Retail Media Explained for Consumer Brands: Amazon, Walmart Connect, Zalando, bol.com and Beyond
Most brands already spend on retail media without calling it that. The Sponsored Products budget sitting in the Amazon team's spreadsheet is retail media. So is the Walmart Connect line, the Kaufland ad spend, and the Zalando campaign someone runs from a different dashboard. Individually each looks like a marketplace cost. Added together they often rival the paid social budget, while being managed as an ecommerce side project rather than a third major advertising channel. That mismatch is the reason this article exists.
The short answer: retail media is advertising bought inside a retailer's own properties, targeted with that retailer's first-party purchase data and measured against sales on the same platform.
Key takeaways
- Retail media works because it places the ad where the purchase happens, with closed-loop measurement between click and sale.
- US spend is forecast around $69 to $71 billion in 2026, and Amazon plus Walmart are taking roughly 89% of the new money.
- Europe is fragmented rather than concentrated, which is an operational problem before it is a budget one.
- Sponsored Products is the dominant format globally and the right starting point for almost every brand.
- Creative quality matters more here than brands assume, because retail environments are visually noisy.
What is retail media?
A retail media network is a retailer selling advertising space on its own digital property, using what it knows about its shoppers to target it. When you buy Sponsored Products on Amazon, a banner on bol.com, or a placement in Zalando's ad platform, you are buying retail media. Our glossary entry keeps the compact definition.
Three properties make it different from search and social. The ad sits at the point of purchase, so there is no journey between seeing it and buying. The targeting runs on first-party purchase history rather than inferred interest, so the retailer knows what the shopper actually bought, not what they appeared to like. And measurement is closed-loop: the same platform that served the impression records the sale, which removes most of the attribution argument that dominates other channels.
That combination is why the category has grown so fast. It is also why it is priced the way it is, and why the returns tend to look better in reporting than they do in incremental profit, a point worth holding onto.
How big is it, and who holds the money?
US retail media spend is forecast at roughly $69 to $71 billion in 2026, up from about $59 to $60 billion in 2025, which puts it near 30% of all US digital advertising. Globally the category is well past $140 billion and climbing.
The number that should shape your planning is not the total, though. It is the concentration. eMarketer forecasts that of the roughly $10.5 billion in incremental US retail media spending in 2026, about $9.4 billion goes to Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect, which is over 89% of the new money flowing to two platforms. Analysis of the wider market puts Amazon alone at around three quarters of US retail media spend.
So the practical allocation question for most brands is narrower than the network count suggests: how much to Amazon, how much to Walmart, and how much to keep in channels you control. The long tail of 150 or more other networks is real, but it competes for a small slice, and many of those networks are heavily dependent on a handful of large advertisers.
Why Europe is a different problem
The US story is concentration. The European story is fragmentation, and it changes what "getting into retail media" actually costs you.
European retail media is projected to reach around €31 billion by 2028, and the networks are national rather than continental. The Schwarz Group runs media for Lidl and Kaufland in Germany, Zalando operates ZMS, Otto and Douglas have their own networks, Ahold Delhaize and bol. cover the Benelux, Carrefour and Tesco dominate French and UK grocery, and Allegro anchors Poland. Mirakl Ads powers advertising across a large set of marketplaces built on its platform, which is how a brand ends up with ad inventory on Decathlon or Stadium without ever signing a separate media contract.
The operational cost of that spread is the part nobody budgets for. As Bluedot puts it, running a pan-European campaign can mean logging into dozens of platforms with different metrics, languages and specs, which is why retail media aggregators like Criteo, CitrusAd and Skai exist. For a mid-sized brand the honest read is that Europe rewards depth over breadth: two or three networks run properly will beat eight run badly, and the ninth network is rarely a budget decision so much as a headcount decision.
What can you actually buy?
Formats vary in name but rarely in substance.
Sponsored product listings are the workhorse, and the dominant format globally at roughly 37% of retail media spend. They are keyword or category targeted, priced per click, and they capture demand that already exists on the platform. Every network has a version of this, and it is where almost every brand should start.
Sponsored brands and display sit higher in the funnel, usually priced per thousand impressions, building consideration rather than capturing intent.
Off-site extensions are the growth area: retailers using their purchase data to target ads on social and connected TV, then attributing the sales back. In the US this is already over a fifth of retail media spend.
In-store is the newest and least developed, with screens and digital signage in physical stores tied to the same networks.
One finding worth taking seriously before commissioning creative: a study of simulated shopping on Amazon and Walmart reported by WARC Media found that memory encoding dropped by 47% for ads running on retailer platforms compared with generic off-site environments, while high-quality creative produced a 12% lift in short-term brand choice among undecided shoppers. Retail environments are visually noisy and shoppers are task-focused, so the "it's just a product tile" assumption costs real performance.
How should you allocate budget?
Start from where your sales already are, not from where the growth headlines are. Retail media works because it reaches people already shopping on that platform, so spending on a network where you have thin distribution and no reviews buys clicks to a page that cannot convert.
A workable sequence:
Two disciplines keep this honest. Every network needs a margin gate, calculated from your real unit economics in that market rather than a blanket target, because duty, fulfilment and commission differ enough between markets to move break-even by several points. And retail media should be judged partly on incrementality: closed-loop attribution is excellent at telling you a sale followed a click, and much weaker at telling you whether the sale would have happened anyway. Branded search terms flatter every network in the same way they flatter Amazon campaigns. Our FAQ on marketplace advertising budgets covers sensible starting points, and for brands we operate, how advertising spend works in a partnership explains the mechanics.
What retail media cannot fix
Three things go wrong repeatedly, and none of them are solved by spending more.
The first is advertising into a weak listing. Retail media sends traffic to a product page you may not fully control, and if content, images or reviews are thin, the clicks convert badly on every network simultaneously. The second is pricing conflict: if your product is available cheaper elsewhere on the same platform, you can pay for a click that routes the sale to another seller. Anyone dealing with unauthorised resellers should read our guide to MAP pricing before increasing budget, because the ad spend arrives at the problem rather than solving it. The third is stock: advertising a product that goes out of stock mid-campaign wastes the spend and the rank you bought with it.
There is also a measurement trap worth naming. Each network reports its own success using its own data, so summing platform reports produces a number that flatters the whole. Judging networks against each other requires a single view of revenue and margin across channels, which is the problem Apollo Intelligence exists to solve for the brands we operate.
Where this fits for an expanding brand
Retail media rewards brands that already sell well on a platform and punishes brands treating it as a shortcut to distribution. So for most consumer brands, the sequence runs the other way round from how it is usually pitched: get the listing right, get availability reliable, get pricing controlled, then advertise.
That order matters more in Europe than in the US, because entering a network often means entering a market: local content, local VAT and compliance, local fulfilment, and the operational work behind each. Which networks deserve budget is usually downstream of which marketplaces to prioritise in Europe in the first place.
eBrands runs advertising as part of operating the channel rather than as a separate service. We manage Amazon alongside Walmart, Kaufland, Allegro, bol and Mirakl-powered networks, buy media against real per-market margins through our ad network operations, and report it back in one place rather than in eleven dashboards. The brand, the pricing and the inventory stay yours. If your retail media spend is spread across several networks and nobody can currently say which of them are actually profitable after landed cost, that is a solvable problem, and our team can show you what the consolidated view looks like.
Frequently asked questions
What is a retail media network?
A retailer's own advertising platform, selling placements on its site and app, targeted using its first-party shopper data and measured against sales on that same platform. Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect are the largest examples.
How is retail media different from Google or Meta ads?
The ad appears where the purchase happens rather than upstream of it, targeting uses verified purchase history rather than inferred interest, and attribution is closed-loop because the platform serving the ad also records the sale.
Which retail media networks should a European brand use?
Start with the platform where you already sell most, typically Amazon, then add the network where you have genuine sales rather than the one with the biggest audience. Depth beats breadth in Europe because each network is a separate operational setup.
How much of my budget should go to retail media?
There is no universal share. Work back from your break-even margin per market and cap tests on new networks to a fixed budget and a fixed window, rather than allocating a percentage of total spend by default.
Is retail media worth it for smaller brands?
On the platforms where you already have distribution and converting listings, usually yes, because sponsored product formats work at modest budgets. Spreading small budgets across many networks generally is not, since each one carries setup and management overhead.
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