Retail media

Good morning and welcome back to Retail Media Breakfast Club.

Yesterday I shared the first half of a piece that I wrote for my column at The Drum about the different eras of retail media and I shared how we have an evolution playing out with retail media as being built as a monolithic all-in-one ad platform like Amazon was able to.

We then had the advent of specialist retail media tech companies like CitrusAd and Criteo enabling everyone else with an all-in-one kind of solution, which consolidated demand and supply.

in a simple, easy to buy solution for retailers.

Certainly go back and listen to part one if you missed that yesterday.

But part two, we're coming around to a little refinement of this concept, which is that technology and eras of technology aren't the only access of which to look at the broad landscape of retail media capabilities on the market today.

And for this part of the article, I drew on an interview on the Retail Media Therapy podcast, which is excellent.

And I recently played part of this interview on the show on a different topic about RMN aggregators.

On a recent call, a retail media leader at a mid-sized US network told me how technology decisions actually get made.

They told me how they joined the company and did what any competent operator would do.

They audited the on-site ad stack.

Without this, my source estimates the network would've missed seven figures in ad opportunities it didn't know that it had.

Welcome to 2026 and the manual labor still holding up a US retail [chuckles] media network.

Retail media might feel new, but it isn't.

It has already been through several eras and reinventions over the past decade or so, and today's operators have more technology options available to them than at any previous point.

What they don't have is a straightforward way to get it approved and installed.

We're going to get out in front of CTV.

We're going to get out in front of retail media, two areas of real growth.

Did they not make enough moves in those two areas and rely too heavily on this area that was going to get hit so hard? Or maybe, to be fair, maybe they were always going to run out of room.

Do either of you have a thought on that?

But as usual, the more interesting conversation happened after I shared that piece in the comments on LinkedIn.

So let's get straight to the question that actually matters to anyone who is managing a budget or running a retail media network.

Does any of this change where the money goes? My prediction, sadly, I don't think so, though I would be thrilled to be proven wrong.

Let's get into it.

So neither outcome has money leaving the Amazon orbit anytime soon.

But there is a silver lining here for two groups.

First of all, every other retail media network now has a window to play the transparency card, the trust card, to show their cards on auction mechanics before anyone forces them to, or just take advantage of this moment to demonstrate how they are different.

[laughs] Walmart Connect made a lot of noise when it moved to second price ad auction format in 2022, and advertisers genuinely cared.

Helen, look, one of the things that feels different over the last couple of years is the language that we're all using.

A few years ago, everyone talked about retail media.

Now we're hearing much more about commerce media, hence Commerce Media Matters podcast.

That feels like more than a rebrand, right? There's real shift happening.

And I say that because I've heard sometimes it referred to just offsite, for example, or I've heard it referred to just as using data, for example.

But for me, it's really the either or.

And the way that I've seen it evolve is that obviously we had what everybody will know as the shopper marketing phase, which went into the evolution of the retail media phase.

And the most recent evolution I've seen is how it's gone from retail media to commerce media, where obviously the people and the partners you were working with for that data or for those inventory touch points were retailers where products could be bought.

Hey, how's it going?

I'm really excited for today's conversation because if you're a listener or reader, you know that we've been covering... commerce media retail media however you want to define it for the past few weeks now we've had someone from iab on the show um and dove deep into some new trends in the commerce media landscape like vertical dramas and the creator economy um so i'm excited to have someone on the rmn side someone who's doing the work working with partners and really exploring all these different trends uh Philip, what about you? What are your thoughts on how we're tackling this topic? Because I feel like it's so vast, evolving so quickly, and there are so many things to talk about.

But what are you excited to dig into today?

Well, I think one of the things that's often overlooked is the variety of formats that retail media can actually come in, right? And I think a lot of it's just been focused on display and digital display for so long.

And one way that I think we could probably zoom out is just think about all the formats and all the ways that people can interact with media.

Media for many years, if you go back 100 years, media was... you know, terrestrial radio.

And I think that our next guest has really taken that and made it very literal and thought about what does in-store shopper experience look like when you can't physically look at your phone, but you still want to interact with media and actually deliver value over retail media.

And how can you turn that into something that's really valuable and point to the other parts of the retail experience, like loyalty.