Retail Media Networks Are In Their 'Gangly Teenager' Phase. They're Trying to Grow Up. -- WSJ

By Megan Graham

As retail media networks overtake television in ad revenue, they are also taking a page from the way TV pitches itself to marketers.

After media companies like NBCUniversal, Disney and Paramount conclude their annual upfront sales spectacles this spring, companies including Albertsons, Home Depot, DoorDash and JPMorgan Chase will promote their own ad products in a take on the upfronts this September.

Minus the celebrity cameos and pop-star serenades.

Retail media networks offer advertisers a way to reach consumers in stores or online using all the data they collect on their customers. They "don't have all the actors and comedians and late-night pundits. They don't have the news anchors," said Susan MacDermid, founder of the Ascendant Network, the advertising industry-focused events business that is organizing the retail media networks' gathering. "It's not going to be glitz and glamour."

Presenters will instead emphasize their ability to generate demonstrable results, MacDermid said. "And I have to say, in this macroeconomic environment, that's probably a good thing," she said.

Retail media has provided a major growth engine for advertising in recent years. The media investment group WPP Media forecast in December that global retail media ad revenue would increase 11.3% last year to $174.2 billion, surpassing TV ad revenue.

In the U.S., ad spending on retail media networks this year will rise 19% to $72 billion, according to a separate forecast by the research firm Emarketer.

But the burgeoning category has its challenges. Even major retailers struggle to compete against Amazon's retail media business, which Emarketer predicts will command a U.S. market share approaching 80% this year. Walmart's retail media business is expected to comprise 9% of the U.S. market, by comparison, while the networks of Target, eBay and Kroger will garner around 1.5% each.

Marketers are looking to simplify where they are spending, meaning it isn't easy to convince them to spend with one more retail media network. The industry is due for a "rationalization" where only the biggest, most technologically sophisticated networks are likely to win out, according to WPP Media's forecast. The pressure on smaller players that don't have differentiated media inventory or data assets will be "existential," WPP Media wrote.

Ascendant organized the retail media upfront after ad agencies said they wanted a more centralized way to learn more about companies' offerings than setting up many individual meetings or attending multiple events, MacDermid said.

The September event will coincide with many marketers' annual joint-business planning with vendors, she added.

Albertsons plans to use the event to sell marketers on what the company has been building, like measurement tools designed to show when shoppers buy things because of ads they saw and not because they planned to anyway.

The grocery chain also hopes the upfront will get attention from more brand-oriented marketers, not just the shopper marketing or performance-media buyers that have often looked to retail media to drive more immediate sales, said Brian Monahan, senior vice president of Albertsons Media Collective.

"We're just trying to show the totality of the growth-driving solutions that we've built, and trying to speak to different marketing decision makers than ones that perhaps historically have been focused on the opportunity with retail media," Monahan said.

Coming together as an industry will benefit the smaller players in retail media, he added.

"We're a gangly teenager of an industry," Monahan said. "We're just coming to grips with our own power, we can be a little bit messy, and we can be hard to work with and inconsistent with what the experience is for an advertiser who's trying to work across multiple retailers. ... We have to be easier to do business with."

Buyers facing a growing slate of retail media solutions to understand and form relationships with will likely appreciate the event, said Jason Colon, executive vice president of Horizon Commerce, the retail media-focused arm of media agency Horizon. But they are unlikely to start making significant TV-style spending arrangements well ahead of time, he said.

"Part of what is so powerful about retail media is that you're able to be fluid with your investment based on retail conditions in real time, and creating commitments just doesn't work with option-based models on search or with programmatic display," Colon said.

In the future, smaller retail media networks' data could increasingly get aggregated through partnerships or networks. That would enable marketers to work with multiple businesses without having to maintain individual relationships with each, he predicted.

The industry's growth is set to continue, but slow down, with a major advantage to the players who are already the largest. To keep drawing new revenue, networks will need to move from serving so-called lower-funnel, sales-driven objectives to proving they can help marketers build brands at a higher level, industry observers said.

"The majority of incremental spend will go to the largest players," said Sarah Marzano, vice president and principal analyst for retail media at Emarketer. "Sustained growth in the space will depend on expansion of use cases beyond lower-funnel conversion into upper-and mid-funnel objectives, which is a major motivation behind upfront style events in retail media."

Write to Megan Graham at megan.graham@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 10, 2026 17:00 ET (21:00 GMT)

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