How Retail Media Changed Digital Marketing in 2025
How retail media matured in 2025: off-site expansion, AI-driven ad creative and the push for standardized measurement across a crowded field of networks.
If 2024 was the year retail media became a category every brand had to plan for, 2025 was the year the category had to start behaving like a mature one. Growth kept climbing, but the conversation shifted from “should we be here” to “how do we manage this well.”
Off-site expansion became the norm
Retailers with large ad platforms increasingly stopped confining inventory to their own apps and websites. Amazon’s DSP had long let advertisers use Amazon’s purchase data to target ads running on other publishers’ sites and apps, and more retail media networks followed that model through 2025, letting brands use a retailer’s first-party purchase data to reach shoppers well beyond that retailer’s own digital storefront. This blurred the old line between “retail media” and “programmatic advertising powered by retail data,” and it meant a growing share of retail media spend was no longer buying placements on the retailer’s own site at all.
AI-driven tools reshaped both sides of the buy
Retail media platforms leaned hard into AI-assisted campaign creation in 2025, automated bidding tuned to a retailer’s own conversion data, generative tools for producing product-level ad creative at scale, and recommendation engines suggesting which products or categories a brand should be targeting based on purchase patterns the retailer alone could see. For brands managing campaigns across a dozen or more separate retail media platforms, these tools were less a novelty than a necessity, since manually managing that many separate ad accounts with distinct interfaces had become its own operational burden.
Measurement standardization became the industry’s loudest complaint
With so many retailers running their own ad platforms, each with different reporting definitions, attribution windows and metrics, brands and agencies spent much of 2025 pushing publicly for more standardized measurement across networks. Comparing performance between, say, a grocery retailer’s platform and a home improvement chain’s platform remained difficult, and that lack of comparability was the single biggest friction point holding back even faster budget growth into the category.
In-store and connected TV kept converging
The in-store digital screen networks that had expanded in 2024 continued growing in 2025, increasingly sold through the same platforms and reporting dashboards as online placements, and connected TV inventory tied to retailer purchase data (following the direction signaled by deals like Walmart’s acquisition of Vizio) moved from an emerging idea to an actual line item in more media plans. Retail media was no longer just a website placement business; it was becoming a full-funnel channel spanning screens in the store, on the couch and in the browser, all tied back to the same purchase-data backbone.
What this meant for how brands planned
By 2025, treating retail media as a single, simple tactic to bolt onto an existing search and social plan had stopped being viable for any brand spending seriously in the category. It required dedicated headcount, platform-specific expertise and a tolerance for measurement gaps that search and social advertisers, used to far more standardized reporting, found uncomfortable. The brands getting the most out of retail media in 2025 were the ones that had accepted that trade-off early and built the internal capability to manage it properly, rather than expecting the category to simplify itself.
More from Paid Advertising, the 2025 archive or the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
