Retail Media’s Next Act Isn’t About Owning Data — It’s About Conducting It
For most of the past five years, the story of retail media has been about ownership. Retailers owned the data, brands rented access to it, and agencies largely sat on the sidelines.
But a quiet shift is happening — one that changes who gets to participate, how budgets move, and what it even means to “own” signal. We’ve entered the Orchestration Era.
Until recently, every major retailer built its own walled garden. While we were selling the dream, this model worked because it was turn-key. The walls, of course, made it hard to scale: each retailer had different measurement rules, reporting delays, and activation systems.
The result? A fragmented ecosystem that rewarded a handful of large brands and left the rest looking in from outside.
Now, the pipes are starting to open. Deals like The Trade Desk Ă— Koddi Ă— Gopuff are giving agencies and brands access to onsite inventory through familiar DSP workflows. Greg Stellato echoed my enthusiasm for the first horizontal DSP to get access to onsite retail media inventory.
Instead of forcing advertisers to adapt to each retailer’s stack orchestration layers normalize the signals, route demand intelligently, and let the buying tools connect directly to the shelf.
At Tom Triscari's Advertising Economic Forum, Horizon Media's Bob Lord and Domenic Venuto made it clear they’re not chasing data ownership the way holding companies like Publicis did. They’re betting on alignment over control.
Venuto put it simply:
“We’re redesigning the agency model. It used to be services first with point product solutions in support of those services. Now technology is at a point where product and services meet in the middle.”
Horizon’s “tech-enabled services” approach — powered by TransUnion on for identity and Akkio for optimization — suggests a future where agencies insource orchestration rather than outsource execution.
In that world, alignment becomes the product.
Meanwhile, retailers are getting more sophisticated.
Albertsons Media Collective is opening its conversion APIs, allowing partners like PepsiCo to model hourly outcomes, as demonstrated in the Test Kitchen talk at Groceryshop with Liz Roche & Mike Glaser. More on this with our upcoming Middlemen Podcast episode with Brian Monahan
Ahold Delhaize's AD Retail Media USA is publicly pivoting from static “category buyers” to predictive shoppers — people you don’t yet know will buy something. More on that with our upcoming episode with Bobby Watts
Retailers may own the data, but increasingly they’re inviting others to build the intelligence layer on top to drive activation.
But the whole point of retail media was to get comfortable with riskier bets in media by enabling better measurement. Measurement is the trust layer. That’s where Circana comes in.
As Kiri Masters underscored in today's Retail Media Breakfast Club, under Cara Pratt , Circana is trying to unify marketing-mix rigor with retail-media immediacy — bridging trade and advertising so that sales lift, brand impact, and media ROI are measured on the same scale.
For retailers, this means more demand without giving up control — predictive modeling and orchestration let them monetize their signal while keeping the data.
For large brands, it means scale and flexibility — fewer dashboards, more cross-retailer consistency, and cleaner measurement.
For emerging brands, it lowers the barrier to entry — they can finally compete through shared pipes and predictive tools instead of massive data deals.
The retail-media ecosystem starts to look less like a patchwork of silos and more like a network of interoperable systems.
The Orchestration era is built on APIs and it may be fulfilled with agentic technology, but the value that's created comes from taking data and making it work across owners and operators.
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