CMO Strategies: Retail media continues to mature, as RMNs from the likes of Ulta and Gopuff build on their strengths

Retail media advertising has been the subject of a fair amount of industry buzz, but there are signs that the marketing channel could be heading toward maturation. For instance, 27% of marketers said retail media is one of two marketing channels that took the highest portion of their company’s budget as of first-quarter 2025, down 4 percentage points from first-quarter 2024. This is according to Digiday+ Research surveys conducted annually among brands, retailers and agencies.

On the other hand, the other marketing channels included in Digiday’s survey saw small increases in the percentage of marketers who said they get the highest portion of their budgets compared to last year. For context, the percentage of marketers who said display ads and ad-supported streaming are one of two channels where they put the highest portion of their budgets increased by 6 percentage points and 5 percentage points respectively in comparison to last year, while social media saw a 3 percentage point bump.

There are several factors that are likely affecting the way marketers are investing in retail media. For one, as the number of retail media networks (RMNs) continues to grow, brands have become more selective about where they spend their ad dollars.

RMNs have also begun asking for bigger investments from brands. Recently some brands have even walked away from joint business planning (JBP) negotiations because of the pressure to invest more with little incremental return on investment or standardization in measurement. JBP commitments typically allow marketers to negotiate better media buys that mutually benefit the retailer and brand and form more sustainable relationships in the long run. But negotiations have grown more complicated as the power shifts toward brands as new retail partners enter the mix.

Finally, confusion among marketers and agencies around who controls retail media ad spend has affected how retail media deals are brokered, especially as retail media capabilities in display ads and CTV continue to expand. By 2028, retail media CTV will represent more than a quarter of RMN display ad spend, and nearly 22% of overall CTV ad spend, according to eMarketer.

But the advantages of retail media are unique. Food delivery service Gopuff has a RMN called Gopuff Ads. Michael Peroutka, head of brand and agency partnerships at Gopuff Ads, said RMNs’ proximity to the point of purchase gives them an edge over other marketing channels, despite some marketers’ concerns. “When it comes to impressions and conversions, that’s fundamentally why retail media networks were started,” Peroutka said. “RMNs are so close to the point of sale, its ability to drive conversion is uniquely differentiated from [other marketing channels].” According to Peroutka, Gopuff has been able to shorten the buying time from impression to consumption to within 30 minutes.

In this report, we look at how multi-category RMNs like Amazon and Walmart compare to the burgeoning offerings of category-specific RMNs like Gopuff’s Gopuff Ads and Ulta’s UB Media, as well as how brands are evaluating how best to invest in retail media marketing.

To map out marketers’ current digital playbook, Digiday+ Research surveyed 195 respondents about past and upcoming investments, marketing channel tactics, preferences and business challenges.

Digiday+ Research also conducted individual interviews with marketing executives at:

• Dude Wipes
• Georgia-Pacific
• Gopuff
• Samsung
• Ulta Beauty

Renee Caceres, head of retail media at programmatic ad platform StackAdapt, told Digiday that dollars are indeed flowing from traditional ad formats into programmatic channels like CTV in retail media. But that movement blurs the lines between brand and shopper marketing budgets, making it difficult to determine who oversees funding, she added.

As a result, some RMNs are working more closely with brands to earn their ad dollars by improving the quality of their data and measurement tools. Ulta Beauty CMO Kelly Mahoney said the data the retailer gathers from its 44 million loyalty program members has been especially valuable for its brand partners.

“We saw the importance of first-party data at Ulta Beauty for a variety of reasons,” Mahoney said. “One, just to personalize core experiences that we wish to personalize. And, we also saw the need to help our brand partners grow their businesses. So, we made sure we had high-quality data, not just transactional data, but data about who the beauty enthusiast is, how they like to shop, ways they like to engage in beauty — whether that be in our stores, on our app, socially. … That’s our real claim for having a large high-quality data set that allows our brand partners to utilize that data and grow their business within our business.”

Brands like Samsung are using retailers’ shopper data banks to their advantage by combining that data with their own proprietary data to maximize return. “What’s interesting about retail media is they have data and understanding about their shoppers that we don’t have,” said Samsung CMO Allison Stransky. “[Samsung] has a huge first-party database, we know a lot about your [a consumer’s] interest in Samsung and your journey. But then you pair it with retail media networks — they know where you shop and how you engage with their stores and channels. So the magic comes in bringing those two things together.”

When Digiday asked agencies to describe how much of their clients’ marketing budgets goes to seven of the top RMNs this year in comparison to last year, fewer survey respondents on average selected a “very large portion” or a “large portion” than selected a “small portion” or a “very small portion of our budget.” This indicates that agency clients are more modestly investing in individual RMNs this year, including e-commerce giant Amazon, which dropped 0.8 weighted average points since last year, according to Digiday’s analysis.

Cost of media is the largest challenge marketers said they face on most RMNs, including category-specific players like Nordstrom and Best Buy. In fact, all marketers chose cost of media as their top barrier on eBay Ads. Historically, the cost to advertise is marketers’ top challenge across these RMNs, especially as the possibility of a recession looms in the U.S. However RMNs are addressing these growing pains by continuing to modify their real-time bidding options and standardize their buying process to simplify the buying process and make it easier for brands to understand where their ad spend is going.

Lack of expertise also arose as a major challenge for marketers on Amazon, Best Buy and Kroger’s networks, according to Digiday’s survey. With Walmart, Target and Kroger, marketers said they face difficulty integrating in-store and online options. These challenges indicate a need for RMNs to provide additional training and communication about platform offerings to marketers, especially as their platforms become more self-serve and autonomous.

According to survey data from Turbyne, four in five brands will advertise with six or fewer RMNs. Samsung’s Stransky said each RMN the electronics maker works with has its own investment requirements and unique ad features, so investing with a mix of retail partners is ideal for brands. “Each partner is trying to find their own value,” Stransky explained. “From our experience, everybody [each brand] is a little bit different, but not surprisingly, because each platform is also a little different as well.”

Although the percentage of marketers who selected retail media as one of the top two marketing channels in which they invest was down in first-quarter 2025, the percentage of marketers who told Digiday+ Research that they use retail media as a marketing channel was up 1 percentage point in first-quarter 2025 versus first-quarter 2024. Industry forecasts also predict stronger retail media spending this year than last year. According to eMarketer, retail media ad spend is set to exceed $67 billion in the U.S. in 2025 — up 24% from the $55 billion spent in 2024. Of that, $53.42 billion is expected to go to Amazon, Walmart and Target in 2025, leaving $8.58 billion up for grabs for the remaining RMN players.

According to Digiday+ Research survey results, 86% of marketer respondents said they currently advertise on Amazon. Over a third of marketers (34% of respondents) said they place ads on Walmart’s Walmart Connect, while 14% of marketers said they place ads on Target’s Roundel — the same percentage of marketers who said that they use Nordstrom’s Media Network.

Brands continue to invest large amounts with Amazon and Walmart in part because of the retailers’ ability to provide product discoverability options and tailored brand experiences.

For example, Amazon and Walmart are the only two retailers that have developed self-service brand stores that move beyond providing product detail pages to show a brand’s entire product portfolio, according to Mars United’s most recent Retail Media Report Card.

At CES in January 2025, Amazon began beta testing its Retail Ad Service tool, which lets retailers use Amazon Web Services to display ads on their own websites. The following month, Walmart launched a new API for Walmart Connect through which sellers and advertisers can create and manage tools for display campaigns — marking a move from managed service to self-service.

With Amazon’s marketer usage rate far exceeding that of other RMNs, Walmart, Target and other category-specific players like Gopuff and Ulta have bolstered their retail media offerings this year to catch up. And brands are taking advantage of these new opportunities.

“Amazon is such a big force in all the categories they play in,” Samsung’s Stransky said. “So, of course, they’re an important part of our business too. But we’re also in conversations across the RMNs in a number of the other channels that we work with. Best Buy is very critical to our business, so is Walmart.”

To better compete with Amazon’s live shoppable content, Walmart expanded its CTV and retail media partnerships over the past year. Walmart ran shoppable TV ads during NBCUniversal’s 2024 Thanksgiving Day live sports coverage, reaching 145 million weekly linear TV viewers. In December 2024, Walmart purchased smart TV maker Vizio for $2.3 billion, including the latter’s SmartCast operating system that powers Vizio’s smart TV features and user interface.

“If I was Walmart and I wanted to compete with Amazon, I would be pushing the Vizio acquisition so much more,” said an ad buyer who spoke to Digiday under the condition of anonymity. “[Imagine if] everyone who signs up for Walmart+ got a free Vizio TV? If Walmart did that they would compete with Amazon because then you’re getting like every household in America to sign up and then you’re getting addressable TV tied to Walmart data.”

Target, on the other hand, has struggled to keep up with retail powerhouses Amazon and Walmart. In 2024, Walmart’s and Amazon’s ad businesses brought in $4.4 billion and $50 billion, respectively. Meanwhile, Target’s Roundel hit $649 million in 2024 revenue — although this was a 25% increase from the $522 million it made in 2023.

Target spent the last few months strengthening its retail media offerings and scalability. In July, the company introduced its self-service ad buying tool Roundel Media Studio. In February 2025, Roundel Media Studio moved to a second-price auction mode — which means the second-highest bidder determines the sale price of an impression. However, Walmart Connect and other platforms moved to second-price auction back in 2022.

For its part, Gopuff has found ways to better position itself to compete with major platforms. In September 2024, Gopuff launched customizable pages within the Gopuff app called Brand Shops, in partnership with mobile ad platform AdAdapted. With the new tool, customers can add products to their Gopuff cart when shopping anywhere online, without having to leave the site they’re on. According to Gopuff’s Peroutka, the Brand Shops can be built and launched in less than 72 hours and increase a brand’s average order value by 20%. Petroutka said this allows Gopuff to compete against Amazon and Walmart’s self-service options, which also offer fast turn around times and brand flexibility.

Gopuff’s Peroutka said the main reason Gopuff built Brand Shops was to reduce the number of clicks it takes a consumer to make a purchase. “That moment of inspiration to convert a consumer could strike at any time, but the more clicks you put in front of them to get that product in the cart, the more drop-off you’re going to see,” Peroutka said. “So, why not enable them from the very first click to add to their cart? We’ve seen from testing with a couple of our initial partners these campaigns are performing much better from a sales attribution perspective than the standard display [ad] that’s driving people in the first click into the Gopuff experience.”

When asked about the biggest challenge they face when working with the top retail media networks — Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect and Target’s Roundel — marketers’ responses varied by platform. Overall, marketers have said they are looking for improvements in measuring their return on investment before committing more ad dollars to these platforms. This leaves a gap for category-specific players like Best Buy, Gopuff and Ulta to make a name for themselves among RMNs.

The biggest challenges marketers said they face on Amazon Ads are the cost of advertising and the lack of budget available to unlock all of the network’s capabilities. Nearly half of marketers (43%) selected cost of media as the greatest challenge they face on Amazon Ads, while 20% of marketers said lack of budget is their biggest barrier on the platform.

Amazon specifically makes several ad offerings available to its brand partners, which has the potential to overwhelm marketers with choice, and makes sense considering the 11% that said lack of expertise is the biggest challenge for them on the platform.

“I do think it is overwhelming, and there isn’t a lot of standardization across all retail media networks,” Ulta’s Mahoney said. “So, we invest in people that understand the beauty business and the media business. Those are media strategists that sit side-by-side with our brand partners and craft bespoke strategies to help with the brand’s specific needs. Whether it’s to grow awareness because maybe they’re launching a brand new product, or it’s more down funnel, it’s really about making sure we place the ads in the right moments of the shopper journey.”

Marketers who use Walmart Connect and Target’s Roundel said their biggest challenges on those platforms are lack of scale and difficulty integrating their online and in-store offerings. Over a quarter of marketer respondents (29%) told Digiday that they struggle with lack of scale on Walmart Connect, and exactly one-quarter of respondents (25%) said the same of Target’s Roundel. A quarter of respondents (25%) also said they have difficulty integrating Roundel’s offline and online options, while 14% of marketers said the same about Walmart Connect. There are now more than 250 retail media networks in operation globally, according to retail media intelligence platform Mimbi, making such challenges important to take into account. “With the explosion of RMNs, retailers aren’t just competing on audience size anymore; they’re competing on the sophistication of their media offerings,” Mary O’Brien, head of programmatic media at independent digital ad agency PMG, explained in an emailed statement to Digiday.

Category-specific RMNs like Ulta’s UB Media have benefited by integrating themselves at all points of the marketing funnel and adapting their in-store formats. With over 1,400 retail locations and a larger commitment to in-store brand events in 2025, Mahoney said Ulta is thoughtfully utilizing its UB Media RMN more offline.

“We have to be full-funnel or we’re not delivering enough value,” Mahoney said. “When you have guests that sign up and want to attend and be engaged, we see that as quite an opportunity for our brand partners to enjoy advertising in our physical locations. We need to tap into that differentiator and utilize our RMN in a much bigger way because that’s where a lot of the engagement, and I’ll call it magic, happens between the associate and our guest.”

Outside of Amazon, marketers’ use of almost all of the other RMNs included in Digiday’s survey decreased in 2025 compared to last year. The percentage of marketers who said they used Walmart Connect in 2024 dropped by 43 percentage points in 2025, Digiday’s survey found. Marketers’ use of Target’s Roundel also decreased by 22 percentage points in 2025. Kroger Precision Marketing and eBay Ads’ declines were softer compared to last year, decreasing by 8 and 4 percentage points, respectively.

But this doesn’t mean marketers are shying away from diversifying their retail media spend across multiple platforms. Laura Knebusch, svp of CPG marketing and consumer experience at Georgia-Pacific, said having a mix of media network partnerships with Amazon, Walmart, Target and Kroger has provided the paper goods company with the greatest return on its ad spend.

“Amazon, Walmart, Kroger and Target are four of our more strategic partners,” Knebusch said. “As a consumer packaged goods company, we are primarily in grocery, mass club and dollar [stores]. We have found those four to be some of the most advanced. We want to partner in a bigger way, with networks who are investing in their capabilities, their partnerships, their metrics, measurement and data.”

Ulta’s Mahoney said the retailer’s UB Media RMN has seen a boost in retail media spending. “We are growing 20% year over year, and nearly 50% of our brand partners are leveraging [UB Media],” Mahoney said. “They see it as a growth driver and we don’t see that changing.”

The influx of newer category-specific RMNs, along with marketers’ shifts in retail media spending, may signal a movement of negotiation power away from retailers and toward brands, according to Gopuff’s Peroutka. “The retail media and commerce media landscape now reminds me of what shook out across the digital and programmatic landscape 15 years ago,” Peroutka said. “If you wanted to reach an auto intender, you had to buy Kelly Blue Book or Cars.com or Auto Trader. Then cookies came about and it changed the world. It shifted the power from the publishers back to the brands, and the brands being able to say, ‘Guess what? I just care about reaching this consumer, and I’m going to reach them in the contextual environment that I think makes the most sense. I can build my frequency elsewhere.’”

Peroutka said the reality is that having more RMNs to choose from gives marketers more options and power over messaging. “What’s been really interesting within the retail media landscape is traditionally it’s been the retailers that have controlled the power,” Peroutka said. “We believe there’s going to be this big shift. A lot of what we’ve been building is giving the power back to the brands.”

Digiday’s survey found that marketers look to commerce or sales as the most important success metric on most RMNs. But they also consider impressions and engagement rates when evaluating ad performance on Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect.

A majority of marketers said that commerce or sales is the most important success metric they consider on Target’s Roundel (86% of marketers), Amazon Ads (79% of marketers), Walmart Connect (78% of marketers), Nordstrom Media Network (78% of marketers) and Kroger Precision Marketing (67% of marketers).

However, respondents were evenly divided when it came to the top success metrics they consider on eBay Ads — 50% of marketers selected impressions as their most important measurement of success on the platform, while the other 50% of marketers said engagement is their topic metric.

Engagement was by far marketers’ main measurement of campaign success on Best Buy Ads — 75% of marketers selected this metric, while 25% of marketers said commerce or sales was their top means of measuring success on the platform.

“From a general retail standpoint, we look at the distribution and revenue percentages of that partner, more than what sort of advertising opportunities are on that particular site,” said Ryan Meegan, CMO at disposable wipes manufacturer Dude Wipes.

Samsung’s Stransky explained that RMN performance all comes down to financial results for the brand. “We are so critical of every dollar working as hard as possible,” Stransky said. “It’s constantly [evaluating] are we getting what we need out of the entire media landscape? How is this paying off online, offline and in the bigger, holistic business? If this is helping our business, we will continue to invest there.”

Because of the importance of commerce and sales in gauging the success of retail media marketing, Gopuff specifically is positioning itself as close to the point of purchase as possible. “That ability to move product and convert consumers from that very first impression, then having it in their hands in 30 minutes is something that we’ve seen a ton of success with,” Gopuff’s Peroutka explained. “When [advertisers] are looking for conversions and moving product, retail media networks are at the tip of their tongue.”

However, a lack of measurement standardization across RMNs for evaluating sales performance presents a challenge for marketers, according to Georgia-Pacific’s Knebusch. “Each [RMN] has their own set of metrics, and while some of them are similar in name, like ROAS, how they measure that could be different,” Knebusch said. “That does make it very hard to look at it apples-to-apples across the retail media networks — and makes it harder to compare to other media investment choices that we have in the digital space.”

Advertisers continue to push for transparency around the metrics return on ad spend, performance measurement and incrementality. Some of the struggle to measure performance, marketers and media buyers say, can be blamed on the retail media industry’s lack of maturity and standardization. Notably, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Media Rating Council finalized retail media measurement standards just last year, setting a framework for audience measurement, metrics and best practices in measuring incrementality.

“We do need to start to see, and I think we will start to see, more standardization in reporting the right KPIs,” Ulta’s Mahoney said. She added that Ulta is looking into “how to ensure that everyone’s baselining their reporting and measurement in the same way. That’s going to get shored up in the very, very near future.”

A common RMN benefit mentioned by the CMOs Digiday spoke with for this report is how quickly brands can respond to trending news and cultural moments, and pivot their ad strategies in real time within the channel.

Gopuff’s Peroutka said the grocery delivery service’s extensive network of fulfillment and delivery warehouses, plus its ability to tap into its own Gopuff Ads RMN, means Gopuff can react to cultural trends in less than a day. “Right now, our team would move and jump on something, and we could be live in a matter of hours,” Peroutka said. “One of my favorite examples of this was last fall when Dua Lipa went on TikTok and said that her favorite thing to drink was spicy Diet Coke, which was Diet Coke, pickle juice and jalapeños. And within hours of that starting to gain traction, we had a homepage asset on our site saying, ‘Grab the ingredients to make your own spicy Diet Coke.’”

Ulta’s Mahoney said generative AI is also helping marketers and RMNs respond quickly to trends. “With automation powering more personalized, automated connections, RMNs can create these bespoke shopping journeys that are funded by the brands, that help an enthusiast discover and explore a specific brand’s product line,” Mahoney said. “We’re exploring ways in which we can leverage Gen AI on our core side to personalize and use Gen AI to be faster in the creatives that we display.”

Another benefit RMNs provide, according to the CMOs Digiday spoke with, is the ability to target precise consumer demographic groups through category-specific RMNs.

“We don’t want to control the conversation, but we certainly want to be a part of the conversation and help shape the conversation,” Mahoney said. “In our eyes, the way in there, especially with beauty, is through music and sports, which is why you saw us play in the Super Bowl. That weekend, on the ground, was a war room style. We were watching, monitoring, listening, learning and developing content in the moment.”

Dude Wipes, on the other hand, with its humor-led marketing tactics that feel like a less conventional style of connecting with its core audience, struggles with conforming to some RMNs’ creative constraints. The brand has struggled to strike a balance with retail partners that don’t traditionally promote “potty” jokes, Meegan said.

“We’re not trying to offend anybody,” Meegan said. “We’re just trying to have fun, and humor is a cornerstone of our brand. We’ve learned over the years to scale it back for those particular retailers, because we know how they’re going to react. But even some of the things that we think are really scaled-down still end up getting red-flagged. … We use humor to get across why we’re relevant and better than toilet paper, so that’s our biggest challenge — getting the right content on there that we feel is not watered down, but still acceptable to that retailer while staying true to ourselves.”

As the retail media market matures, marketers and RMNs can continue to build on the channel’s strengths. The challenge ahead for the retail media space is to standardize measurement and avoid additional market fragmentation.