What is retail media?

Retail media is the name the industry gives to advertising a brand buys inside a retailer's environment: its website, its app, the results of its internal search engine, the screens in its physical store, or the external channels it manages using its own data. Amazon Ads, Carrefour's sponsored placements, or ads inside the Douglas app are common examples.

There is no single, official, binding definition of retail media shared across the whole industry. IAB Europe published the first pan-European definitions of the term in 2023, precisely because the market lacked a common vocabulary, and different analysts and providers still draw the line in different places: some restrict the term to advertising within the retailer's own website (on-site), others include advertising that retailer sells outside its own environment using its data (off-site), and others add the physical screen inside the store (in-store).

What every variant does share is the central element: the retailer doesn't just sell the ad space, it also contributes its knowledge of its own shoppers to target that ad more precisely.

The term coexists with a broader one, commerce media, which some analysts use to also include marketplaces and platforms that aren't traditional retailers. The line between the two isn't fixed unanimously either, another sign that this market's vocabulary is still taking shape.

The mechanism common to the different forms of retail media is this: a retailer with its own traffic, whether a website, an app or a chain of physical stores, turns that traffic and the purchase data it generates into an advertising product it sells to brands that want to appear there.

In the on-site variant, the brand pays to appear in the retailer's internal search results, in product banners, or in recommendation modules, and the retailer targets those ads using its own purchase history: who has bought similar products before, how often. It's a similar principle to Customer Match or Performance Max at Google, applied with the retailer's own data instead of a general ad platform's.

In the off-site variant, the retailer doesn't sell space within its own website; instead it shares, under certain conditions, its knowledge of the shopper so a brand can reach them elsewhere, typically through an integration with an external ad network.

The in-store variant adds the physical space: digital screens, samples, or featured shelf positions, measured and sold using the same purchase-data approach as the other two.

In practice, the brand doesn't negotiate with the store or the retailer's general marketing department, but with a specific unit that manages that inventory, often under its own name: Amazon has Amazon Ads, and European retailers such as Carrefour or MediaMarkt have created equivalent units. That unit sets the minimum spend, the available format, and the conditions for accessing the targeting data.

In all three cases, the retailer acts simultaneously as the seller of the ad space and as the owner of the data that makes that space valuable, something neither a traditional media outlet nor a social platform can offer in the same way.

Retail media has grown fast in Spain and Germany, with Amazon Ads as the benchmark and retailers such as Carrefour, Douglas or MediaMarkt building their own ad networks. For a brand, this changes where it makes sense to put budget: instead of relying only on search engines or social networks to reach a shopper, it can pay to appear at the exact moment that shopper is deciding what to take home, inside the retailer itself.

The underlying reason has to do with first-party data. As third-party cookies lose reach and classic ad targeting becomes less precise, a retailer's first-hand purchase data (who bought what, when, and how often) becomes more valuable than before, because it doesn't depend on tracking the user outside that environment.

This growth also coincides with the rise of AI-driven shopping assistants, which often recommend products within the very retailer environment where the user is already shopping. That reinforces the value of appearing well placed inside that retailer, not just in the general search engine.

For an agency or a marketing team, understanding retail media matters because it means a different relationship with each retailer: every network has its own buying platform, its own metrics and its own way of defining what counts as a result, precisely because there is no common standard that unifies them.

• Before investing, ask each retailer exactly how it defines its retail media inventory (on-site, off-site, in-store), because the term doesn't mean the same thing on every platform.
• Compare metrics between different networks with caution: each retailer measures its own way, and there's no common standard that guarantees the same metric means the same thing on two platforms.
• Start with the on-site retail media of the retailer where you already sell product, before expanding into off-site formats that are harder to measure.
• Ask explicitly what first-party data the retailer uses to target the ad, and whether that data complies with GDPR, before approving the campaign.
• Keep budget separate from search and social: retail media competes for a purchase decision that's already in motion, not for generating the first intent.
• Cross-check the retailer's own reporting against your own sales data where possible, instead of accepting only the report the platform provides.

• Assuming every retail media network measures the same way Amazon Ads does, when each retailer sets its own metrics and conditions.
• Treating retail media as a simple variant of search advertising, ignoring that its real advantage lies in the retailer's own purchase data.
• Reusing the same creative and targeting used on Google or social networks without adapting it to the purchase context inside the retailer.
• Assuming a single definition of the term exists and citing it as if it were an industry standard, when different analysts and organisations such as IAB Europe draw it differently.
• Not asking whether the format is on-site, off-site or in-store before signing, which produces budget comparisons between line items that aren't equivalent.