How Aggregation & Syndication Will Reshape the Retail Media Landscape in 2025
Retail media continues to solidify its position as a major revenue driver for retailers and a powerful channel for brands to engage with shoppers. Plus retail media spending is projected to surpass linear TV by 2026. This growth is driven by several factors, including:
- The rise of e-commerce: The shift to online shopping has enabled retailers to monetize digital platforms and leverage valuable first-party data.
- The decline of third-party cookies: With privacy regulations tightening and browsers phasing out third-party cookies, first-party data becomes even more crucial. This data allows retailers to:
- Personalize experiences with tailored recommendations, driving engagement and conversions.
- Enhance targeting and measurement to ensure ads reach the most relevant audiences and track performance.
- Gain a competitive edge with unique shopper insights.
- The demand for performance marketing: Retail media offers closed-loop measurement, allowing brands to track the direct impact of their ads on sales.
Over the last decade, we've seen a tenfold increase in the number of retail media networks (RMNs). While platforms like Amazon and Walmart continue to dominate, RMNs are emerging across various sectors like convenience, hospitality, banking and finance. As a result, the landscape has become increasingly fragmented, leading to challenges and opportunities for both brands and retailers alike.
My Prediction: The Rise of Aggregation and Syndication
As one advertising executive put it, "We're now working with over 20 different RMNs. Each has its own platform, reporting metrics and processes. It’s inefficient."
Fragmentation makes it difficult for advertisers to:
- Achieve scale — reaching large audiences requires navigating multiple platforms.
- Maintain consistency — ensuring consistent brand messaging across RMNs is challenging.
- Optimize efficiently — analyzing and optimizing performance across fragmented platforms is time-consuming.
In 2025, aggregation and syndication among smaller retailers and super-regionals will rise to compete with the major players. By pooling data, smaller retailers can:
- Increase audience reach — combining their data to create a larger and more diverse audience, appealing to national brands.
- Enhance data capabilities — aggregated data offers deeper insights into consumer behavior, enabling more effective targeting.
- Improve advertising offerings — smaller retailers can develop more sophisticated ad products to rival larger RMNs.
Several factors are driving the rise of aggregation in retail media. The increasing competition in the market is a key driver. As more RMNs emerge, managing campaigns across multiple platforms is becoming increasingly complex for brands.
There also is a growing demand for efficiency. Brands seek streamlined solutions to simplify campaign setup, reporting, and overall management, reducing the time and resources spent on these tasks. Finally, the need for scale plays a significant role in the aggregation trend. Smaller retailers can leverage aggregation to expand their reach, creating an audience large enough to compete with larger networks, helping them attract more advertisers.
Benefits for Brands
Brands stand to benefit greatly from this shift toward aggregation. One of the primary advantages is simplified campaign management. By using a centralized platform, brands can manage campaigns across multiple RMNs, reducing the complexity and inefficiency of dealing with each network individually. Aggregation also improves efficiency by streamlining workflows, freeing up time and resources that brands can allocate to more strategic activities. This allows them to focus on optimizing campaigns and developing creative strategies.
The increased reach is another significant benefit of aggregation. By syndicating campaigns across multiple networks, brands can expand their visibility and customer engagement, reaching new audiences they might not have been able to access otherwise. Moreover, aggregated data provides enhanced targeting capabilities, allowing brands to refine their audience segmentation. This leads to better ROI as brands can more precisely target the consumers most likely to convert.
Ultimately, this shift toward aggregation creates a win-win situation for all parties involved. Retailers can generate more revenue by pooling their resources, while brands gain access to new audiences and a more streamlined advertising experience. Addressing fragmentation will make the retail media ecosystem more efficient and effective, benefiting retailers, brands and shoppers alike.
About the Author
Adam Skinner is managing director, global unified retail media, at Epsilon. He is responsible for product strategy across onsite, offsite and in-store retail media offerings. Adam also oversees go-to-market strategy and global partnerships.
