How Retail Media Networks Changed Digital Marketing in 2024
How Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect and a wave of new retail media networks reshaped ad budgets in 2024, and why brands started calling it the third pillar.
Retail media had been growing for years, but 2024 was the year it stopped being a specialist tactic and became something most brand marketers had to have an opinion on. Here’s what changed.
The list of networks got long, fast
Amazon Ads remained the dominant player by far, but 2024 saw the field widen meaningfully: Walmart Connect, Instacart Ads, Kroger’s retail media arm (operating as 8451), Target’s Roundel and a growing list of grocery, home improvement and pharmacy chains all built out or expanded their own ad platforms that year. For brand marketers, this meant retail media stopped being a single relationship to manage and became a fragmented set of platforms, each with its own targeting tools, reporting and minimum spend.
Walmart pushed into television inventory
Walmart’s move to acquire the smart TV maker Vizio, announced in February 2024, was widely read as a signal of where retail media was heading next: beyond on-site product placements and into connected TV inventory tied directly to a retailer’s own purchase data. That combination, TV-scale reach matched with retail-grade purchase attribution, was exactly the pitch that had made search and social advertising so effective for over a decade, and retailers were now positioned to make a similar case with their own first-party data.
In-store retail media became a real category
Digital screens and connected displays inside physical stores, running ads tied to the same retailer ad platforms selling on-site placements, expanded meaningfully through 2024. This let retail media extend past the online storefront into the physical point of sale, closing a loop that had always been a gap for brands trying to measure the connection between an ad and an actual purchase.
Agencies built dedicated retail media practices
The complexity of managing multiple retail media platforms, each with different bidding mechanics and reporting standards, pushed agencies to stand up specialized retail media teams and practices in 2024 rather than folding it into general paid social or search teams. That specialization reflected how much the discipline had diverged from standard programmatic buying, closed ecosystems built around a retailer’s own purchase data rather than open exchange inventory.
First-party data made the pitch louder
As the ad industry continued wrestling with the slow, repeatedly delayed rollout of third-party cookie deprecation, retail media’s core advantage, ad targeting and measurement built directly on a retailer’s actual purchase history rather than inferred behavioral signals, only got more attractive. Brands increasingly treated retail media spend as a hedge against a cookie-less future that kept being promised and kept being postponed.
What this meant for budgets
By the end of 2024, a meaningful number of consumer brands were describing retail media as sitting alongside search and social as a third core pillar of digital ad spend, rather than a secondary tactic layered on top of a trade marketing budget. That shift in language reflected a real shift in where dollars were going, and it set up retail media’s continued expansion into 2025 and beyond.
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