Retail Media Networks

Walmart’s $2.3 billion acquisition of smart TV maker Vizio offers another sign that retail media networks have entered a new era, one focused on expansion into premium advertising channels like connected TV (CTV) and streaming. The deal might also lend credence to concerns that retail media could follow the same path as past digital platforms, with just a handful of dominant players rising to the top to establish walled gardens, in the vein of Google and Meta. Brands that relied on Vizio for media planning and buying and measurement may soon need to turn to Walmart to conduct those areas of business, shrinking their options. 

“This is a positive move for Walmart and Vizio, but will undoubtedly shake up the space for advertisers currently relying on Vizio’s raw viewership data as part of their advertising or measurement stack,” Ashwin Navin, CEO of Samba TV, said in comments shared with Marketing Dive. Navin claims Samba TV is now the “only independent first-party TV data and measurement provider in the market.”

Vizio was valued by marketers for interoperable data sets stemming from areas like its automatic content recognition (ACR) technology that helps identify what the viewer of a smart TV is watching. The fear for some media executives is that that data may become harder and more expensive to access under Walmart’s ownership. Walmart Connect declined to comment on specifics of the deal due to the acquisition not being finalized. 

A game-changing deal?

Walmart is purchasing Vizio to strengthen its U.S. retail media arm Walmart Connect, already a category leader. Walmart Connect saw growth up 30% in fiscal 2024, while the big-box store’s global ad business that includes offerings like FlipKart reached $3.4 billion in revenue. Vizio brings over its own suite of ad solutions and more than 500 direct brand relationships, expanding Walmart Connect’s scale. Vizio’s Platform Plus unit, which mostly focuses on advertising, accounts for the majority of gross company profits. 

While the long-term impact of the acquisition is yet to be seen, it’s clear Walmart intends to create a more robust ecosystem where it can link together various channels, such as its Walmart+ e-commerce platform and Vizio’s CTV capabilities, to drive effective advertising. That is to say, Walmart could start to look a lot more like Amazon, which is also ramping up a focus on advertising via its Prime Video streaming portal and owns the rival Fire TV line of hardware. 

“The acquisition of Vizio by Walmart is a game-changer for the retail and streaming sectors, even if it’s not ultimately so surprising,” said Alex Yip, director of CTV product at AppsFlyer, over email. “Walmart is not only adding a popular private label TV brand to its portfolio, but also gaining access to a huge amount of first-party consumer data that will enhance its advertising and streaming capabilities.”

“This deal will help Walmart diversify its revenue sources, increase its customer loyalty, and challenge Amazon’s dominance in the e-commerce and streaming sectors,” Yip continued.

CTV convergence

Other retail media networks have turned to CTV as their next big opportunity, courting marketers that want to deliver more precise advertising on the backs of first-party shopper data. Those demands have continued to climb as signal loss intensifies amid the death of the cookie.

“As Google deprecates third-party cookies and advertisers continue to seek new opportunities to get in front of their audiences, we will see a convergence in digital advertising, especially with growing channels like retail media and CTV,” said Brian Gleason, chief revenue officer at Criteo, over email.

Areas like CTV give retail media networks the chance to try and flex their muscles with upper-funnel tactics where they have historically been lacking. With Vizio, Walmart Connect closes the knowledge gap even faster. Researcher eMarketer expects CTV advertising revenue in the U.S. will climb 22.4% to reach $30.1 billion in 2024.  

“The move gives Walmart a strong foothold in the CTV advertising market,” said Nikhil Raj, a former Walmart executive who now serves as chief business officer for retail media at Moloco, in an email. “It also collapses the CTV ads value chain enabling Walmart to place the demand from retail media on its own supply, no different than Amazon with its Prime Video inventory.”

This year’s digital-focused NewFronts and TV-focused upfronts presented an opportunity to take stock of an evolving advertising landscape. Amid privacy challenges, threats to popular platforms and the impact of artificial intelligence (AI), digital ad spend is still expected to grow about 10% in both 2024 and 2025, led by continued growth in retail media and connected TV (CTV), according to a recent report by Advertiser Perceptions.

As advertisers shift their spend to those two channels, legacy media conglomerates and retailers with media networks of their own continue yearslong efforts to connect content and commerce. These new deals look to capitalize on tech-centered developments in both spaces, fusing the scale and brand-building power of CTV with the data-driven, outcome-oriented capabilities of retail media.

“Media and ad tech companies need to form relationships with retail media platforms or risk missing out on one of the few large and quickly growing segments of the digital advertising market,” said Eric Haggstrom, director of business intelligence and head of forecasting for Advertiser Perceptions, in a statement around its report.

Disney and NBCUniversal announced such deals, while Amazon — a leading retail media player with growing video ambitions — primed the pump for its first upfront event.

Consumer data in the crosshairs

Partnerships between media companies and retailers have steadily increased in the last few years amid the proliferation of media networks and in advance of the signal loss expected from Google's again-delayed plan to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome. First-party data is core to both the retail media proposition and the ad platforms developed by major media players that seek to unite content across channels.

NBCUniversal — a leader in developing the future of targeting, measurement and streaming — continued its efforts to turn TV into a commerce-enabled performance marketing channel with the announcement of a new collaboration with Instacart. Expected to launch in Q2 in streaming before moving to linear TV, the expanded collaboration allows CPG advertisers to reach in-market consumers and measure campaigns with the use of ad exposure and purchase data.

“Advertisers are increasingly prioritizing strategic audiences, and with this partnership, CPG brands will be able to connect the next generation of grocery shoppers in a highly engaging environment,” said Alison Levin, president of NBCUniversal's advertising and partnerships, in a statement.

NBCUniversal was the first official streaming partner of Instacart, which has continued to build out its ad platform with moves like powering Google Shopping ads and partnering with third-party verification providers — efforts that helped Instacart receive its first advertising accreditation from the Media Rating Council. The latest deal helps CPG brands connect with high-intent consumers and prove campaign efficacy with closed-loop measurement, said Tim Castelli, vice president of global advertising sales at Instacart.

“Consumers can see a CPG’s ad on streaming and get that product delivered to them via Instacart in as fast as an hour,” Castelli said in a statement. “It’s a win-win for both consumers and brands.”

In kind, Disney Advertising announced a collaboration with Walmart Connect that gives advertisers enhanced audience targeting and closed-loop measurement capabilities for brand campaigns across the company's CTV inventory on Disney+ and Hulu, per details shared with Marketing Dive.

A proof-of-concept program will launch in Q2 with select advertisers across categories including CPG, consumer electronics, telecommunications, auto, apparel and beauty before scaling to all eligible advertisers over the next few months. The partnership allows Walmart Connect advertisers to apply the retailer's first-party shopper data for targeting and measurement using Disney's Audience Graph in programmatic, helping marketers better understand purchase intent and outcomes.

“Disney is committed to bringing innovative solutions to advertisers that tap into unique and actionable first-party data to drive insights, and prove effectiveness through the most transformative technology,” said Jamie Power, senior vice president of addressable sales at Disney, in a statement. “Walmart has incredible data insights for planning and measuring, that when combined with the most impactful streaming environments — is a winning combination for advertisers.”

Walmart Connect, which saw revenue up 22% in Q4 2023, has previously boasted about the performances of partnerships with video platforms Roku, TikTok and TalkShopLive and has started making overtures to non-endemic brands in the automotive, entertainment, financial services, quick-service restaurant and travel industries. As part of the deal, Disney will join Walmart Connect’s Partner Lab, which NBCUniversal joined last year.

Partnerships like the expanded NBCUniversal-Instacart pact and new Disney-Walmart Connect deal are likely to proliferate due to data signal loss caused by industry and regulatory changes, according to Nicole Perrin, senior vice president of business intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions.

“Media sellers are under at least as much pressure from advertisers as ever before to help them reach the right audiences and prove that their ads have an effect,” Perrin said in emailed comments. “Organizations that have their own first-party data about consumers that can be used to target and measure ads will look for ways to team up with media sellers that are privacy-safe for consumers as well as being protective of the organization's owned data assets.”

Amazon looms large

Walmart could be an even bigger player at the convergence of retail media and CTV if its planned acquisition of smart TV maker Vizio clears regulatory hurdles — but it won't be alone. Amazon's advertising business continues to grow, driven largely by product ads around its e-commerce marketplace, with ads introduced on its Prime Video platform in January showing encouraging early results, per an earnings call.

Amazon's continued focus on Prime Video, along with livestreaming service Twitch and ad-supported streamer Freevee, comes as the company made its upfronts debut on May 14 after years of presenting at the NewFronts. In advance of the presentation, the company announced three new streaming TV ad formats that boost interactivity and shoppability on Prime Video.

The new formats, available during the upcoming broadcast year, include shoppable carousel ads that can be browsed during ad breaks, interactive pause ads that feature "Add to Cart" and "Learn More" overlays, and interactive brand trivia ads that present an opportunity for brand storytelling and several types of customer interactions. The introduction of living room remote capabilities expands the availability of ad formats that "go far beyond QR codes," per details shared with Marketing Dive.

“We are developing innovative experiences to help brands better engage with customers, as we work to transform streaming advertising through our differentiated combination of reach, first-party signals, and ad tech,” said Alan Moss, vice president of global ads sales for Amazon Ads, in a statement. “Ads in Prime Video provide an unparalleled experience for advertisers to deliver on any full-funnel marketing objective – whether it’s awareness, consideration, or conversion.”

The new formats allow advertisers to reach Prime Video's average monthly ad-supported reach of more than 200 million global customers. Interactivity is quickly becoming table stakes in the CTV space, with Amazon's interactive ads driving 10-times more product page views and conversions than non-interactive formats, according to company research. The new capabilities, and whatever else Amazon has in store for the upfronts, could set the stage for incremental ad spend down the road. 

“In the long run, we believe Amazon will be able to draw incremental streaming budgets from SMBs that sell on their platform, but we expect minimal contribution in 2024,” Advertiser Perceptions' Haggstrom said in its recent forecast. “These assumptions could be quickly disproven in the coming months but expect heavy competition for streaming ad budgets that will grow at a moderate rate in 2024.”

Expedia at its annual Explore partner event revealed a travel media network that builds on two decades of advertising experience. The Expedia Group Media Solutions offering combines first-party traveler intent and purchase data with on- and offsite ad tools, planning and measurement capabilities and access to an in-house creative team.

The launch of Expedia Group’s Travel Media Network comes as more players enter the booming media network space, with companies like Chase, Marriott and ride-hailing leaders Uber and Lyft joining a growing list that already includes most major retailers and grocers. U.S. retail media ad spend nearly hit $50 billion in 2023 — similar to what advertisers spent on national and local linear TV — and is expected to grow another 30% in 2024, per Advertiser Perceptions’ U.S. Advertising Market Outlook.

For Expedia, the time for a built-out media network is now: not only has the company sold advertising for decades, but it has “unparalleled” global reach and scale, encompassing 200 booking sites in more than 70 countries, along with a B2B network that includes more than 60,000 partners, according to Rob Torres, senior vice president of media and affiliate solutions.

“We’ve seen this happening with some retailers and other type of commerce platforms, but you haven’t seen a lot of that in travel,” said Torres, who joined Expedia in 2022 after 16 years in Google’s travel advertising business. “Not all of the smaller companies have that data and travel insights to bring together in a big media network like we can. We think that we’re onto something here because of that opportunity.”

Journeys before journeys

Before they can make trips of their own, customers must first navigate a travel purchase journey that is increasingly complex. Travelers, on average, view 141 pages of travel content in the 45 days before booking a trip, and nearly three in five travelers don’t have a specific destination in mind or have considered multiple destinations, per data shared by Expedia.

“We’re trying to solve a problem for our advertisers,” said Jennifer Andre, vice president of business development for Expedia Group Media Solutions. “It’s overwhelming for them to figure out how to find that traveler and how to tie it all together and make their media buying easier.”

Expedia’s travel network leverages first-party intent data to target high-value travelers with onsite advertising, as well as offsite ads on YouTube and connected TV, relying on a media, insight and planning team that spent over 12,000 hours in 2023 helping advertising partners to optimize their campaigns. The network is also partnered with publishers and platforms including Netflix and Disney+ that allow for extensions into newly created inventories.

“We can put together these robust campaigns for our partners that are multifaceted and actually reach that customer wherever they are throughout their travel journey,” Torres said.

For an example of what Expedia can do, the company shared the results of a co-created campaign with nonprofit travel board Visit California that ran in London’s Heathrow Airport. Expedia had both the inventory, having bought out all of the billboards in Terminal 5, and the insight that Visit California should target U.K. travelers, resulting in an effort that gave the brand 100% share of voice in the terminal and generated 275 million total impressions.

“It wasn’t [Visit California] just buying out-of-home in isolation — they were buying it as part of our travel media network with owned-and-operated channels and other components of their strategy with us,” Andre explained.

Opportunities for growth

Media networks continue to offer more refined capabilities, around everything from content creation to measurement. With its ad offerings, data and insights and in-house creative team, Expedia wants to be a “one-stop shop” for travel advertisers.

“For our endemic partners that we’re already working with, we may already have large strategic deals, but this just gives them an opportunity to go even deeper and potentially see us in a different way,” said Andre. “Not just, ‘Hey, I want to spend money on Expedia, how many bookings can you drive?’ — we actually have the opportunity to create awareness and get them in front of travelers throughout the wider ecosystem.”

Expedia executives also highlighted a lesser-known B2B network that extends its capabilities to more than 60,000 partners. The B2B network is expected to be a “growth vehicle” for both the network and Expedia overall, Torres noted.

“Many of those partners where we are serving up hotel supply, we’re also serving up our sponsored listings for hotels, so there’s a way for our partners to extend their presence,” Andre added. “We don’t think those people realize how big we are in that space and how Expedia is showing up and powering other players in the space.”

The company’s refreshed presence in the media network space also comes as industry leaders pave the way for determining what such offerings can mean for all advertisers. Walmart Connect and Home Depot’s recently rebranded Orange Apron Media network are both making overtures to non-endemic brands outside of their respective retail and home improvement categories, a path that could be a “huge opportunity” for Expedia, Andre said.

“We do work with some non-endemics now, but we think that this is going to open up the opportunity as we look at offering this audience offsite and working with some of our brand partnerships,” Torres added. “It could be a big, big deal.”

While WARC now expects retail media spending to grow at a slightly faster rate in 2024, with global marketing investments climbing 13.7% year over year to reach $153.3 billion, the space is headed for a cooldown next year. A new report from the researcher revealed that retail media networks’ increased sophistication in leveraging shopper data to target offsite campaigns, including in non-retail environments, is helping fuel channel growth.  

Retail media remains hypercompetitive but Amazon is enshrining a dominant position, with WARC expecting the e-commerce giant to command 37.3% of the market in 2024. However, some of retail media’s meteoric growth could soon taper off as brands max out their budgets.

WARC aligns with other forecasters in expecting retail media networks to see a bump in growth from their bigger push into offsite media. That said, the growth rate for one of digital’s booming channels appears to be decelerating after a long run on a meteoric upward trajectory.

In 2024, WARC forecasts spend on social media to grow more quickly than for retail media at a rate of 14.3%. The “Future of Digital Commerce” report stated that retail media spending will grow more slowly in 2025, with the rate clocking in at 10.6% “as trade marketing budgets are steadily exhausted.”

Retail media networks rose to prominence thanks to sponsored search and display placements appearing on on-site properties that could catch the attention of consumers as they browsed and filled up their carts. But mature players in the space have started leveraging their first-party data troves to help brands target their campaigns elsewhere, including on trendy social media apps like TikTok and in the burgeoning connected TV (CTV) space. 

In a sign of the trend, Disney Advertising struck a deal with Walmart Connect to use the big-box store’s retail media data to power ad campaigns on platforms like Hulu and Disney+. Programmatic buying is also a growing area of interest for retail media networks that want to extend their tendrils into the open web. A separate report from Advertiser Perceptions revealed that offsite programmatic retail media will generate $20 billion in 2024, leapfrogging 2023’s figures. 

With dollars pouring in, retail media has seen power consolidate around a handful of platforms, Amazon chief among them. When factoring out China, where Temu owner Pinduoduo dominates the retail media landscape, Amazon accounts for 62.3% of global category market share, according to WARC.

Amazon’s revenue derived from advertising jumped 24% year-over-year in Q1 2024 to $11.82 billion, and the company plans to see further traction as it introduces commercials to Prime Video. WARC believes Amazon will maintain 25% retail media growth in 2024 to hit $52.7 billion in revenue.  

Retail media is primed to be an adland priority in 2024 as networks continue to proliferate across the space and marketer dollars flood the channel. Ad spending in the channel is forecast to grow 30% in 2024 and eventually make up nearly a quarter (23.5%) of all digital advertising in the U.S., according to a recent report by Advertiser Perceptions.

As options grow for how and where advertisers can spend, early entrants into the retail media network space are racing to boost and differentiate their offerings. Home Depot this year hosted its first InFronts, an in-person marketing summit around retail media modeled after presentations hosted by traditional and digital media companies. 

The inaugural event is intended to allow Home Depot to give an inside look to its suppliers — businesses that are highly connected to the success of the home improvement retailer, unlike in other media channels — as it runs beta tests of its offerings with non-endemic brands.

“As someone who used to buy all the media for Home Depot, yes, you were partners with your media teams, but you didn't necessarily have to know their strategies and how they're going to attract new customers and what their biggest area of growth were, you just wanted really effective products that drove your business objectives,” said Melanie Babcock, leader of The Home Depot’s retail media business.

At the InFronts event, Home Depot offered insights into customers and across the company's business, marketing, creative and media strategies, along with a road map ahead for retail media. Along with the retail media ad experience, Home Depot also detailed its systems, reporting and measurement capabilities, and the new products and partners that it is enlisting to extend the reach of its network.

“It's an educational moment for that supplier, because as they think about investing into retail media networks, where do they want to invest? They want to invest with a retailer that aligns to their own objectives and is in a growth position,” Babcock said.

Time to the Infronts, Home Depot is also rebranding its Retail Media+ offering, which launched in 2018, as Orange Apron Media. Babcock's title will shift to vice president of Orange Apron Media and Monetization. The effort comes as Home Depot looks to differentiate itself in the market among not only home improvement networks, but retail media in general, to reach suppliers and CPG marketers.

In 2023, the company underwent a "rigorous" branding exercise as it looked for a name that would speak to its home improvement core, coming up with hundreds of names; the space lends itself to words like “workbench,” “toolbox,” “drill” and other action-based terms. It also keyed in on the color and function of its iconic orange aprons that signify helping customers.

“There are 500,000 associates in our stores every single day who wear an apron, and we even have apron-wearing days at the store support center, where we work," Babcock said. “It unites us under our values and what we stand for, which is service and help.”

What marketers can expect

With its new name, Home Depot plans to highlight the experience suppliers have when using Orange Apron Media, with less focus on specific ad types and more on the technology, tools and partners that make suppliers' ad buying easier. The company stood up its on-site, off-site and in-store ad businesses simultaneously, and is now looking to unify the experience, whether suppliers use self-service or rely on Babcock's team for managed service.

As retail media networks look to sync with media partners to improve audience targeting and engagement, Home Depot has side-stepped major media conglomerates to work with Univision. The partnership will allow the retailer to reach both culturally diverse millennial and Gen Z consumers and Spanish-language consumers in the business and professional contractor spaces.

“We want to extend our reach and extend our ability to get our suppliers in front of those customers,” Babcock said. “We're going to partner with the largest network out there, and all the different ad types that they have, to extend our reach into this Spanish language customer [base].” 

Still in its early days, the relationship with Univision involves tests around creating look-alike audiences, and Babcock describes the deal as a unique and ownable opportunity for the company. Home Depot is also offering closed-loop measurement that connects ad reach with business objectives, and has set up a clean room that will help it meet imperatives around consumer data privacy.

While focused on suppliers for its home improvement business, Home Depot is also running beta tests with non-endemic brands to see if its audiences are compelling to other businesses looking to advertise to homeowners and small-business owners. The company reports it is seeing "very positive signs" in tests with financial services, insurance, automotive and telecom brands.

“Home Depot is a pretty rigorous company,” Babcock said. “We like to test and make sure that things work, the pipes work, the measurement works, the data works [and] we've got the right audiences before we go full scale… We'll have a bigger offering coming out this summer with more announcements, because I do believe with cookie deprecation, non-endemics could be very interested in our audiences.”

Retail media networks are entering either their 2.0 or 3.0 era, depending on who you asked at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show in January 2024. Numerical variance aside, experts agreed that this year heralds the next chapter for a fast-growing channel, though one whose path forward remains murky amid a race to standardize ad formats and measurement.

Retail media is still primed to attract heftier investments now that Google’s plan to enact the death of the cookie is in effect, hampering a bedrock digital ad-targeting method. However, speakers at the NRF confab seemed more eager to highlight the ways they’re trying to refashion old chestnuts, including in-store assets, to fortify their newfangled advertising bets than talk about the search and display offerings (or retail media 1.0) that have put the category on course to generate a $100 billion in revenue over the next several years.

Repositioning brick and mortar as a brand-building tool versus simple shopper marketing was a theme threaded throughout discussions and interviews on the show floor. Only time will tell whether consumers view it as more than a message plastered on the aisle or their shopping cart with some additional tech bells and whistles.

“It’s a channel with broadcast-level scale,” said Ryan Mayward, senior vice president of retail media sales at Walmart Connect, during a panel about how physical stores could usher in the “golden age” of retail media. Walmart Connect has recently taken its product demoing program in-house and expanded advertising on an owned and operated in-store radio network called Walmart Radio.  

“One hundred and forty million customers a week shop in our stores. That’s bigger than any broadcast TV network can deliver,” Mayward continued. “I think the store, as an advertising channel, is as relevant to the shopper marketer as it is to the chief marketer.”

A Super Bowl-sized opportunity?

Other retail media networks signaled their ambitions to ramp up in-store bets at NRF, viewing it as a key piece in realizing a pitch around omnichannel capabilities and providing a full view into the customer journey. Despite the bump e-commerce received during the pandemic, about 85% of transactions still occur at brick-and-mortar locations in the U.S., per CB Insights data cited by one conference attendee. Physical retail also gives smaller networks a possible advantage over Amazon, a platform that commands the lion’s share of retail media spending but has struggled to iron out its brick-and-mortar strategy.  

“[In-store] is the biggest opportunity left for retail media networks to capitalize on. Generally, it’s by far the larger conversion location,” said Evan Hovorka, head of product and innovation at Albertsons Media Collective, in an interview. “A lot of the traffic, the time spent, the impressions and the conversions are in that store center.”

7-Eleven, the largest convenience chain in the U.S. with over 13,000 locations, is also scaling up its radio ambitions in 2024, bringing a program currently in about 2,000 stores to the entirety of its North American network. The move will make the c-store’s radio station the largest in the country, claimed Marissa Jarratt chief marketing and sustainability officer, during an on-stage discussion. 

Instacart, the grocery delivery platform, is beginning to pilot ads on its artificial intelligence-powered Caper Carts. Deli and bakery screens, electronics department TVs and cooler doors, enabled by vendors like Cooler Screens, were some of the other in-store advertising avenues championed at NRF. 

“I think physical retail is the new TV because it provides so much of what linear TV is no longer able to provide, which is scale, brand safety and reaching the right audiences,” said Andrew Lipsman, an analyst at Media, Ads +Commerce, on the same panel as Walmart Connect’s Mayward. “Increasingly, it can start to fill that role that TV is leaving behind.”

While it’s been clear for some time that in-store advertising has benefits, like placing a brand message close to the point of transaction, some on the NRF show floor were more measured about the opportunity when compared against conventional brand-building tactics.  

“In-store should be able to shine bright for a few things, but nothing tells a national brand story like a Super Bowl ad,” said Hovorka. “It’s just that there's less and less of those opportunities on linear.”

Easier said than done

The fast rise of retail media has pushed network owners to quickly learn the ropes of complicated programmatic ad tech, either building out that infrastructure internally or, more commonly, partnering with established third parties for scale and cost-effectiveness. A renewed emphasis on in-store formats sounds, on paper, potentially more intuitive for a crowd that has sometimes been stodgy with tech adoption, drawing on retailers’ rich history of shopper marketing. 

But experts said that delivering a cohesive in-store experience will prove to be a big challenge, especially with the longer-term goal of threading the needle between digital and physical measurement and sales attribution.

“If you’re a large company like us with 2,200 stores, all with different footprints, different banners, different constraints, trying to bring a consistent look and feel to a complementary ad service is difficult,” said Albertsons’ Hovorka. “Where we’re pushing ourselves is to really tie that all into a single vision, single strategy, so we can tell an omnichannel story better to our investors to our brands.”

As in the digital realm, retailers may enlist the help of vendors with more established tech know-how to enact their visions of a better-monetized, more digital store. Indeed, NRF’s Big Show was host to plenty of vendors touting those very same capabilities in a sea of booths that stretched across the Javitz Center in Manhattan. But third-party relationships can be messy and add layers to an already complicated retail ecosystem where different players are fighting for a piece of an increasingly lucrative pie.

“A lot of vendors are coming to them now. There’s a price to that. It could be on a programmatic exchange that they don’t control,” said Matt O’Grady, Dunnhumby’s president of Americas, on the NRF show floor. 

“I’m a little sympathetic to the retailers because I think they’ve been burned in the past with other in-store technologies that they probably spent a lot of money on — radio frequencies and things like that — that may not have worked out,” O’Grady added.

Preparation for the in-store evolution is leading companies like Albertsons to invest more in sourcing, negotiations and legal given the amount of sensitive data and contract work involved in the process. The grocer earlier this month partnered with Capgemini on automation tools that serve to improve media planning, operations and content creation. 

“I think what we’ll look for is more localized campaign objectives, being able to target specifically within certain regions, within certain zip codes,” said Hovorka. “We’ve launched our AI and automation investment now to prepare for that in-store work later this year.” 

If and when more sophisticated in-store tech is implemented, retail media networks will have other factors to consider if they want to truly transform the channel into a storytelling machine. Chief among them: Are the ads from their brand partners actually any good?

“What everybody’s got to remember about brand building, and this is not just relevant to retail, is the value of creative,” said O’Grady. “You’ve got to have great creative to get somebody to stop in an aisle and watch an ad.”

YouTube Shopping ads are getting a boost from Instacart’s retail media muscle. Viewers of the Google-owned video site will soon start seeing messages from brands like Clorox that are targeted using Instacart first-party shopper data and include callouts to jump to the grocery delivery platform to place orders. 

Clorox, a regular Instacart partner, and a number of Publicis Media clients are the first consumer packaged goods brands to test the integration, which is part of a growing movement among retail media networks to leverage their troves of first-party shopper data to power campaigns on offsite marketing channels. The news was announced in June as part of Instacart’s presence at the Cannes Lions festival celebrating international creativity in Cannes, France. 

“This is really our first integration in shoppable video,” said Ali Miller, Instacart’s vice president of ads product, in an interview. “It’s also an area where we got a lot of interest from our mutual CPG partners.”

Instacart has been pushing further into offsite advertising, or what Miller terms “retail-powered media,” since 2023, when it linked with demand-side platform The Trade Desk and Roku. At CES in January, it announced it would begin working with Google Shopping ads in search, with YouTube providing a natural stepping stone into video, a more premium format. The company, which went public in September, additionally has deals in place with publishers like NBCUniversal and The New York Times.

YouTube allows advertisers on Instacart’s network to reach consumers during a variety of occasions, including scrolling on their phones, browsing the web or tuning in via a TV screen in their living room. For brands like Clorox, the goal is to more quickly convert a viewer from consideration to purchase with video creative, a concept that has gained newfound traction in the streaming and second-screening era.

Connected TV (CTV) has emerged as a competitive battleground for retail media networks that want to prove they can drive performance and transactions beyond sponsored search and display placements on their owned properties. YouTube’s CTV bets have become a focus of its overtures to Madison Avenue, though Instacart is taking a broad view through its collaboration with the platform. 

“CTV is an incredible landscape and canvas to lean into, but we didn’t want to limit ourselves to one modality of consumer attention and interaction,” said Miller, who formerly worked at YouTube. “Our marketplace model can power a lot of flexibility.”

Venturing offsite

The YouTube Shopping integration launches in a limited pilot, and Miller emphasized that Instacart’s larger offsite push is still in its early stages. But offsite broadly is fueling retail media growth as the channel reaches a fresh stage of maturity. 

Offsite programmatic retail media is forecast to generate $20 billion in sales this year, a leap over the $7.5 billion seen in 2023, according to Advertiser Perceptions. The researcher said offsite today is driving much of the category’s momentum. A separate report from WARC similarly found that the push into non-retail channels is giving a boost to the industry, which is expected to see its rate of growth cool in 2025 following a yearslong hot streak. 

For Instacart, cracking into offsite is a “logical step” to take after establishing a reputable on-platform advertising offering, according to Miller. Instacart in March received its first advertising accreditation from the Media Rating Council (MRC) for impression, click and viewability metrics across a number of formats, including shoppable video. Miller views the MRC stamp of approval as an advantage in a retail media landscape that has faced more pressing questions around trust and transparency after expanding rapidly during the pandemic. 

Instacart sits at an interesting place in the retail media chain in that it delivers groceries from a roster of 1,500 retail partners, some of which operate their own ad networks, but doesn’t wield a traditional store footprint. That said, the company sees an opportunity in enabling what Miller called the “connected store” through offerings like its artificial intelligence-powered smart shopping carts that include screens that can run ads. Instacart also helps new retail media entrants in grocery monetize their fledgling advertising bets through a Carrot Ads platform that is pitched around lessening some of the need to invest in in-house sales and ad tech teams.

“This is part of the omnichannel journey,” said Miller of Instacart’s offsite strategy. “The vision of Instacart is to power every grocery transaction.”