I love the ads of people who are way too excited about soup at the store.
Last time you went shopping, do you remember seeing an ad for a particular brand?
RMNs, you’ve definitely seen them, but maybe you didn’t know it had a name. Now you do!
In today’s episode, we talk all about them, their advantages, and those pesky disadvantages!
SOURCES:
https://www.marketingdive.com/news/the-future-retail-media-networks-heres-what-the-numbers-say/742455/ https://www.sellerapp.com/blog/retail-media-networks/ https://martech.org/why-we-care-about-retail-media-networks/ https://www.emarketer.com/learningcenter/guides/definition-retail-media-networks/ https://www.aidigital.com/blog/retail-media-networks
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
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Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
We’re out of the office for a couple of weeks, and so this week, we’ll ring in the New Year with five ways marketing may change in 2026. We’re going to cover big changes in influencer marketing, how audio in ads is tuning out, the rise of retail media networks, the powerful motivator of treatonomics and why optimizing AI platforms is going to be very important over the next year.
And yeah, I have a cold, which means I’m happy to be recording videos instead of going out shopping. And that’s probably for the best, because retailers are getting better than ever at selling me products, and one of the tools they’re using is called a retail media network, or RMN.
If you’re not familiar with this term, RMNs have been around for decades and they describe advertising platforms owned and operated by retailers using their own data and media to let third party brands advertise directly to their customers.
So, a simple example is you walk into a grocery store and you see an ad on an in-store display for a branded item for sale in that store. The retailer is leveraging their foot traffic and customers’ eyeballs to allow advertisers to talk up products close to the point of sale. This is different from traditional in-store promotional strategies, catalog listings and point of purchase displays because it’s digital and behaves more like traditional out of home advertising targeted to that store’s customers.
But there are also additional components to it, because that in-store ad can be pushed out to other channels owned by the retailer as well, like its website and its mobile app or promotional systems used for push notifications and text messages. And even better, the retailer brings with it a ton of customer data that can allow for really precise targeting based on purchase behavior. And that data goes deep because it’s tied to both scanner data and loyalty program data that could represent dozens or hundreds or even thousands of transactions over many years.
The upshot of this is that the retailers are close to the customers, can get the messages closer to the point of sale and can leverage their existing relationships with customers for more credible and targeted deployment of advertising. This is actually far more effective than broad, mass-market advertising for many products because it helps to move brands out of the unknown or evoked set into the consideration set much closer to the purchase decision!
This even allows advertisers to measure closed-loop metrics like sales lift, conversion rate and incremental revenue in ways that just aren’t possible with traditional media.
Having an influx of ad dollars also allows retailers to develop a new revenue stream that can help them to offer competitive pricing and services in the marketplace. This is vital because brick and mortar retailers need to be able to compete against online competitors, and online retailers need to have a way to directly market to their customers in a manner that operates at scale while still feeling personalized. RMNs are a win-win on both counts because they put those ad dollars into retail operations to allow them to utilize a pull strategy rather than putting them into traditional media to apply a less effective mass market push strategy.
Of course, retailers are not traditionally advertising companies and many of them are not that good at this role yet. Many aren’t equipped with the technology infrastructure to make these happen.
The largest RMNs are owned by large retailers – Amazon, Walmart, Target, Instacart, eBay and Etsy. Grocery stores like Kroger and Albertsons, value stores like Dollar General, hotel chains like Marriott and buy now pay later services like Klarna are also valuable players in the space.
And these RMNs are quite lucrative. According a report from Forrester, about a quarter of retailers are generating more than $100 million from their networks, and a BCG study says that while the margin on retail products is traditionally quite slim, the margin in ad sales is extremely high. It’s estimated that by the end of 2026, 25% of all digital media spends will be in RMNs.
Of course, there are also downsides, and the big one is competition. As more retailers attempt to leverage their consumer data and get into the RMN business, the market becomes more fragmented and pricing for ads tends to drop due to the greater availability of opportunities. As you might expect, the big players like Amazon and Walmart have already positioned themselves to be the premium RMNs, but they also can be expensive and too focused on the mass market, causing many brands to work with multiple RMNs to capture customers more effectively.
Another issue is that customers themselves don’t like a lot of advertising coming from their retailers via websites or apps, and that puts a limit on the amount of direct messaging retailers can send out.
And then there is the integration of RMNs into programmatic platforms, which is both a good thing for advertisers but a potentially bad thing for the RMNs themselves since it isolates them from the actual brands and adds in intermediaries such as media buyers.
But the advantages far outweigh the challenges, and I expect that as RMNs become more and more integrated into marketing strategy, they will probably become one of the primary methods of product marketing and a very valuable way to reach out to target markets for services and brand messaging. I wouldn’t be surprised if RMNs begin taking over more and more out of home advertising as well and really begin providing a powerful and more trustworthy alternative to online advertising through search and social media.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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