What is retail media?
Retail media is advertising sold by a retailer on its own properties — sponsored placements in search results and category pages, and increasingly email, in-store screens and streaming inventory.
What makes it different from other advertising is the data underneath it. The retailer already knows what the shopper actually buys, so a placement can be targeted and measured against real purchases rather than inferred interest.
Two related terms are worth separating. A retail media network is the advertising business a retailer builds around that inventory and data — the thing being sold, packaged and staffed. Commerce media is the broader label, stretching the same model past traditional retailers to marketplaces and delivery platforms.
That much is settled, and you can find it anywhere. The useful question is the next one.
Should brands and retailers invest in retail media differently?
Yes. For a brand, investing means allocating advertising budget and managing fragmentation across retailer networks. For a retailer, investing means building a media business with its own technology, sales organisation and payback period.
Buyers use the same phrase for both. One is a media buy. The other is starting a business.
Investing means buying
You are funding ad spend on someone else's network, plus the tooling and people to run it. The decision is a budget allocation, and the hard part is that there is no single place to spend it.
Cost shape · ongoing spendInvesting means building
You are standing up a media business with its own profit and loss, ad server, sales team and account management. The decision is a capital one, and buyers describe significant up-front investment and a payback that does not arrive immediately.
Cost shape · up-front capitalBoth groups appear in our interviews, and they describe the same market from opposite ends. That symmetry is the most useful thing on this page, so it is worth taking each side in turn.
What is the biggest retail-media problem for brands?
Fragmentation. Brands buying across several retail media networks have to carry a different interface, a different data set and often a different partner for each one.
Brands do not describe agonising over whether retail media works. They describe the operational cost of doing it in more than one place at once.
A large consumer-health manufacturer runs Walmart Connect for its Walmart presence, Roundel for Target, and Flywheel for Amazon — three retailers, three different arrangements, each justified by that partner's understanding of that one network. The pattern repeats across the consumer-goods brands we interview, and it helps explain the demand for platforms that consolidate execution across retailers.
The response is consolidation onto a platform layer that reaches across retailers. A global consumer-products manufacturer selling through Amazon, Walmart and Target ran a formal, worldwide evaluation to unify its commerce, digital shelf and retail media execution in one place, and chose Pacvue for what its ecommerce lead described as rule-based automations and depth across multiple retailers.
That is the shape of a brand-side investment. Not a single decision about whether retail media is worthwhile, but a recurring one about how many separate interfaces your team can carry before a consolidation layer becomes easier to justify than carrying the fragmentation.
One thing consolidation did not do in that case is remove people. The manufacturer kept an agency layered on top of the platform to execute campaigns region by region — the platform bought them one place to see and automate from, while execution stayed regional and agency-led.
Which retail media platforms are brands using?
| Platform | Avg rating | What buyers use it for |
|---|---|---|
| ~8 | Chosen in one manufacturer's global evaluation to unify commerce, digital shelf and retail media execution in a single platform. Praised for rule-based automations and depth across multiple retailers. | |
| ~8 | Market intelligence across Amazon, Walmart and Target — run alongside a campaign platform rather than instead of one. | |
| ~7 | The alternative weighed head-to-head in that same consolidation decision, before the manufacturer chose. | |
| ~7 | Search optimisation on retailer networks; a global beverage manufacturer rates it well and describes still being early in the integration. | |
| ~6.5 | Digital-shelf analytics, named by drinks and consumer-goods manufacturers alongside their campaign tooling rather than in place of it. | |
| not rated | Amazon media planning and optimisation, praised for platform-specific depth. Too few buyers to publish a rating. |
What is the biggest retail-media problem for retailers?
Payback. Retailers describe building a network as a capital-intensive business — technology, sales and account-management costs that do not return quickly.
A director at a large grocery retailer, whose entire remit is the network — profit and loss, ad technology, sales, account management, media buying — describes it as significant capital investment that doesn't pay off immediately, and names the high costs of building and scaling as a standing challenge. In a market where online grocery is still immature, getting to a strong return is harder again.
A delivery marketplace running its own ads platform frames the difficulty as competitive rather than technical. Large networks already dominate; the market is fragmented; and so the daily work is proving to brands that your inventory deserves a slice of a budget they are already allocating somewhere else. Their words: the fragmentation of market share requires us to prove our value to brands choosing where to allocate their advertising spend.
Put those two next to the brand side and the market's shape is clear. Brands find fragmentation expensive to buy across. Retailers find that same fragmentation is what makes their inventory hard to sell. Both are the consequence of many retailers building their own networks at the same time.
Can your commerce platform lock you into a retail media ad server?
It can. One retailer in these interviews found that its existing commerce-platform relationship had effectively predetermined its ad-server choice — the sharpest operational detail on this side, and one nobody goes looking for.
The grocery retailer above ran CitrusAd as its ad server not because it won an evaluation, but because the commerce technology platform the business already ran on obliged it to — in the buyer's words, that arrangement restricted us to using CitrusAd until recently. The ad-serving decision was effectively made years earlier, by a different team, as a side effect of a platform contract.
They are now dissatisfied — specifically over service and support — and evaluating Criteo, Instacart Carrot Ads and Kevel as replacements. Separately, the delivery marketplace also moved off CitrusAd, to Koddi, wanting something more bespoke. Two operators, independently, moving off the same ad server.
Two buyers is two buyers, and we are not going to tell you a vendor is in trouble on that basis. But the mechanism underneath is worth carrying into your own evaluation, and it is ours to point out rather than something buyers volunteered: if you are choosing a commerce platform, check what it obliges you to use for ad serving before you sign, because that constraint may outlive the reason you accepted it.
What technology do retailers use to run retail media networks?
| Vendor | Avg rating | Where it shows up |
|---|---|---|
| 6.6 | The only vendor here rated by enough buyers to carry a number, and on the shortlist when a grocery retailer went looking for a replacement ad server. | |
| not rated | Runs a delivery marketplace's ads platform as its decisioning layer and inventory SSP, chosen for customisation and a joint roadmap. Too few buyers to publish a rating. | |
| not rated | The incumbent both operators here are moving away from — one over service and support, one wanting something more bespoke. Too few buyers to publish a rating. | |
| not rated | Named alongside Criteo and Instacart Carrot Ads on that same replacement shortlist, at demo stage. Too few buyers to publish a rating. | |
| not rated | Named by retailers monetising their own inventory, including one expanding into video placements. Too few buyers to publish a rating. |
Note what that shortlist has in common: a general ad platform, a marketplace's ad product and a developer-first ad server sit side by side as candidates for the same job. These interviews do not show a settled operator-side vendor category — buyers compare quite different kinds of technology to fill one slot.
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The honest answer is that you are being asked two different questions, and only one of them is yours.
If you are a brand, the live question is usually how much fragmentation justifies a management layer on top of it. For buyers already putting meaningful budget into major retailer networks, the decision has shifted from whether to participate to how to run it — they describe retail-media spend as an existing budget-allocation reality rather than a new category to approve. In the clearest example here, the buyer that crossed that line ran a formal global evaluation rather than defaulting to whichever tool its largest retailer preferred.
If you are a retailer, the question is whether the media business can carry the capital, headcount and payback period required to build it. Treat it as a business case, not a technology project: the buyers actually running networks talk about profit and loss, staffing and payback horizons long before they talk about ad servers. The most useful thing they say is the least exciting — they describe heavier capital needs and longer payback than a software-style evaluation would imply.
Common questions
What is retail media?
Retail media is advertising sold by a retailer on its own properties — sponsored placements in search results and category pages on a retailer's site or app, and increasingly its email, in-store screens and streaming inventory. What makes it valuable is that the retailer already knows what the shopper buys, so the ad can be targeted and measured against actual purchases rather than inferred interest. For brands, retail media is an advertising channel. For retailers, it is a media business.
What is a retail media network?
A retail media network is the advertising business a retailer builds around its own shopper data and inventory. It sells sponsored placements across the retailer's site, app, email, in-store screens and other media surfaces, and uses first-party purchase data for targeting and measurement. Buyers who run one describe it as a business rather than a feature: it carries its own profit and loss, licensed ad technology, a sales organisation and account management.
What is the difference between retail media and commerce media?
Retail media usually means advertising sold by a retailer using its own shopper data and inventory. Commerce media is the broader term: it extends the same model to marketplaces, delivery platforms and other commerce environments that are not traditional retailers. The distinction matters mostly to the operator — a delivery marketplace we interviewed uses the broader framing for its own ads business while competing for the same brand budgets as grocery and mass retailers.
What is the difference between buying retail media and building a retail media network?
For a brand, buying retail media means allocating advertising budget across retailer networks and managing the fragmentation that comes with it — a different interface, and often a different partner, for each retailer. For a retailer, building a retail media network means creating a media business with its own ad technology, sales team, account management and profit-and-loss model. They share a name and almost nothing else: one is a recurring spend decision, the other is a capital one.
Should you invest in retail media?
It depends which side you are on, and the two decisions look nothing alike. For a brand already putting meaningful budget into major retailer networks, the live question is usually not whether to participate but how much fragmentation justifies paying for a management layer on top of it. For a retailer, the question is whether the media business can support the capital, headcount and payback period required to build it. Buyers running networks describe it as a business investment rather than a software purchase.
What does it cost a retailer to build a retail media network?
Buyers running one do not describe it as a feature you switch on. They describe a business: a profit and loss to manage, ad technology to license, sales and account management to staff, and media buying to run. One director whose whole remit is a grocery network calls it significant capital investment that does not pay off immediately, and names the high cost of building and scaling as a standing challenge. A second operator frames the difficulty as competitive rather than technical — a fragmented market where large networks already dominate, so the work is proving to brands that your inventory deserves a share of a budget they are allocating elsewhere.
What tools do brands use to manage retail media?
The platform layer that sits across retailers — Pacvue, CommerceIQ, Skai, Stackline and Flywheel are the names that recur — handling campaign management, bidding automation and reporting across Amazon, Walmart, Target and others from one place. Buyers consolidating onto one of these describe running a formal evaluation to do it. Alongside that sits each retailer's own buying interface, which is where the fragmentation actually bites.
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