Retail & commerce
Retail media
Retail media is advertising sold by retailers, on their own websites, apps and stores or elsewhere using their shopper data, letting brands reach customers close to the point of purchase.
Retailers know what people buy. Retail media turns that knowledge into an advertising business. Brands pay to appear in search results and product pages on a retailer's site (sponsored products), in display and video on the retailer's properties, on screens in stores, and increasingly across the web, social and CTV using the retailer's data (off-site retail media).
Its appeal is closed-loop measurement: because the retailer sees both ad exposure and purchases, it can show brands whether ads led to sales. Amazon built the largest retail media business, reporting $56.2 billion in advertising services revenue for 2024 in its annual report; Walmart Connect, Instacart, Target's Roundel, Tesco, Carrefour, Flipkart, Mercado Libre and Coupang are among many others. Retailers run them as a retail media network.
Challenges include fragmentation across dozens of networks, inconsistent metrics, questions about incrementality versus claiming sales that would have happened anyway, and whether brand budgets are really trade-promotion money in disguise. IAB and the MRC published retail media measurement guidelines in 2024 to standardise definitions.
Think of it like this
Retail media is like a supermarket renting the end-of-aisle displays and the announcements over the tannoy to brands, and then telling them exactly how many extra boxes sold.
An example
A shampoo brand in India buys sponsored search placements on a large e-commerce marketplace and sees, via the marketplace's reporting, that ads drove 18,000 attributed orders at a ROAS of 5.
Related terms
Retail media network (RMN)
A retail media network (RMN) is a retailer's advertising business, including its ad inventory, shopper data, ad technology and sales team, that sells ads to brands on and off the retailer's properties.
Sponsored products
Sponsored products are ads that promote specific products within a retailer's or marketplace's search results and product pages, looking like regular listings but labelled as sponsored.
Closed-loop measurement
Closed-loop measurement links ad exposure directly to actual sales data for the same people, typically within a retailer or data owner, showing whether ads led to purchases.
Off-site retail media
Off-site retail media is advertising that uses a retailer's shopper data to target and measure ads outside the retailer's own properties, such as on the open web, social media or CTV.
Commerce media
Commerce media is advertising sold by any business with transaction or shopper data, such as retailers, delivery apps, travel sites, payment companies and banks, not only traditional retailers.