Retail Media Has Grown Up. Now Comes the Hard Part

Mitsunaga Kikuchi is the founder and CEO of Shirofune, the digital advertising management tool that automates ad campaigns through an easy-to-use interface for management, budgeting, monitorig and analytics. Mitsunaga recently won the 2025 ANA MarTech Gold Award for individual marketing solutions provider and the 2025 AdWeek TechStack Award.

Six months ago, the conversation around retail media was centered on opportunity. Retailers had become media companies, and first-party purchase data emerged as one of the most valuable assets in advertising. Brands rapidly increased investment in retail media networks such as Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect because these platforms could tie advertising directly to purchases through closed-loop measurement.

Those advantages remain, but the conversation has evolved.

Retail Media Networks (or RMNs) are now an established part of the advertising mix for many brands. However, as spending has increased, so has the complexity of managing campaigns across a growing number of retail media networks.

According to WARC, global retail media spending is projected to approach $200 billion in 2026. While the market continues to expand, its pace of growth has slowed significantly from the rapid acceleration of recent years. As retail media enters a more mature phase, marketers are shifting their focus from adoption to execution—finding ways to manage increasingly complex campaigns while maintaining performance and efficiency.

Retail media has become a core component of many advertising strategies. As brands expand their investments across retail media networks—including Walmart Connect, Amazon Ads, Target Roundel, and others—managing campaigns efficiently across multiple platforms has become increasingly complex.

Growth Created Complexity

Most advertisers expected media fragmentation.

Now, managing campaigns across Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Amazon, Walmart, and dozens of other channels has become part of modern marketing.

What few expected was workflow fragmentation.

Every RMN introduces its own dashboard, reporting methodology, attribution window, audience definitions, optimization controls, and measurement standards. However, none operate exactly the same way.

For marketing teams, every new platform creates another set of processes to learn and another reporting system to reconcile.

The result is that campaign management has become increasingly manual at precisely the moment advertisers are being asked to operate faster and prove greater efficiency.

Closed-Loop Measurement Isn’t the End of the Story

RMNs earned their reputation because they offer something traditional advertising often cannot.

A retailer knows what consumers searched for, which advertisements they saw, and what they ultimately purchased. That ability to connect advertising directly to transactions has made retail media one of the most measurable forms of digital advertising.

But measurement itself is becoming more complicated.

Industry discussions have increasingly focused on the lack of standardized reporting across retail media networks. The Current recently highlighted that return on ad spend can vary dramatically between networks because each calculates the metric differently. Researchers from Albertsons Media Collective, Northwestern University, and Ovative Group found that ROAS calculations can vary by as much as 63 percent depending on methodology.

As retail media spending increases, marketers are looking beyond ROAS toward broader business metrics including customer lifetime value, incrementality, cohort analysis, and unified measurement across channels.

The industry’s measurement priorities are evolving alongside the platforms themselves.

Reducing Manual Work Across Retail Media

Agencies and in-house marketing teams often manage campaigns across several retail media networks simultaneously, requiring them to move between different dashboards, attribution models, and reporting formats throughout the day.

Marketing teams spend hours moving between dashboards, exporting reports, adjusting bids, monitoring budgets, and normalizing data across multiple platforms before they can begin making strategic decisions.

Research from Harvard Business Review and Forrester suggests that many frustrations surrounding retail media are not caused by the advertising opportunity itself, bur rather from fragmented workflows, inconsistent reporting, and limited interoperability between platforms.

These are infrastructure challenges rather than media challenges.

As RMNs become a part of everyday advertising operations, automation will become increasingly important for reducing manual work while helping marketers maintain consistent optimization across channels.

Retail Media Is Becoming Part of a Larger Commerce Ecosystem

Another important shift is already underway as retail media networks are beginning to evolve into broader commerce media ecosystems.

Retailers remain important participants, but transaction data is also emerging from financial services, travel companies, delivery platforms, loyalty programs, and other businesses with rich first-party customer relationships.

For advertisers, this means the number of commerce-based advertising environments will continue to expand. Managing them individually becomes progressively less practical.

Scaling Retail Media Operations

RMNs continue to grow, but their expansion has introduced new operational demands. As brands add Walmart Connect, Amazon Ads, Target Roundel, and other retail media networks to their media mix, campaign management, measurement, and workflow efficiency are becoming increasingly important considerations.

Brands will continue investing in Walmart Connect, Amazon Ads, and other retail media networks because these platforms provide valuable purchase signals and measurable outcomes.

Success, however, will depend less on gaining access to another advertising platform and more on building the operational systems needed to manage many of them simultaneously.

Advertising has always evolved alongside technology. As retail media becomes a standard part of the media mix, the competitive advantage is shifting from simply participating in these networks to operating across them efficiently at scale.