Your digital ad budget might be working against you. While marketers continue pouring money into traditional programmatic channels, retail media networks are quietly delivering nearly double the return—and most marketing teams haven't adjusted their attribution models to capture it.
Here's what you need to know: retail media networks (RMNs) are generating 1.8x higher return on ad spend compared to standard digital advertising, according to recent performance data from Skai. This isn't a minor optimization opportunity. It's a fundamental shift in where your advertising dollars work hardest.
Why Retail Media Is Outperforming Traditional Digital
The secret isn't complicated. Retail media networks sit closer to the point of purchase than any other advertising channel.
When someone sees your ad on a retailer's website, they're already in shopping mode. They have a cart. They're comparing products. The intent signal is as strong as it gets. Compare that to catching someone mid-scroll on social media or interrupting their news reading with a display ad.
According to Experian, the identity infrastructure powering retail media provides deterministic matching that programmatic advertising simply can't replicate. Retailers know who their customers are, what they've purchased before, and what they're browsing right now. That first-party data advantage becomes more valuable as third-party cookies continue their slow fade.
The numbers tell the story. Marketing Brew reports that retail media ad spending is projected to exceed $60 billion in 2025, with growth rates outpacing nearly every other digital channel.
The Attribution Problem Nobody's Talking About
Here's where things get interesting—and potentially frustrating.
Most marketing teams are still measuring retail media success using the same last-click or multi-touch attribution models they use for everything else. That approach may be leaving significant value on the table.
Key Insight: Traditional attribution models often undercount retail media's true impact because they don't capture the full-funnel influence these networks have on purchase decisions.
AdMonsters highlights a growing shift toward incrementality measurement over traditional attribution. The question isn't just "did this ad get credit for a sale?" It's "would this sale have happened without the ad?"
When brands run incrementality tests on retail media campaigns, they're finding lift that standard attribution misses. The customer who saw your sponsored product listing might have purchased anyway—but incrementality testing reveals how many additional purchases your spend actually generated.
The Full-Funnel Evolution
Retail media isn't just for bottom-funnel conversions anymore.
Major retail media networks are expanding into upper-funnel formats: connected TV inventory, off-site display, and even in-store digital screens. Equativ notes that this offsite expansion is accelerating as retailers look to compete with traditional media companies for brand awareness budgets.
Some networks are now offering performance guarantees—a level of accountability that traditional digital advertising rarely provides. According to ExchangeWire, this willingness to tie fees to outcomes signals confidence in the channel's effectiveness and may pressure other advertising channels to follow suit.
For marketing leaders, this evolution means retail media can now serve your entire funnel. Awareness, consideration, and conversion—all within ecosystems where measurement is cleaner and attribution is more reliable.
What This Means for Your 2025 Media Mix
The consolidation happening across retail media networks suggests this channel is maturing rapidly.
Smaller players may struggle to compete with the data scale and inventory breadth of major retailers. For brands, that could mean fewer but more powerful partners to manage—potentially simplifying operations while improving results.
Media, Ads & Commerce observes that the technology infrastructure supporting retail media is becoming more sophisticated, with better APIs, more granular targeting options, and improved measurement capabilities.
The practical implication? If you haven't seriously evaluated retail media's role in your marketing mix recently, you may be working with outdated assumptions.
Key Takeaways:
- Audit your current retail media investment against the 1.8x ROAS benchmark—you may be underinvested
- Implement incrementality testing alongside traditional attribution to capture retail media's true impact
- Explore full-funnel retail media options beyond sponsored product listings
- Consolidate retail media partnerships with networks offering performance guarantees
- Update your attribution models to account for retail media's unique position in the customer journey
Looking Ahead
The 1.8x performance advantage may not last forever. As more brands shift budget into retail media, competition could drive up costs and compress returns. But right now, there's an arbitrage opportunity for marketing teams willing to move quickly and measure properly.
The question isn't whether retail media deserves a place in your strategy. It's whether your attribution infrastructure is sophisticated enough to prove what that place should be.
