With Amazon accounting for 76.7% of the US retail media industry’s $60.81 billion in ad spend, smaller retail media networks (RMNs) have to innovate to differentiate themselves in the longtail of the marketplace.

"Retailers have modeled on Amazon, but few can hope to achieve a similar scale by following the same steps," said on our analyst Sarah Marzano "Behind the Numbers" podcast.

Here is how non-Amazon RMNs are innovating.

Expanding beyond on-site inventory

On-site advertising inventory is limited by a retailer's digital footprint.

"More and more, retail and commerce media networks are recognizing, 'We need to think outside the box of our on-site digitally owned and operated inventory for how we're going to further scale our programs,'" Marzano said.

This recognition is driving creative solutions across the industry. Albertsons has launched an API enabling advertising partners to incorporate campaign results directly into their own measurement models—addressing a significant pain point for advertisers struggling to compare performance across multiple networks.

Albertsons has also explored acquiring media and publisher properties to incorporate into its owned channels. "By moving off-site in this way, Albertsons is able to better scale the value of their first-party data," Marzano said, while avoiding challenges related to brand safety and measurement that typically accompany off-site expansion.

Leveraging first-party data in new ways

Best Buy's recent launch of Social+ demonstrates another innovative approach to expanding beyond traditional retail media boundaries. The tool allows brands to leverage Best Buy's first-party data for social media campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, with plans to expand to other platforms.

Connecting data to social inventory helps streamline measurement and analytics, said our analyst, Arielle Feger. “It's a really smart move and I'm curious to see what other platforms [Social+] expands to in the future.”

Creating unique value through partnerships

DoorDash is leveraging its position as an intermediary with data across merchants to increase basket sizes post-purchase.

Its DoubleDash feature allows customers to add promoted items to existing orders for free delivery—keeping users within the DoorDash ecosystem when they’re already making purchases. Additionally, DoorDash's partnership with Topsort will enable advertisers to buy inventory across DoorDash and other retailers in a single media buy.

For advertisers, this provides a simple way to scale ad buys. For retailers, DoorDash offers access to its infrastructure and to high-demand, engaged consumers, Marzano explained.

Meanwhile, Dollar General Media Network has partnered with experiential retail media platform Recess to distribute product samples at community events and schools. This allows Dollar General to expand the traditional retail media strategy of sampling beyond its store walls. “It’s like an off-site version of in-store retail media,” Marzano said.

Competition beyond retail

As retail media networks move offsite, they're competing not just with other retailers but with media giants like Google and Meta. "Retail media is really growing up as a format, and the consequence of that is that advertisers are going to start judging it as a more mature marketing activation," Marzano said.

In order to compete, RMNs will need to improve measurement and scaling capabilities across networks.

"Ad-buyers [are] all in on retail media, but are just begging us to make it easier for them to buy it and scale those buys across more networks and report on it and understand it," Marzano said.

Listen to the full episode.

This was originally featured in the Retail Media Weekly newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.