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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In lieu of the flashy screens or overwhelming tech, these are intentionally low-tech branding opportunities: lean and focused on the products inside the aisle, where paper promotions are quickly changed daily or weekly. The branding frames the shopping moment, and then promptly gets out of the way.
The industry can often equate innovation with complexity — this is a good reminder that lean doesn’t necessarily mean lazy, but rather disciplined.
It’s not every day that a competitor spills their secrets: Mark Williamson, AVP of Retail Media at Costco, took an opposite approach to all other retailers by revealing exactly which vendors power his RMN stack at NRF 2026.
Costco’s RMN tech stack includes:
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This level of transparency is rare, but it’s intentional — and hopefully can serve as a blueprint for the future as retail media matures, and credibility starts to matter more than ever.
As Kiri Masters says in her breakdown of Williamson’s presentation at The Drum:
“Retailers maintaining secrecy should ask themselves: what are we really protecting? And is it worth the cost in advertiser trust and ecosystem collaboration?”
Sarah Marzano recently presented surprising results from her Retail Media Network (RMN) leadership survey.
Historically, RMNs often lived under the Chief Merchandising Officer. But today, RMN leadership is increasingly moving towards roles such as:
CFO being on this list is a particularly recent development, and quite telling: retail media is no longer just about placement and partnerships, but also revenue accountability and strategy.
Something else worth noting: RMNs who are led by a Chief Data Officer or a Head of Ecommerce tend to have a more online or direct-to-consumer focus than those with a more physical presence.Â
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4. Be focused and ruthless
Quick case study: 7-Eleven’s Gulp Media Network featured real in-store audio creative from brands Phorm Energy and Celsius Live Fit.
Both energy drinks ran in-store audio ads, however Phorm had a much higher lift than Celsius.
Why? As Mario Mijares, VP Marketing, Loyalty, and Monetization Platforms at 7-Eleven explained, it came down to being ruthless about the job to be done in a limited amount of time.
Brands can’t just repurpose their CTV or Linear creative into an in-store audio ad and hope for the best. The winning creative stripped away everything unnecessary and focused on a single, clear message designed for the moment shoppers were actually in. Again, discipline makes all the difference!
New formats and platforms come and go, but intentionality is the reigning theme among all:Â
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