Retail media’s rapid growth has given rise to a fragmentation problem that is hampering investment and created complexity, argues Claire Trbovic, Global Head of Product at SMG. Solving this problem can not only unlock further scale but also let advertisers tap into one of retail media’s biggest competitive advantages.
As anyone reading this will no doubt know, retail media has become one of advertising’s fastest-growing channels.
Brands have embraced its ability to connect media investment directly to commerce outcomes, while retailers have capitalised on opportunities to monetise their first-party data and customer relationships. Yet as retail media matures, the industry is discovering that growth alone does not guarantee efficiency.
The rapid proliferation of retail media networks (RMNs), combined with the increasing expectation that agencies and brands plan, buy and measure campaigns across multiple disconnected platforms, has created significant operational complexity. More importantly, it is limiting the industry’s ability to scale efficiently.
The next phase of retail media growth will therefore not be defined by the number of networks that launch, but by the infrastructure that connects them.
Retail media’s miniature walled gardens
In theory, more RMNs should create more opportunities. In reality, every new network introduces another buying platform, another reporting framework, another set of audience definitions and another activation process.
Individually, these networks offer valuable audiences and differentiated retail environments. Collectively, however, they are creating a level of complexity that many advertisers struggle to manage. The result is a fragmentation paradox.
Buyers increasingly find themselves navigating hundreds of what are effectively ’mini walled gardens’, each operating independently. This makes it difficult to compare performance, optimise budgets, and understand where true incremental value is being generated.
To simplify operations, advertisers often reduce the number of partners they work with, while agencies consolidate spend among a smaller group of larger, easier-to-manage platforms. That creates a challenge for emerging and specialist RMNs, many of which can offer highly-engaged audiences and unique customer insights.
What’s needed is a more efficient way to buy across the ecosystem. Otherwise, retail media risks becoming a collection of isolated opportunities rather than a truly scalable media channel.
The rise of the retail media access layer
Rather than expecting agencies to navigate dozens of separate retail media environments, the market needs a unified access layer that connects multiple networks through a single point of entry.
This shifts the conversation from individual platforms to ecosystem connectivity. An inventory-agnostic exchange model could enable agencies and brands to discover, plan, activate and measure campaigns across multiple retail environments without requiring separate workflows for every network.
Crucially, retailers would retain control over pricing, inventory allocation, data governance and commercial relationships.
The goal is not centralisation but interoperability. By reducing operational friction, smaller and specialist networks become easier to access. Agencies gain efficiency, brands gain reach, and retailers maintain ownership of their assets. The entire ecosystem benefits from a more connected marketplace.
Unlocking retail media’s most powerful competitive advantage
The infrastructure conversation becomes even more important as retail media expands beyond on-site advertising. Retailers increasingly operate across digital screens, in-store media, offsite activation, first-party data partnerships and near-store environments. Consumers, however, do not experience these channels separately but instead move seamlessly between physical and digital touchpoints. The industry’s infrastructure needs to reflect that reality.
A connected access layer creates the potential for truly omnichannel commerce media, bringing together digital, in-store, near-store and data-driven activation within a single ecosystem. This is where retail media’s competitive advantage becomes most powerful: its ability to connect media exposure directly to purchase behaviour across multiple environments, which is something that few other channels can replicate.
As retail media inventory expands across retailers and channels, the challenge shifts from simply accessing inventory to understanding which inventory delivers the greatest value for a specific objective. This is where AI-powered planning and optimisation can play a transformative role.
Rather than treating all inventory equally, intelligent systems can evaluate factors such as audience quality, category relevance, historical performance and retailer strengths to inform budget allocation decisions. Over time, this has the potential to create a smarter marketplace, where investment flows according to value rather than convenience.
For agencies, this reduces planning complexity; for retailers, it creates greater visibility for differentiated inventory. And for brands, it improves outcomes.
Solving the trust challenge
If interoperability is the infrastructure challenge, standardisation is the trust challenge. Retail media cannot mature into a truly scalable media channel while every network speaks a different language. The industry needs greater consistency around measurement, terminology, reporting and attribution.
Trade bodies, retailers and technology partners all have a role to play in developing a common taxonomy that enables advertisers to evaluate performance more effectively across networks. This is not about removing competitive differentiation – it’s about creating a shared framework that allows buyers to make informed decisions with confidence.
Without standardisation, fragmentation will continue to limit growth. With it, retail media becomes significantly more investable.
Retail media’s next chapter will be about building the infrastructure required to support long-term growth.
Reducing buying friction, improving interoperability, establishing common standards, and enabling access to the full breadth of retail media opportunities available in the market will make investment easier and more effective for advertisers.
The winners in this next phase may not simply be those with the largest audiences, but those helping to build the connected ecosystem that allows the entire market to grow.
Retail media’s future won’t be determined by how many networks exist: it will be determined by how effectively they work together.
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