AMENIA, NY — The retail media landscape is heading toward a decisive split between sustainable businesses and complementary revenue streams as brands demand accountability from an increasingly crowded marketplace.
“Some retailers, as publishers, are driving sustainable businesses right now, some are complementary revenue, and that that’s something in the next 12 months or 18 months that we’re really going to see sort of go to different ends of the spectrum,” Lauren Lavin, executive director of North American Commerce at WPP Media, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Beet Retreat Berkshires 2025.
This anticipated consolidation reflects mounting pressure on retail media networks to prove business impact rather than simply capturing budget transfers from brands’ existing advertising relationships.
Investment levels driving market separation
The emerging divide stems from vastly different investment levels in retail media infrastructure and innovation. According to Lavin, building and maintaining an effective retail media network requires substantial ongoing capital that not all retailers can sustain.
“It takes a lot of money to have your own retail media network. So some of them are really investing and we’re even seeing a little bit of a stretch between what we would normally consider the top five or top six,” she said. “They’re starting to be more of a divide there.”
This investment gap extends beyond the traditional retail media hierarchy, creating separation even among established players. Networks that cannot maintain development pace or scale effectively face potential consolidation, with budgets flowing toward platforms that demonstrate clear performance advantages.
Focus shifts to business outcomes
The early phase of retail media expansion encouraged brands to pursue every available network, particularly when those retailers represented existing supplier relationships. This shotgun strategy created budget fragmentation without clear performance validation.
“In the past two, three years, a lot of brands have chased down every retail media network that has popped up,” Lavin said. The convergence of retailer relationships with media opportunities led to “a lot of money that’s being transferred just within that relationship.”
Moving forward, WPP is prioritizing networks that can demonstrate actual sales impact and incrementality rather than just audience reach or inventory availability. “Unless those retail media networks can really prove that that money that is being spent there is actually driving sales and driving incrementality, I think there’s going to be a consolidation of that money going to the partners that best share that data,” she said.
Transparency demands
The accountability shift centers on eliminating what Lavin calls “grading your own homework.” In Lavin’s telling, that’s when retail media networks provide performance metrics without independent verification or transparent data access.
“The retail media networks that are driving real incremental growth are the ones that are able to share and provide opportunities for both brands and agencies to more transparently look into the data that is happening behind the scenes,” she said.
As retail media budgets increase, accountability requirements intensify correspondingly. Brands and agencies need visibility into complete consumer journeys and actual business outcomes rather than platform-reported impressions and engagement metrics.
Cloud environments and advanced data-sharing capabilities are becoming essential infrastructure for networks seeking to capture larger budget allocations. These tools enable independent performance validation and cross-platform attribution analysis.
Personalization evolution
Current personalization efforts in retail media have focused heavily on audience segmentation and product-level targeting based on purchase behavior signals. However, this emphasis has come at the expense of creative quality and brand consistency.
“The state of personalization in this space has been really primarily focused on audiences and making sure that we’re using signals from buying behavior to be able to make sure that we are hyper personalizing at a product level,” Lavin said. “But that has sort of come at the sake of creative at this point.”
Early dynamic creative optimization often pulled substandard creative assets directly from product pages, resulting in advertising that looked unprofessional despite sophisticated targeting capabilities.
The next evolution involves maintaining real-time behavioral targeting while improving creative execution to match brand standards. “As this advances, we’ll really get to a place where some of these ads are looking more like an upper funnel ad or have more branding and aesthetically matching the brand ethos a little bit more,” she said.
Data collaboration
As retail partners seek access to brands’ first-party data for enhanced targeting and attribution, WPP focuses on enabling collaboration without direct data transfer. This addresses both partnership goals and data protection requirements simultaneously.
“When partners are asking for our client’s first party data, I think it’s important that where we’re at in the industry today is that that data doesn’t necessarily need to move from one place to another,” Lavin said.
Current technology enables signal sharing and collaborative targeting without requiring brands to input proprietary data directly into retailer systems. This maintains data control while enabling the personalization and attribution capabilities that make retail media partnerships valuable.
“We’re using the data in a way that it can be helpful and inform that retailer’s audiences,” she said.
