Retail Media Networks: Every Retailer Wants Ad Dollars Now

The grocery store has become an advertising platform. So has the pharmacy, the home improvement chain, the electronics retailer, and the fast food app. Retail media—advertising sold by retailers against their first-party purchase data—grew 28% globally in 2025 and is projected to exceed $200 billion by 2028. The growth logic is straightforward. Retailers possess something that has become increasingly scarce and valuable in the post-cookie advertising landscape: authenticated first-party data attached to purchase behavior. When a retailer knows that a customer buys premium olive oil every three weeks, that information is worth more to an olive oil competitor than virtually any other signal available in the advertising market. The proliferation of retail media networks has been remarkable. In 2022, there were perhaps a dozen significant retail media offerings globally. By mid-2026, that number exceeds 200, with networks operating across grocery, pharmacy, DIY, electronics, fashion, fuel, and quick-service restaurants. The shared services infrastructure—the measurement tools, the creative specifications, the reporting interfaces—varies dramatically across networks. This fragmentation is the central headache for brands. Managing campaigns across even five retail media networks requires dedicated operational capacity. Each network has different targeting parameters, different ad formats, different attribution windows, and different reporting metrics. The strategic insight that works on one network does not automatically transfer to another. The quality gap between networks is also significant. The largest retail media networks—Amazon, Walmart Connect, Kroger Precision Marketing—have invested heavily in measurement infrastructure and can demonstrate clear purchase lift. Smaller networks often cannot. Their data is less clean, their attribution models less rigorous, and their ability to prove ROI correspondingly weaker. Brands navigating this landscape are developing tiered strategies: deep investment in the large networks where measurement is robust, selective testing on mid-tier networks where the audience is differentiated, and minimal engagement with networks that cannot demonstrate meaningful measurement capability. This tiering approach is rational. The challenge is executing it without the operational capacity that most brands do not currently have.