Media is playing a growing role in our lives, fast becoming 100% addressable, 100% shoppable, and 100% accountable.
At dentsu, we call this the algorithmic era of media.
This article is extracted from The Year of Impact | 2025 Media Trends, dentsu’s 15th annual trends report. With retail media growing at a 12.7% rate thanks to its wealth of high-quality shopper data, and with new players constantly entering the space, we believe 2025 is set to be rich in retail media opportunities for advertisers.
Retailers spread their wings over media
Long gone are the days when selling advertising was only an afterthought for retailers, and when advertising on retail websites was a mere digital counterpart to in-store promotion. As retailers now race to capture more media budgets from brands, they are diversifying their ad estates and seeking to develop integrated, closed-loop attribution capabilities throughout the purchase journey.
Unsurprisingly, the leader in the space is Amazon, which generated more than $50 billion in revenue from its advertising business in the past four quarters. Other players are also doubling down on their efforts to build comprehensive advertising solutions. Walmart recently acquired Vizio, whose smart televisions have more than 18 million active accounts in the US. This deal not only gives the retailer a larger ad inventory and richer data, but it could also take truly shoppable television one step closer to reality. More specialized retailers are active, too, such as CVS Pharmacy which recently partnered with The Trade Desk to enable self-serve advertising.
The space is evolving so rapidly that retailers could not only dominate the retail media category in the future but dictate the entire advertising market.
Media companies organize the response
The progression of retail media has not gone unnoticed by other media companies. While retailers swim upstream in the purchase funnel with more premium placements (e.g., ads in Prime Video), media publishers swim downstream to bolster their shopping capabilities.
This often means coupling their media assets with shopper data to offer better targeting and measurement, especially as third-party cookies become increasingly marginalized. For example, Disney Advertising has partnered with Mercado Libre, a commerce leader in LATAM, to let advertisers use the two companies’ audience targeting capabilities. Other platforms are opting to develop their own commerce capabilities such as TikTok, which now has more than 15 million merchants globally.
A new interested party ramps up its capabilities
Retailers are not the only ones to know the shopping preferences of consumers. Companies processing payments do as well, and are now turning their eyes to the media business.
PayPal recently announced it is building a new advertising platform, Chase has already launched an ad network where brands can leverage the bank’s first-party financial data on its customers’ spending patterns, and Paramount Advertising has secured a partnership with Mastercard to help advertisers measure how their media spend performs.
These new entrants into the media space offer interesting alternatives to advertisers with limited shopping data (e.g., CPG companies) as they can boast seamless shopper intelligence across categories – not only retail – and across online and offline points of sale.
What’s next?
The convergence of the retail and media worlds will continue, with an increasing portion of media campaigns having at least a shopper component. We anticipate the space to boom with acquisitions likely to happen. The future will tell whether a major streamer buys a major retailer or the opposite, or if they will all be outpaced by financial companies.
This is the seventh of ten trends discussed in dentsu’s The Year of Impact | 2025 Media Trends report.
Get your copy of The Year of Impact | 2025 Media Trends report here to see all ten trends.
