A retail media network is a retailer's advertising business that sells placements on its site, app, stores and partner channels, targeted with its own shopper purchase data, that helps CPG and DTC brands reach buyers close to the point of purchase and tie ad spend to sales.
Retail media networks (RMNs) take a growing share of consumer packaged goods (CPG) and direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing spend, and Bain expects that share to keep rising.
For most brands, the money arrives through three doors at once: trade and joint business planning with the retailer, marketplace ad spend on Amazon, and brand or shopper marketing. Usually, nobody inside the brand owns the total or knows whether it is working.
Retail media advertising is easy to buy and hard to own. The harder question for most brands is who decides where the money goes.
The order below is the order the decision should happen in. First, what RMNs are and which ones matter. Then where they overlap with trade, marketplace and shopper budgets, and how to tell if the spend works. Last, who inside the brand should run it.
A retail media network turns a retailer's own first-party sales data into ad inventory it can sell to the brands already on its shelves. Retailers build them because ad revenue earns a far richer margin than selling the product itself.
Brands buy in for the opposite reason. The retailer can put an ad in front of a shopper who is already there to buy, then report back whether that shopper, or someone like them, purchased afterward.
Commerce media is the broader category that includes retail media platforms alongside advertising networks operated by banks, travel companies and delivery apps. These businesses use first-party transaction data to target advertising across their own properties and external channels.
For a brand, the ad lands close to the moment of purchase, it's targeted on the retailer's own purchase history, and the result reports back as a sale at that retailer.
That same closed loop is also why judging the return later takes real care.
On-site placements are sponsored product ads, sponsored brand ads and display ads sitting inside search results, category pages and product detail pages on the retailer's own site and app, the inventory most people picture first.
Off-site placements target ads using the retailer's shopper audiences on streaming TV, social platforms and the open web. The format follows the channel. Streaming TV gets video, social gets shoppable formats, and the open web gets programmatic buys. Sales are still measured back at the retailer.
In-store placements are digital screens, audio and shelf-edge displays inside physical stores, sold through the same network as the retailer's digital inventory.
In-store measurement is still the least standardized of the three. The IAB/MRC guidelines give digital in-store placements a chapter of their own.
Most RMNs sell search placements through a self-serve auction, and sell larger display, off-site and in-store packages through a managed deal.
The networks to prioritize are the ones where the brand already sells, or is about to launch. Spend on a network with thin distribution or patchy stock hands the retailer money for an audience the brand cannot serve.
These five are consistently named among the top RMNs for CPG and DTC spend:
Bain also finds that most CPG companies put the majority of their retail media dollars into these five, with smaller, targeted bets on a short list of others.
Some networks also sell their shopper audiences to brands with no shelf presence there at all, an approach often called non-endemic advertising. A baby-care brand with no distribution at a given grocer can still target that grocer's new-parent shoppers through the grocer's purchase data.
Retail media rarely draws from one budget. For most CPG and DTC brands, it pulls from the three doors in the intro: trade, marketplace and shopper marketing. Each has its own owner and scorecard. None has to tell the others what it spends.
Trade and joint business planning (JBP) used to be a conversation about shelf position, promotional calendars and volume commitments. Retail media now sits inside that same planning conversation, which means the team negotiating it is measured on distribution and sell-through, not on what an ad returned.
A retailer can price retail media as the cost of keeping a good slot in the next reset, and the brand's trade team will often pay it on that logic alone, whether or not the ad spend produced an incremental sale.
On Amazon, sponsored ads are the marketplace ad budget, so retail media there often already belongs to the marketplace lead.
In a 2026 Head of Marketplaces search Constant Hire ran for a DTC pet health brand, the marketplace lead sets ad budgets with a PPC manager and holds that manager to return on ad spend (ROAS), advertising cost of sales (ACOS) and total advertising cost of sales (TACOS).
The same seat directs an outside Amazon agency and personally owns catalog, pricing and stock.
Shopper marketing teams run a third slice, usually folding it into whatever programs they already manage with the retailer, separate from both the trade budget and the marketplace budget above.
When trade, marketplace and shopper marketing teams fund the same retailer independently, their campaigns can overlap. The brand may bid against itself, repeatedly pay to reach the same shopper with ads for the same product, and lose track of total retail media spending across networks.
Retail distribution changes unit economics, and the change is easy to miss when the retail media report looks efficient. Wholesale hands part of the retail price to the store. Ad spend that looks efficient on a platform's own report can still leave little contribution once the brand accounts for its full cost structure.
The gap is clearest at the unit level, once the brand subtracts both wholesale terms and retail media spend from the same retail price:
Illustrative example; numbers are assumptions, not benchmarks.
If retail media pulls a shopper who would have bought on the brand's own site instead, the brand has moved that sale from its higher-margin channel into its lower-margin one.
The RMN selling the ad also decides the attribution window, owns the sales record, and writes the report on its own return. That closed-loop measurement setup lets platform ROAS count sales that would have happened anyway.
Attribution is the credit the network's own rules assign to an ad. Incrementality, sometimes called sales lift, is the sales that would not have happened without it, a harder number to get and the one that counts.
Bain points out that the same 2.0 ROAS can mean two different things on two platforms, depending on each one's own halo rules and attribution window.
The IAB and MRC's own measurement guidelines require networks to disclose attribution windows before a campaign runs, put typical digital windows at 3 to 30 days, recommend SKU-level reporting, and call for networks to disclose how much of attributed sales is modeled rather than observed. Amazon argues the opposite problem exists too. By its own estimate, based on more than 2 million campaigns, about a fifth of a brand's sales value lands after the usual seven-to-30-day window closes. That figure comes from Amazon's projected long-term sales metric, not an independent audit, and some agencies say they don't see the uplift in their own sales data.
The ANA released its own measurement-standardization framework in August 2026, built with heads of media from more than 40 brands. The questions below draw on the IAB/MRC and IAB guidance, plus one of our own on brand-name search. Ask them of any RMN before spend scales.
Source: IAB/MRC Retail Media Measurement Guidelines, 2024; IAB Guidelines for Incremental Measurement in Commerce Media, November 2025; ANA measurement-standardization framework via Digiday, August 2026.
Who should own retail media depends on how much the brand spends and how many retailers it sells through. The owner usually changes as both numbers grow. For store-heavy brands, the first owner is usually the retail marketing lead, who runs marketing programs with brick-and-mortar retailers while sales owns trade terms. In our searches, we recommend thinking about it in three stages:
Based on Constant Hire's search experience; thresholds are guidance, not survey data.
In a 2026 retail marketing search Constant Hire ran for a DTC health brand, the first dedicated hire was a senior retail marketing seat. That person runs retail media and marketplace programs hands-on or through an agency or broker, depending on the program, as a team of one.
Bain describes CPG operating models as following a similar path. Retail media starts with shopper marketing staff tied to specific retailers working through agencies, moves to a central cross-retailer team that leads strategy in-house, and at maturity sits with brand teams themselves, backed by a lean central group often in sales.
For the full stage model, see CPG team structure.
Most brands we work with end up using a retail media agency and an in-house manager at the same time. What changes is which work moves in-house first. The agency earns its keep when spend is small, occasional, or concentrated in creative and off-site campaigns that do not need a dedicated person watching them daily.
In Constant Hire's view, the case for bringing the role in-house grows once annual spend passes about $1M, once the brand sells through enough retailers that someone needs to own the plan across all of them, and once ad decisions depend on stock levels and promotion calendars an outside agency never sees in real time.
Amazon introduced Ads Agent in November 2025 as an AI assistant on parts of its ads console. In September 2026 it made Ads Agent the name of its whole ad platform, opened Full-Funnel Campaigns to all US advertisers, and expanded the chat assistant, which is still in closed beta for eligible advertisers.
As Amazon advertising automation handles setup work, the job shifts further toward deciding where budget goes next and proving the spend paid off.
For pay, see Retail Media Manager salary and role profile in our top ecommerce roles to hire in 2027 list.
In the retail marketing search for a DTC health brand, the brief called for someone who had managed retail ad spend both directly and through agencies, had run programs across at least two retail channel types (mass, club or grocery), knew what item setup and reset calendars take, and could translate between DTC and retail math. It also asked for real time on the brand side, not only at agencies.
Across candidate profiles in Constant Hire's database, most people with "retail media" in their job title built that experience at an agency, a network or an ad-tech vendor. Brand-side people doing the same work usually carry a shopper marketing, customer marketing, marketplace or paid media title. Searching on the title alone therefore misses most of the brand-side candidates who can do the job.
When an agency-side retail media person moves in-house, our recruiters see two problems come up in the first six months. That's our experience across searches, not a rule for every hire, and brand-side team structures vary.
The first failure mode is treating retail media as growth media instead of a trade-negotiation tool. A Walmart Connect or Roundel budget is often co-op trade spend in disguise, tied to JBPs, resets and margin clawbacks, and an agency transplant who fights it on efficiency grounds alone loses credibility with the people who hold the budget.
The second failure mode is data poverty. Inventory, fill-rate and campaign data sit in disconnected systems. When warehouse updates do not reach the advertising platform, teams keep running ads on out-of-stock products and must manually reconcile vendor portals with ad reports.
Once retail media spend outgrows what a shared owner can keep up with, the fix is usually a dedicated hire. That person owns the plan across RMNs and has the time to ask each RMN the right questions before spend scales further.
Constant Hire places retail media, marketplace and retail marketing leaders for CPG and DTC brands, drawing on a proprietary database of vetted candidates. Constant Hire delivers first interviews within 5 business days for standard roles.
To start a search, book a call with Constant Hire's CPG recruiting team.
A retail media network is a retailer's advertising business. It sells ad placements on the retailer's site, app and stores, and on outside channels like streaming TV, targeted with the retailer's own shopper purchase data. Brands use it to reach buyers close to the point of purchase and to connect ad spend to sales at that retailer.
Yes. Walmart Connect is Walmart's retail media network, and Roundel is Target's. Both target ads using their own shopper purchase data. Walmart reported that Walmart Connect grew 43% in the US, excluding VIZIO, in the quarter ended July 31, 2026.
Constant Hire's rule of thumb is about $1M in annual retail media spend. Below that, a marketplace or retail marketing lead can usually own the plan with agency support. Above it, the budget, the measurement work and the planning with retailers usually justify one person who owns retail media across networks.
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