Latest / Retail Media Breakfast Club / Retail Media Is Mid? The Brutal Truth About Amazon, Walmart & the Future of Retail Media
Transcript
- retail media is mid === [00:00:00] Kiri Masters: I was at a happy hour at Advertising Week New York last year when I was introduced to a well-known thought leader in the lofty brand marketing space. I introduced myself as someone who covers retail media. "Retail media is [00:00:15] the scourge of the advertising world and nothing more than a tax on brands," they quipped, and then immediately left the event venue. [00:00:23] I was dumbstruck. Did they not even wanna hear my response? Perhaps they just had somewhere better to be. [00:00:30] But this wasn't the first or last time that I've heard such things. Last year, I wrote an impassioned rebuttal to the claim that retail media is basically a nothing burger, and the argument goes something like this: most [00:00:45] retail media is just ad dollars spent on Amazon, and most of that is on-site sponsored product ads. [00:00:52] Now, in my corner of the internet, and for anyone listening to this podcast, retail media is a big deal. I write a newsletter and a [00:01:00] podcast that more than 10,000 people in the industry read or listen to every day. Are those people simply volunteering their time to a good cause? [00:01:10] A few weeks ago, I was on a call with a very smart and very successful [00:01:15] tech leader in the e-commerce ecosystem who said, "Yeah, there's only one company that makes a lot of money in retail media today, Amazon. Even Walmart has direct revenue from it, but they have $780 billion in top-line revenue and [00:01:30] only three, four, $5 billion in retail media. [00:01:33] Their retail media business could disappear, and they would be totally fine." Now, a third of Walmart's operating profit comes from retail media [00:01:42] Then came the discussion about retail media being a tax [00:01:45] and a way to get money out of suppliers, and this whole conversation that we've all been having for years and years made me realize yet again that retail media still has a huge perception problem, not just [00:02:00] among average consumers who will always say they hate ads, they'd never click on the ads, but there is a perception problem among smart professionals in the e-commerce industry. [00:02:11] But here is what is even more troubling than that. [00:02:15] It's that if we continue down the path that we're on right now, retail media may in fact become mid. Let's jump in [00:02:24] [00:02:26] [00:02:26] Kiri Masters: So look, the critique is not entirely irrational. Retail media [00:02:30] is often too reliant on sponsored product ads, especially on-site search placements. Amazon, yes, they dominate the category spectacularly. Some retail media networks remain under-resourced, [00:02:45] under-differentiated, and too dependent on outsourced sales [00:02:48] And outdated tech stacks. Jason Goldberg of the Jason and Scott Show and Chief Commerce Officer at Publicis has made a version of this argument before, and it was a great [00:03:00] tit-for-tat argument that we ran across both of our properties last year. And his critique is that the category's biggest growth engine is also its greatest reputational weakness. [00:03:11] Retail media often looks less like media [00:03:15] innovation and more like retailers monetizing access that they already controlled. It's the old trade media moving from one pocket to the other pocket and being called retail media argument. So that is a serious argument, [00:03:30] but it is not the whole argument. So I called on a cadre of industry friends to weigh in [00:03:36] So first I called on industry analyst Andrew Lipsman, and he pushed back on the idea that retail media's Amazon and sponsored product [00:03:45] concentration makes the rest of the market too small to matter. He says non-search retail media is a twenty-one billion dollar market already projected to hit thirty-five billion dollars by twenty twenty-nine, and non-Amazon retail [00:04:00] media is a twenty-three billion dollar market already. [00:04:03] Not too shabby. In other words, even if you strip out Amazon and sponsored product ads, what remains is a very large business. Andrew argued that the remaining slice is [00:04:15] enough to support at least four billion dollar plus ad businesses [00:04:20] he says most RMNs still have huge upside because they remain under-monetized in on-site search and are still ramping on-site display and video. [00:04:30] In-store retail media drives little revenue today, but promises to be a ten to twenty billion dollar ad market in the next five to ten years. [00:04:37] Lack of execution is a much bigger inhibitor of growth than lack of opportunity for non-Amazon retail media [00:04:45] networks The agentic AI revolution is here, and the competitive edge belongs to those who move faster than disruption [00:05:00] itself. Join Miracle Ads and me in New York City on June 10, 2026, for strategies, insights, and connections built for the era of agentic commerce. [00:05:15] Discovery is shifting, media economics are following, and the brands and retailers who figure out what comes next won't be the ones who wait. [00:05:24] They'll be the ones already moving. Join me at the Miracle Summit [00:05:30] in New York City on June 10. Link to register in the show notes [00:05:36] I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit here 'cause this article is quite long. There's a bit more detail in it, and if you are looking for some good material to argue that [00:05:45] retail media is not mid, you should definitely read, uh, read the full article. But I'm just gonna skip ahead to a couple of other points that I really wanted you to hear on the podcast. [00:05:54] Anne Hallick, who is the vice president of sales for the Americas at Miracle Ads, takes issue with the idea that [00:06:00] the industry should be dismissed because it is still immature. She s- she said, "So we're just not supposed to do anything? What's the solution here? [00:06:09] That you're going to have an entire generation of retail and ad tech professionals who just [00:06:15] didn't attempt to monetize owned properties?" Anne compares retail media's current awkwardness to earlier stages of digital and programmatic advertising. She talks about when she entered programmatic in 2013, everyone thought that it [00:06:30] was remnant inventory, it was garbage, and the protocol was gonna go away. [00:06:34] Was that mid? That was worse than mid, she said. Her point is that immature channels often look messy before they mature. Retail [00:06:45] media may be a little clunky around the edges today, but clunky doesn't mean inconsequential Amazon stands alone, she told me. I don't use Amazon as a benchmark or comparable when I talk about retail media because it is so truly unique [00:07:00] She also argues that marketplace and advertising are increasingly inseparable [00:07:06] Ads plus Marketplace is the complete protein. She said, "You're not gonna have a flourishing marketplace if the seller can't promote their [00:07:15] product [00:07:15] For Anne, the fallacy is not in saying that retail media is mostly sponsored product ads or that it is mostly Amazon. The fallacy is concluding that because those two things are true, that the rest of the market is [00:07:30] insignificant [00:07:30] I next spoke with Anna Laura Zane, who is the chief marketing officer at MetaRouter, And she sees a conceptual problem in focusing too narrowly on the ad unit and missing the actual currency of the industry. [00:07:43] In twenty twenty-six, [00:07:45] off-site spend, such as using retailer data to buy CTV or social ads, is growing three times faster than on-site, she said. This is not only about sponsored product ads, it's about moving the shopper signal across the [00:08:00] entire internet Retail data, in Annalaura's view, is the engine behind major brand-building campaigns. [00:08:08] Narrowing the debate to sponsored product ads is like judging the impact of the internet by the number of banner ads [00:08:15] on a homepage [00:08:16] Now I'm gonna skip forward again to the conclusion here, which is where, sadly, the naysayers could end up being right. We are not out of the woods, let alone out of [00:08:30] Amazon's looming shadow. Here is the concern that was shared privately with me by a very experienced executive in the ecosystem. [00:08:39] They told me retail media feels mid right now, but it doesn't have to be. [00:08:45] Most people are running the exact same playbook in new ways and expecting different results. Outsource sales to Criteo, to Instacart, a demand network, or a programmatic on-site player, but only the cheapest tech. [00:09:00] Don't ask for much funding for resources. [00:09:02] Park change management. Prioritize only product listing ads because off-site is less profitable and in-store is expensive. They continued on, Walmart, Instacart, and [00:09:15] Amazon are winning because they took this business seriously and invest it. You get out of it what you put into it. Now that to me is actually the most compelling version of the skeptical case We're not talking about whether [00:09:30] retail media is real. [00:09:31] We're talking about whether enough retailers will build media businesses that are worthy of the budgets that they want to capture [00:09:40] Retail media can be a tax. It can also be a [00:09:45] serious media channel. The next few years will decide which version of the industry becomes dominant [00:09:52]