emails or phone numbers. That makes offsite targeting nearly impossible. Criteo’s shopper graph couldn’t bridge the gap. The result? Onsite works; offsite struggles. If you’re still not collecting identifiers in-store, your media ambition is capped. That’s a foundational issue—not something DSPs or clean rooms can solve for you.
2. Clean rooms are the future, but we’re still early.
Criteo runs their own clean room environment, ingesting tokenized purchase and site data for measurement and targeting. But the retailer's team admitted it still feels like a black box. Legal’s on board. Compliance is satisfied. But operationally? It’s hard to inspect or verify what’s actually happening inside. One big opportunity: using clean rooms for match validation across platforms (as one CPG partner does with Amazon). That’s where the trust layer will come from.
3. Attribution still hits a wall with foot traffic.
While Criteo ingests sales data for closed-loop reporting, it can't account for visits, impressions-to-store lift, or full-funnel pathing. Legacy systems = blind spots. As one example: campaigns targeting in-store-only SKUs can’t track sales lift unless they’re tied to digital coupons (and even then, attribution is messy). Lesson: Closed-loop is real, but only within the walls of the data you own. Beyond that, you still need proxies, partnerships, or creative workarounds.
4. Ad delivery is SKU-tied—and that’s a limitation.
In Criteo’s model, if there’s no PDP, there’s no ad. That’s a challenge in pharmacy, where many categories aren’t sold online. Even when brand pages are created to fill the gap, they don’t get enough traffic to justify the spend. Inventory gaps also immediately kill campaigns—no stock, no placement. That’s forcing the team to rethink how they structure pages, category landing experiences, and homepage prioritization—not just media units.
5. Build-vs-buy isn’t just about the tech—it’s about internal focus.
The retailer evaluated building internally, but chose Criteo for flexibility: they can start managed, and peel off layers as capabilities grow. But even now, they see the opportunity: every dollar running through Criteo is margin they could be keeping in-house.
That means the long-term roadmap includes staffing up, carving out a dedicated org structure, and eventually owning more of the sales and media planning cycle. But only once foundational workflows are stabilized.
Key takeaway?
Retail media isn’t just a monetization layer—it’s an infrastructure bet. And while Criteo (or CitrusAd, or Quotient) can help you move quickly, they won’t fix your internal data gaps or substitute for org-level commitment. You still need product, engineering, and ops aligned around the value of media and the mechanics of data.
If you’re evaluating your RMN path, here’s the reality:
- If your POS isn’t clean, your attribution won’t be either.
- If your team doesn’t own segmentation, your audiences aren’t differentiated.
- If your site isn’t structured for SKU-linked delivery, your inventory is invisible.
Still—when done right? This is one of the highest-margin revenue streams available to retailers today.
