Retail Media Networks (RMNs) Are Blowing Up—But Most 2025 Brands Are Only Getting Half the True Value

Retail media networks (RMNs) are having a moment. Amazon’s ad revenue just passed Prime membership revenue. Walmart is acting like a media company. And every major retailer—from Target and Kroger to Ulta and Instacart—is pitching themselves as your new go-to media partner. According to Deloitte, 64% of U.S. retail executives plan to launch or expand a retail media network.

So yeah, if you’re a digital marketer, you’re hearing about RMNs in every QBR. If you’re a CMO, you’re being asked to carve out budget. And if you’re an agency, you’re being asked to make sense of it all. And here’s the thing: it does make sense.

RMNs are the rare channel that actually checks all the boxes:

Access to high-intent shoppers
Real first-party data
Closed-loop measurement
Ad placements at or near the point of purchase

Most brands are treating RMNs like glorified trade spend.

They’re running isolated campaigns inside individual retailer ecosystems.

They’re using generic, off-the-shelf segments.

They’re measuring ROAS in a vacuum.

Above all, they’re missing the real opportunity: to build smarter, predictive, portable audiences that work across retailers, platforms, and channels.
Let’s fix that.

What Is a Retail Media Network (And Why Should You Care)?

At a high level, a retail media network is an ad platform run by a retailer. It lets brands buy media placements across the retailer’s digital properties—web, app, in-store screens—and target customers based on that retailer’s shopper data.

But that’s just the setup. What makes RMNs different is that they’re built on authenticated, transaction-level data. This isn’t cookie-based modeling or social platform interest groups. This is purchase history, loyalty behavior, basket size, replenishment cycles. That’s gold.

Say you’re a beverage brand launching a new low-sugar energy drink. With a retail media campaign on Kroger Precision for example, you could target:

People who’ve bought energy drinks 2+ times in the last 60 days
Households with kids but no purchases of sugary soda
Shoppers who use click-and-collect but not delivery

That level of targeting just isn’t possible on traditional programmatic or social platforms. RMNs let you reach customers at the precise moment they’re shopping—with context, intent, and data on your side.

Why Retail Media Is Growing Like Crazy

Five forces are pushing RMNs to the top of every media plan:

1. The death of third-party cookies. Brands need new ways to reach consumers without relying on Google or Meta’s tracking.

2. The rise of first-party data. Retailers have what every advertiser wants: authenticated, permissioned, real-world data.

3. The need for performance. CMOs are under pressure to prove ROI. RMNs offer closed-loop reporting tied to sales.

4. New revenue streams. With pressure on margins, retail media offers pure-profit ad dollars.

5. The need to meet customers where they shop. And that increasingly means inside retail ecosystems.

No surprise: eMarketer projects over $60B in U.S. RMN ad spend this year, growing faster than display, social, or even CTV.

But as promising as RMNs are, they come with a serious challenge.

The Big Problem: Fragmentation Is Killing Performance

Here’s what happens at most brands: (See if this sounds familiar)

The Amazon team is running sponsored listings and DSP campaigns. The Walmart team is testing product carousel ads through Walmart Connect. Target’s media is being handled by a separate team—or worse, a different agency. Instacart has its own internal buyer. And your brand team is doing CTV and TikTok with a separate budget entirely.

The result? Five platforms. Five dashboards. Five measurement systems. Zero cohesion.

No frequency capping. No shared audience strategy. No unified view of how your media is working together.

Let’s say you’re a personal care brand running deodorant promotions in the summer.

If you’re running RMNs the usual way, you might have:

An Amazon campaign targeting recent deodorant buyers
A Walmart ad targeting men aged 18–34
An Instacart promotion tied to a back-to-school basket
A Facebook campaign targeting gym-goers

Each of these may look fine in isolation. But if you’re not syncing audiences, coordinating creative, or measuring real lift across all of them, you’re not building a strategy.

You’re checking boxes. And that’s not enough anymore.

The Fix: Portable Predictive Audiences

So how do you actually win with retail media?

You stop thinking “How do I target shoppers inside Retailer X?” And start thinking: “How do I reach more people who look like my best customers, everywhere they shop?”

That shift starts with predictive data.

Say you’re a pet food brand launching a high-end, subscription-based dog food.
Your existing customers tend to:

Live in suburban zip codes
Shop at Costco or Whole Foods
Visit PetSmart but not Walmart
Use health apps (for their dog and themselves)

You can take that first-party data and enrich it with behavioral signals—mobile location, app usage, lifestyle traits—to build a predictive audience model of high-LTV customers.

Now you’re not just targeting “dog food buyers” inside an RMN.

You’re targeting the right kind of dog food buyers everywhere.

That’s how you turn retail media into a real omnichannel growth engine.

So How Do You Get Started? Here’s the Playbook

Let’s break it down into a playbook. Here’s how to do RMNs right.

Step 1: Define Your High-Value Customer

Start with your real data, things like:

Loyalty program members
High purchase frequency
High-margin or cross-category buyers
Customers with long tenure or repeat behavior

If you’re a snack brand, this might be:

People who bought 3+ SKUs from the better-for-you line in the past 90 days and redeemed a coupon in the mobile app.

Step 2: Enrich with Predictive Data

Bring in external signals that fill in the gaps:

Do these shoppers use fitness or health tracking apps?
Do they live in urban vs suburban areas?
How often do they visit retailers outside your distribution network?
What’s their price sensitivity or brand loyalty?

Skydeo’s predictive segments and insights can overlay thousands of these attributes to build portable audiences ready to activate anywhere.

Step 3: Build Lookalikes and Activation Strategies

Use the enriched audience to build predictive lookalikes—people who may not have bought your product yet, but share key traits. Then push those audiences into your retail media campaigns, not just programmatic or social.

Say you’re launching in Target for the first time. You can target:

High-LTV lookalikes from your Amazon loyalty base
Shoppers who frequent Whole Foods but haven’t bought your brand
Mobile IDs that show repeat visits to CPG aisles in high-index DMAs

Suddenly, your Target campaign isn’t a test—it’s a growth channel with real, data-driven precision.

Step 4: Sync Messaging and Measurement

This is where most teams fall short. If you’re using predictive audiences across platforms, your messaging should follow. Your RMN, CTV, and Meta campaigns should reinforce the same story—adjusted by platform, but anchored by the same insight.

And don’t stop at ROAS. Build measurement frameworks that look at:

Incremental sales across retailers
Customer acquisition cost by audience type
Repurchase and retention across RMNs
Unified reach and frequency

Yes, clean rooms and identity resolution help here. But the real unlock is thinking about RMNs as part of your ecosystem—not separate from it.

Bottom line, RMNs Work if You Use Them Strategically

Retail media networks are one of the most promising performance channels in modern marketing. RMNs are bringing advertisers and retailers together in a powerful new way that closes the loop from ad impression to conversion. But the brands who will win aren’t the ones just running promos on Amazon and calling it a day. It’s the ones who:

Start with high-quality first-party data
Enrich that data with predictive signals
Build lookalikes that scale across platforms
Coordinate messaging across touchpoints
Measure outcomes, not impressions

Want to turn RMNs into your most efficient growth engine?

Start with a smarter audience strategy : Predictive > reactive. Portable > siloed. Coordinated > fragmented.

Where Skydeo Fits In

Skydeo isn’t a DSP or an agency. We don’t replace your media team.

What we do is give you the audience layer to make RMNs perform:

30,000+ predictive audience segments
First-party data enrichment for CRM and loyalty
Lookalike modeling across channels
Identity resolution for cross-platform activation
Privacy-safe, portable audiences that work wherever you advertise

If you’re still building audiences one RMN at a time, you’re playing small.

– Try Skydeo SAM for free and unlock smarter, portable, predictive audiences that scale.

Learn More About Real Media Networks:

The Hidden Cost of Retail Media Networks: Why First-Party Data Alone Isn’t Enough

How to Build a Predictive Audience That Performs Across Retail Media Networks
Retail Media Networks Without Measurement Are Just Expensive Guessing