LAS VEGAS — The race to monetize shopper data has turned retail media into the advertising industry’s fastest-growing sector, projected to surpass combined spending on connected TV and traditional television by 2027. But perhaps it is also exacerbating a tangled web of walled gardens, leaving buyers navigating a landscape defined as much by its complexity as its scale.
The next phase of the sector’s growth appears to hinge on breaking down these silos to follow the consumer beyond the digital checkout aisle.
“We’re seeing an incredible rise of retail media, but also a rise of fragmentation and complexity,” said Ali Miller, GM, advertising, Instacart, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
Simplifying access across platforms
To address the friction caused by using multiple demand-side platforms (DSPs), the company has deepened integrations with major external players to allow for self-service activation.
“What we’ve found is it’s really important to focus on ease of use and access,” Miller said. “There are many, many different DSPs and a different data sets that are requiring a lot of brands and agencies to work through multiple providers. What we’ve done is we’ve actually listened to brands and agencies asking us, where do they want to see our data available.”
In October 2025, Instacart became the first retail media network to enable targeting and closed-loop measurement directly within TikTok Ads Manager. Miller noted that this approach allows buyers to use Instacart audiences without leaving their preferred buying environments, a strategy also applied to its arrangement with The Trade Desk.
The clean room application
While data collaboration was a buzzword in previous years, Miller suggested that practical applications are now taking center stage through privacy-safe environments. At CES, the company announced the Instacart Data Hub, designed to offer brands more granular access to transaction data to better understand performance.
“It’s the year of the clean room. It’s going to happen now,” Miller said. “This is increasingly important as we start to see the rise of all of these off-platform activations and of course brands have incredibly valuable data of their own that they want to make sure that they’re matching with our order data.”
The goal is to allow advertisers to marry their first-party data with Instacart’s 1,800-retailer dataset to measure lifetime value and new-to-brand metrics. Miller acknowledged that while clean rooms are “not the most scalable solution in the world,” they remain a vital component for sophisticated partners seeking deeper analytics.
Acting as a technology layer
As the sector crowds with new entrants, Instacart is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer powering other networks. This “ecosystem” approach includes providing ad technology to partners such as Hy-Vee and Uber Eats, effectively aggregating fragmented inventory.
“In a lot of ways, Instacart is quite unique as a retail media network because we’re not a retailer. We’re a retail technology platform,” Miller said. “We’re able to take these ad solutions and offer them to partners… using our technology to create and manage their own retail media networks.”
By aggregating inventory across different store types and sizes, the company aims to simplify the buying process for agencies. “That for me is really what sets Instacart apart,” Miller said. “It’s an ecosystem rather than just one retail specific retail media network and we think that that’s going to help drive a lot of value.”
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