Retail Media Levers: Where Brands Can Focus to Prepare for Their Next Leap
As pressure increases on brands to justify marketing investments, retail media remains their double-edged sword of potential and complexity.
More than half of brand marketers in P2PI’s recent research said they’ve increased their investments in retailer media networks over the last year, and 60% cited RMNs as a strategy or tactic that’s been important to their organization over the last year.
It’s a similar story for the rest of 2025, with retail media topping brands’ lists of priorities for investment plans in the second half.
As the skin in the game increases, brands are demanding more from their partners and maintaining an understandably strong desire for standardization given the efforts required to manage these relationships and metrics.
"You hear from brands saying, 'In order for me to invest, I need standardization or I'm not going to be able to do it. I can't measure what is performing better if I don't go down that road,' " Lori Johnshoy, head of global retail and CPG strategy at LiveRamp, told P2PI earlier this year.
See also: A look into how Albertsons and Dollar General are approaching in-store retail media
However, standardization is more than just measurement and needs to be a full-funnel approach, she stressed, which ultimately starts with insights. Brands and retailers need to create audiences and activate in similar ways for consistent measurement, and require more neutral, cross-platform media activation to ensure performance data is comparable and actionable.
For those settling in for the long game, it also means making internal changes and rethinking talent expectations to ensure future alignment.
To navigate what's next, P2PI chatted with a few industry insiders about what brands can do and what to expect.
Connecting the Journey
The pain points surrounding retail media data remain multifaceted and plentiful for both brands and retailers, particularly when it comes to fragmentation and measuring outcomes.
Many brand teams find it hard to connect on- and off-site media to in-store sales performance, noted Mary Kate Huffman, senior director of commerce and investment strategy at Blue Chip. They aren't aligning their retail media to amplify their existing trade programs, and too many marketers are focusing only on ROAS.
"Some even put their entire budgets into auto-optimized ROAS campaigns without looking first at what is actually growing the business," she said.
As partnerships move to become more co-owned between retailers and brands, retailers have to move more quickly around how they unify their online and their offline data, and effectiveness means more than just looking at subsets, said Sherry Smith, executive managing director, Americas, at Criteo.
On this front, loyalty will continue to play a strong role in retail media effectiveness, noted Johnshoy, as it helps retailers create bigger and better audiences to connect the dots between technology enablers like in-store audio and screens, in turn providing a stronger performance to the brands advertising to their networks.
Looking ahead, Johnshoy is also bullish on the potential of cross-screen measurement, which will enable media to be optimized across platforms based on a range of performance signals beyond just conversions.
Preparing for Self-Service's Power Shift
Brands can expect more retailer media networks to offer self-service capabilities to try to maintain growth and seize a share of larger national brand budgets.
While some RMNs fear offering self-service activation will cannibalize their managed products, demonstrating an incremental sales impact of combining brand budgets with shopper budgets can justify the blended, complementary approach, said Johnshoy.
Indeed, H-E-B cited brands' demand for more autonomy and efficiency in campaign execution as reasoning behind the recent launch of its self-service RMN. Ulta Beauty is similarly piloting a self-service reporting portal with real-time access to campaign results.
In this way, RMNs will be taking a page from Amazon, noted Smith.
"While most media networks know they're not going to be Amazon, what Amazon does really well is they have the ability for brands to come in and pull insights — not insights just about media, but insights about the consumer and who's using their products, and then the ability to take those insights and then activate from them," she said.
As self-service grows, both brands and agencies will need to prioritize integration, Huffman told P2PI.
"If you have an IAT [integrated agency team] structure, you need to create clear roles and responsibilities with free sharing of knowledge and performance throughout the funnel," she said. "Otherwise, your budget becomes a battleground, results get obscured and IAT members compete rather than collaborate."
Building the New Bench
Retail media's uneven talent market has fueled an arms race for skills, fluency and tech stacks for both brands and retailers. While many of those who started in retail media came from the merchant side, they need to develop ad tech chops and data literacy, noted Johnshoy.
Huffman said that while Walmart and Kroger teams appear more advanced, many others are relying heavily on agencies and media partners.
Larger brand organizations with in-house hands-on-keyboards may have more experience in such things as sponsored product search, but they're less adept in activating off-site media through DSPs like Amazon or Walmart Connect, she said.
See also: Learn who’s raising the bar in retail media this year
Companies need people who can not only think strategically to connect the dots but also collaborate with all involved functions in order to ID opportunities and mobilize teams to seize them, Huffman added.
"Some marketers still ignore the multifaceted nature of retail," she said. "They think they can succeed with people who focus solely on the bottom of the funnel. They mistakenly presume they can 'fill the gap' efficiently by hiring a person who will activate sponsored search, which isn't enough to win today."
Indeed, even if a retail media unicorn hire is snagged, organizations still need to build new environments that include a dose of humility about what you don't know.
"Some of it is asking the tough questions," said Smith. "It's not a magic bullet, but it's, 'What does relevancy mean and what does it mean to you versus what does it mean to the next person?' I think those that are doing it well are getting all the right people in the room to have those kinds of conversations, [including] product R&D, their data teams, legal, merchants and marketers."
