As retail media moves from side business to centerpiece, big brands are prioritizing measurement and efficiency to cement the channel as a mature budget item.

• Retail media will grow almost 20% this year (19.4%) to reach $58.79 billion, according to EMARKETER's September 2025 forecast.

In recent earnings calls, tech leaders described a channel that is now about solid data, AI-driven relevance, and reshaping how advertisers reach shoppers.

Extending expansion

For many retail media leaders, partnerships have become a hallmark for this next phase of the channel. These collaborations not only extend available inventory, they also help smaller networks compete with Amazon's continued dominance of the space.

• Amazon will see $39.81 billion in retail media ad revenues this year, larger than the next five largest earners combined, according to our September 2025 forecast.

In their earnings call, their CEO Chris Rogers praised the brand's investments in these partnerships.

"We have also expanded our supply with more Carrot Ads partners, entirely new in-store services on Caper Carts, and we have established off-platform partnerships with TikTok and Pinterest, as well as Google, Meta, The Trade Desk, and more," he said. "These partnerships allow us to help brands optimize their campaigns using the power of our data."

Last month, Instacart partnered with Grubhub to jointly craft retail media strategies, brand insights, and new delivery models. Additionally, United Airlines recently teamed up with Instacart to give its loyalty program members enhanced perks.

“When brands advertise with us, they get access to over 1,800 retail banners on our Marketplace, more than 240 partner websites through Carrot Ads, dynamic in-store advertising capabilities, and increasingly valuable off-platform insights that help them drive performance across other channels,” said Rogers on the call.

Retail media is now a structural part of profitability and retailers who align it with logistics and loyalty will unlock scale.

The attribution arms race

Measuring results continues to be a challenge for retail media networks and this signal loss is forcing retailers to build their own stacks.

• 71% of brand/agency marketers worldwide say advanced analytics/attribution/measurement models are one the greatest areas of opportunity in 2025, according to October 2024 data from Digiday and NCSolutions.

Etsy has "optimized our paid social portfolio through targeted mix shifts informed by incrementality testing, making us even better able to target higher value audiences," said Etsy CFO Lanny Baker on their earnings call. "In addition, we shifted low funnel efforts to zero in on new and lapsed buyer audiences and expanded mid and upper funnel investment in high performing channels like TikTok."

• Some 61% of US ad buyers plan to focus at least somewhat more on attribution modeling in 2025, while 56% say the same thing about media mix modelling (MMM), according to December 2024 data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

As cookies fade, first-party data and clean-room partnerships will define which platforms marketers trust for proof of performance.

AI-powered personalization and creative

AI is turning every commerce network into a recommendation engine.

"AI Max and Search is already used by hundreds of thousands of advertisers, currently making it the fastest-growing AI-powered Search Ads product," said Philipp Schindler, Google's chief business officer on their earnings call. "By delivering the most relevant ad across surfaces and matching advertisers against additional queries they weren't reaching before, AI Max helps advertisers discover new customers at the exact moment they need their product or service."

For SMBs and marketers, these networks' AI tools are assisting with reaching the right audiences with tailored messaging.

"Our AI assistant [is] sidekick supercharging merchants' businesses," said Shopify president Harley Finkelstein on their earnings call. "We think about the evolution of AI in three ways: How AI will help our merchants sell everywhere, how AI will help our merchants operate smarter, and how we as a company will use AI to build better. Sell everywhere, operate smarter, and build better."

AI will widen the performance gap between platforms with proprietary shopper data and those without. For marketers, creative automation and contextual targeting are merging into one workflow.

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