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The Blueprint for Modern Retail Media Success
Onsite, offsite, in-store: How to monetize retail media without sacrificing customer experience
Anand Ganesh Rao
September 09, 2025
🧭 Opening Thought
The retail landscape is undergoing a profound transformation, with retail media emerging as an undeniable force. Retail was always a media—every aisle, shelf, screen and product page influenced purchase decisions. Now, it’s becoming official.
Valued at an estimated $180 billion in 2025, retail media is not just another advertising channel; it is a high-margin revenue stream.
This week, we explore the building blocks of successful retail media networks (RMNs) — from first-party data and omnichannel activation to AI-driven personalization — and how retailers can balance monetization with customer experience to win long-term.
Retail leader lets deep dive.
Transformation of retail through media and data (image created by AI)
🚀Deep Dive: Building Your Retail Media Empire
Retail media is no longer just about selling ads. Done right, it transforms customer data into a profitable ecosystem that elevates shopping experiences and strengthens brand partnerships. For retailers starting out, understanding the key pillars is essential.
Pillar 1: First-Party Data – The Crown Jewel: The backbone of retail media is first-party data: customers’ purchases, browsing, preferences, and demographics. Unlike third-party cookies, this data is unique, proprietary, and deeply actionable.
Carrefour activates transactional and behavioral data to sharpen onsite display campaigns, segmenting audiences with precision. Dagrofa gives supplier brands access to insights that fuel more relevant advertising, deepening partnerships.
To harness this, retailers need to unify data across touch-points into a single shopper view while respecting privacy.
Pillar 2: Onsite Retail Media – Monetizing Your Digital Storefront: A retailer's website and app are already high-traffic destinations. Onsite retail media converts this traffic into a revenue stream while giving brands exposure at the moment of purchase intent. Key formats include:
Sponsored Listings: Promoted products appear in search or category pages. You could also surface seller listings to the most relevant buyers.
Sponsored Banners: Display ads placed across home, product, or checkout pages. Match banners to shoppers in real time.
Other Options: Include Brand Stores, Emailers, Digital Receipts, Recommendation Widgets all embedded onsite. Optimize for both revenue and conversion.
For brands, this visibility drives sales. For retailers, it’s a high-margin income stream from existing traffic.
Pillar 3: Offsite Retail Media – Extending Reach: Customer journeys extend far beyond a retailer's site. Offsite retail media allows retailers to reach new audiences and re-engage existing ones across the open web, streaming platforms and OOH.
Social Media: First-party data can be tokenized and used on social media delivering targeted dynamic ads.
Connected TV (CTV): Retailers enable audience targeting on streaming platforms.
Programmatic Display & Video: Retailers can extend their reach beyond owned channels through programmatic ad buys.
Billboards and public screens: Achieve a broad brand exposure, extend influence beyond stores and digital platforms on connected out of home screens.
This offsite layer enables full-funnel advertising—from brand awareness to conversion—powered by the retailer’s data.
Pillar 4: In-Store Retail Media – Digitalizing the Physical Experience: Far from being sidelined, physical stores are becoming powerful media channels. Digital tools now bring the personalization of online into the store aisle.
Dynamic Digital Signage: Digital window displays, instore aisle screens, check out screens, cooler screens transform static merchandising into interactive ad inventory.
In-Store Audio: Retailers can run Instore radio channels offering brands airtime during shopping moments.
Other Options: Include Brand Stores Screens, Digital Receipts, Smart Carts & Displays that can serve personalized ads based on loyalty data and live baskets.
Today’s shopper journey is rarely confined to a single channel. A successful retail media network must extend its reach beyond owned digital properties to encompass offsite channels and even in-store experiences.
The Ubiquitous Role of AI and Automation: AI is the unseen engine across all retail media pillars. It turns raw data into actionable insights and profitable campaigns by:
Automating Bids: Adjusting in real time to maximize return on ad spend.
Optimizing Placements: Predicting which positions drive higher engagement and conversion.
Segmenting Audiences: Moving beyond demographics to behavioral micro-segmentation.
Generating Content: Creating personalized ad copy or creative variations at scale.
Tools & Platforms are already driving this shift, ensuring every impression is relevant, measurable, and profitable.
ROI: Quantifying Success in Retail Media
The beauty of retail media lies in its ability to offer measurable and significant returns. Here’s a snapshot of impressive ROIs and performance uplifts from across the industry:
Driving Sales and Revenue Growth: Retailers consistently see direct sales uplifts.
Carrefour: Onsite campaigns delivered +31% units per click for a beauty brand and a +58% CTR lift for a CPG brand.
Purplle: +10% ad revenue month over month through optimized placements.
Poshmark: Sellers achieved +43% sales and a 3.8x ROAS with AI-powered listings.
Enhancing Brand Engagement and Acquisition: Retail media also expands customer bases and deepens brand interaction.
Dagrofa: +58% new-to-brand customers and +28% purchase intent.
Rakuten France: +83% ad response rate and +25% CTR, proving higher relevancy drives stronger engagement.
Optimizing Advertising Efficiency: Efficiency is where retail media shines, delivering higher returns at lower costs.
Staples: 10x boost in ad relevancy, 5x ROAS, and CTR uplifts from +123%. Vendor ROAS rose upto +477%.
Sodimac: Auction-first model drove +33% YoY ad spend growth with 6.4x ROAS.
Farmatodo: -59.8% cost per click, improving profitability alongside revenue growth.
These figures showcase the financial potential and performance benefits that well-executed retail media strategies can deliver for both retailers and their brand partners.
Tools & Platforms for Implementation
Building a successful retail media network requires a sophisticated tech stack that provides control, flexibility, and robust analytics.
Use Case | Best Options |
Core Ad Management & Monetization: Provide the infrastructure for creating, managing, and optimizing various ad placements, support programmatic buying and offer self-service interfaces for advertisers. | Criteo, Kevel, Zitcha , Mirakl, Topsort, CitrusAd, Kamino Retail, Equativ, Mabaya, Flipkart Commerce Cloud |
First-Party Data Unification & Privacy: Crucial to consolidate customer profiles from disparate sources, build a unified customer view, and activate this data for precise ad targeting, while ensuring compliance with privacy regulations | |
AI-Powered Personalization & Automation: Integrate AI and ML to deliver personalized ad targeting, dynamic content generation, predictive bidding to optimize ad relevancy, auto-calculate optimal bids, minimize revenue cannibalization by intelligently balancing sponsored and organic results. | |
Real-time Analytics & Performance Reporting: Transparency, comprehensive measurement, give advertisers instant access to critical campaign metrics such as impressions, clicks, sales, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and Cost Per Click (CPC). | |
Omnichannel Campaign Activation: Enable unified campaign management across a retailer's onsite, offsite, in-store. |
📖Playbook Tip: The Art of Balancing Monetization and Customer Experience
The ultimate success of a retail media network hinges on a delicate balance: maximizing ad revenue while simultaneously enhancing the shopper experience. It’s not about displaying as many ads as possible; it’s about serving relevant ads.
Prioritize Personalization: Leverage your first-party data to deliver highly personalized ads minimizing the risk of showing irrelevant ads.
Strategic Placement & Format: Experiment ad formats and placements but be mindful of visual clutter.
Ensure Transparency: Discreetly labeling ads as "Sponsored" can maintain a seamless user experience. Transparency in reporting also fosters stronger relationships with brands.
Combat Cannibalization: An intelligent system should determine when an organic listing is a better choice for a user, even if a sponsored slot is available.
Embrace Self-Serve with Guidance: Offer self-service campaign tools to empower brands, supplier and sellers on the platform, but provide robust forecasting and optimization guidance.
By meticulously curating the ad experience, retailers can turn their media network into a flywheel that drives both revenue growth and enduring customer loyalty.
Key Takeaway:
From sales growth to brand building and cost efficiency, retail media consistently proves its value. Whether through onsite campaigns, marketplace programs, or auction-based models, retailers and brands are unlocking measurable, high-impact results.
Retail media isn’t just an add-on—it’s becoming one of the most powerful growth engines in modern retail strategy.
💬 Retail Wisdom
“The ambition in our media solution is to provide a frictionless,data-driven and transparent offering. Kevel is a key partner in offering a retail media network and helped us significantly with their knowledge in creating scalable advertising” Krohn Djurhuus, Dagrof | “We look to retail media as an opportunity to help inform the plans - and the lack of plans that shoppers have for the items they buy at Costco." Mark Williamson, Costco |
“Leveraging our first-party transactional and behavioral data on Criteo's Retail Media Platform, creates an opportunity to reach the most relevant customers with the right content and the right time at the highest point of consideration. ….this is a key development for us to continue to drive performance for our brands.” Charlotte Davis, MAF Precision Media | “Epsilon Retail Media is another way for us to connect with customers... Whether that be phone, desk, store, socially, digitally— we got you covered. We can't make the retail media network roll without the tight partnership with Epsilon. The customer gets their needs met, the brand gets their needs met and then of course, we're the connection point, and we get our needs met.” Tracey D. Brown, Walgreens |
“Pentaleap’s onsite monetization approach unites sponsored products and organic results. We can help users find the right products while our vendors achieve a better advertising ROI. Its huge because Staples can finally reconcile e-commerce and site monetization goals.” Marco Steinsieck, Staples | “Retail media is no longer an add-on; it is the second profit engine of modern retail—driving growth, deepening partnerships, and reshaping the customer experience.” Retail Fountainhead |
🗣️ Over to You
Retail media is no longer optional — it’s becoming the second profit engine after retail sales. How are you approaching it? Are you building your own network, or leaning on partners?
Hit reply and share your perspective — I’d love to learn how you see retail media shaping the future.
Until next week, stay ahead of the curve.
Anand @ Retail Fountainhead
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