Are retail media networks becoming the next ad tech bubble?
— Senior Director of Brand Partnerships
Yes.
But not because retail media is fake.
That’s the lazy take, and lazy takes are how people sound smart for six months before the market punches them in the mouth.
Retail media is real. The value proposition is real. Purchase data is real. Closed-loop measurement is real, at least when it’s done honestly. The basic idea makes sense: retailers know what people buy, brands want to influence what people buy, and advertisers are tired of paying for “awareness” that disappears into a spreadsheet wearing a Patagonia vest.
Retail media has a real job to do.
It connects media spend closer to commerce, and that’s exactly where advertisers want more of their budgets to go.
The problem is what always happens when a real business starts throwing off attractive margins: everyone nearby decides they’re in that business too.
That’s where the bubble starts.
The problem is the copycat math.
Retail media works when the retailer has meaningful scale, frequent customer relationships, useful purchase data, and enough advertiser demand to justify the machinery.
But those are high bars. A lot of companies are skipping that part and jumping straight to the margin story.
They see Amazon and Walmart turning commerce data into media revenue and decide the lesson is simple: we have customers, therefore we have a media network.
Everyone Wants Amazon’s Multiple
Amazon proved the model at scale. Walmart followed with real force. Target, Kroger, Instacart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Best Buy, CVS, Walgreens, Uber, DoorDash, hotel companies, airlines, banks, and basically anyone with a logged-in user and a CFO who likes high-margin revenue decided they were in the media business.
That’s how these cycles work.
One company builds a structurally advantaged business. Everyone else looks at the investor slide and says, “We have data too.”
Congratulations. So does my dentist.
The problem is that retail media isn’t automatically valuable just because a company has transaction data. The quality of the audience matters. The scale matters. The purchase frequency matters. The ad experience matters. The measurement matters. The buyer demand matters. The ability to prove incrementality matters.
A lot of retail media networks have the first-party data part.
Fewer have the media business part, and that’s where the bubble lives.
Retail media keeps getting lumped into the same growth bucket as CTV and social because advertisers are chasing performance-driven channels while traditional formats keep getting squeezed. IAB’s 2025 outlook update reportedly pointed to retail media and CTV as growth areas even as broader ad forecasts were revised down amid macro pressure.
That makes the appeal obvious.
When budgets tighten, CFOs love anything that smells like performance.
Retail media smells like performance.
The question is whether it actually is.
The Pitch Is Better Than the Product
The retail media pitch is beautiful.
We know the shopper. We know what they bought. We can target them near the point of purchase. We can measure whether they bought afterward. We can close the loop.
That pitch is so good it should come with a steak dinner and an NDA.
But the execution is messier.
A brand may advertise across five different retail media networks and get five different dashboards, five different attribution windows, five different definitions of incrementality, five different reporting formats, and five different sales teams explaining why their platform deserves more budget.
Sound familiar?
It should. This is how ad tech always starts. A new channel promises cleaner signals, better accountability, and less waste. Then the ecosystem fragments, every platform grades its own homework, and buyers end up needing another layer of technology to understand the technology that was supposed to simplify things.
Retail media was supposed to solve the measurement problem.
Now it has its own measurement problem.
That’s not a footnote. It’s the whole fight.
If every retailer defines performance differently, then retail media becomes less like a clean performance channel and more like a bunch of walled gardens wearing name tags.
And buyers have seen this movie.
They saw it in programmatic. They saw it in social. They saw it in CTV. They saw it in every “closed ecosystem” that promised superior data and then asked everyone to trust the numbers printed by the same machine that sold the media.
Funny how the cleanest measurement always seems to come from the company sending the invoice.
Retailers Are Not Magically Media Companies
Retailers are very good at retailing. That doesn’t mean they are automatically good at media.
Media isn’t just monetizing a screen. It’s packaging attention, protecting the consumer experience, proving value to advertisers, managing frequency, maintaining trust, and building products that buyers can actually use without wanting to fake their own death during onboarding.
That’s harder than slapping ads on a product page.
Retail media works best when the ad is useful. Sponsored search results, relevant product recommendations, shopper targeting, smart offsite activation, clean in-store moments, and promotions tied to actual buying behavior can create value for brands and consumers.
But bad retail media turns the store into a ransom note.
Everything becomes sponsored. Search results get polluted. Product discovery gets worse. The customer experience gets taxed so the retailer can hit a high-margin revenue target.
That’s the dangerous part.
Retailers are trying to become media companies without damaging the retail business that made the media network valuable in the first place.
That’s a narrow bridge.
Some will cross it.
A lot will fall into the ravine holding a rate card.
The Real Product Is Leverage
Retail media is often described as an advertising product.
Sometimes it is. And sometimes it’s a tax.
Big brands need shelf space, distribution, trade support, promotional access, and retailer relationships. When the same retailer also sells media, the line between advertising opportunity and commercial pressure can get blurry fast.
Nobody says this part loudly at conferences because everyone still wants lunch sponsored.
But buyers know.
Some retail media spend is strategic. Some is performance-driven. Some is genuinely tied to growth. And some is the modern version of paying tribute to the shelf gods.
The retailer controls the store, the data, the shopper relationship, and increasingly the media environment around the transaction. That gives them leverage most publishers would sell a kidney for.
But leverage can make a market sloppy.
If brands feel they have to spend just to maintain the relationship, the media product doesn’t have to be as good as it should be. The dollars show up anyway. That can inflate the market before the underlying performance discipline catches up.
That’s how bubbles form.
Not from nothing.
From too much money flowing into something real before everyone agrees what “working” means.
Scale Will Separate the Adults From the LinkedIn Posts
The hard truth is that not every retail media network deserves to exist at scale.
Amazon does. Walmart does. A handful of major retailers with large audiences, frequent purchase behavior, deep data, and meaningful advertiser demand do.
After that, the slope gets slippery.
A grocery retailer with frequent transactions has one kind of value. A home improvement retailer with lower purchase frequency has another. A pharmacy has another. A delivery platform has another. A specialty retailer with occasional traffic and a narrow audience may have something useful, but that doesn’t mean it needs to pretend it is the next Amazon Ads.
This is where the market gets more disciplined.
Buyers will ask harder questions. Is the audience unique? Is the inventory actually valuable? Is the measurement independent enough to trust? Is the spend incremental, or are we just moving trade dollars into a shinier bucket? Can the network drive offsite performance, or does it only work inside its own walls? Does it have enough scale to matter without becoming operationally annoying?
The long tail of retail media networks is going to discover that having data isn’t the same as having demand.
And having demand isn’t the same as having a durable business.
In-Store Media Is the Next Place Everyone Gets Overexcited
The new frontier is in-store.
Screens at checkout. Digital endcaps. Cooler doors. Audio. Smart carts. Kiosks. Shelf displays. Retailers are looking at physical stores and realizing they’ve got acres of under-monetized attention sitting next to the cereal.
Of course they are.
The store is the original retail media network. Brands have been paying for placement, promotions, displays, coupons, sampling, and endcaps forever. The difference now is that everything gets digitized, packaged, measured, and sold with a software margin.
Some of this will work. A lot of it, though, will be annoying.
The risk is that retailers treat the physical store like a website and start stuffing it with monetization units until every aisle feels like a pop-up ad with shelves. In-store media can be valuable when it helps shoppers decide. It becomes garbage when it turns every aisle into an ad inventory farm.
Retailers need to remember why people came to the store.
They came to buy groceries, shampoo, dog food, batteries, frozen pizza, and whatever else they forgot until they saw it.
They didn’t come to be “activated” by a toothbrush brand at 8:14 p.m. while their kid melts down near the checkout lane.
The Bubble Is in the Expectations
So are retail media networks becoming the next ad tech bubble?
Yes, but with an asterisk the size of a Costco parking lot.
Retail media is not going away. The biggest platforms will keep growing because they connect advertising closer to commerce, and that’s exactly where brands want more of their dollars to go. In a world where media budgets are being judged against outcomes, channels with purchase signals have a real advantage.
The bubble is in the expectation that every retailer can build a high-margin media business just because Amazon and Walmart did.
Some retailers will build real media platforms. Some will build useful data products. Some will build promotional tools with better reporting. Some will build small but profitable businesses serving endemic brands. And some will build a sales deck, call it a network, and wonder why national advertisers don’t want another 17th login.
That last group is where the air comes out.
Because buyers aren’t going to manage infinite retail media relationships forever. They already have too many platforms, too many dashboards, too many attribution models, and too many vendors claiming they can prove sales lift if you just accept their methodology and stop asking rude questions.
Eventually, the market consolidates around scale, trust, ease of buying, and measurement buyers can defend internally.
Everything else becomes local sponsorship with better fonts.
The Winners Will Act Less Like Toll Booths
The better retail media networks will understand that long-term value doesn’t come from extracting as much ad revenue as possible from every surface.
It comes from balancing three things:
- Advertiser outcomes
- Retailer economics
- Customer experience
That last one matters most because the shopper relationship is the whole asset. Abuse it, and the media network starts damaging the store.
The smartest retailers will avoid turning their apps, websites, and aisles into cluttered ad bazaars. They’ll build clean buying tools, standardize reporting, allow more independent measurement, protect search quality, and stop pretending every impression near a transaction is automatically premium.
The dumb ones will monetize the wallpaper.
And for a while, Wall Street may reward them for it.
That’s how bubbles work. They confuse extraction for growth until the customer, the advertiser, or the math finally pushes back.
Skip Says
Retail media is real. But the hype around every retailer becoming a media empire is not.
The best retail media networks have something advertisers genuinely want: purchase data, shopper relationships, proximity to the transaction, and the ability to connect media spend to sales. That’s powerful. It’s also why the space attracted every company with a loyalty program and a revenue target.
The bubble is in the assumption that first-party data automatically creates a media business.
It doesn’t.
A media business needs scale, trust, clean measurement, usable buying tools, quality inventory, and enough advertiser demand to matter after the novelty wears off. Otherwise, it’s just a retailer selling access to its customers and calling the toll booth a platform.
Launching a retail media network is no longer the impressive part.
Staying in the plan after the novelty wears off is.
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