The New Retail Media Playbook for Earning Long-Term Brand Investment

Retail media networks (RMNs) are projected to generate $62 billion in ad spend this year. But behind the headline numbers, intensifying pressures and new competitors are forcing them to prove greater value.

With rising ad costs and inconsistent insights, advertisers are questioning the return they get from media networks, while retailers push for deeper brand commitments amid growing budgetary pressures. With non-retail commerce media networks now claiming ad dollars, RMNS must stand out in a saturated market by proving their unique return on investment and delivering results beyond return on ad spend.

Mutual success depends on greater collaboration, transparency, and commitment to consistent standards. Clean rooms are becoming a linchpin of this transformation, empowering RMNs to evolve from “just another media channel” into strategic growth partners for brands.

Standardization Beyond Measurement

RMNs should begin by tackling one of advertisers’ biggest pain points: measurement. Each RMN still operates with its own methodology, forcing brands to constantly recalibrate how they target, optimize, and evaluate performance across networks. Without consistent frameworks, advertiser budgets will go to the biggest players by default.

Standardized measurement levels the playing field between retailers while building advertiser confidence. However, true impact comes when it extends across the full funnel. With consistency across segmentation, activation, optimization, attribution, and even data governance, brands and RMNs alike can start to understand real business impact.

Embracing standardization gives retailers a powerful catalyst to deepen collaboration with brands. When RMNs move beyond transactional relationships, they become trusted, long-term media partners that demonstrate comprehensive value and secure larger, more sustainable budgets that might otherwise be directed to competing channels.

Collaboration Across Commerce Media

Beyond competition from other RMNs, retailers now face new pressure from outside the category. Hotels, airlines and companies in other data-rich categories are launching their own networks, each with distinct consumer views and behavioral insights. While their value propositions may differ, each is ultimately vying for finite advertiser budgets.

Forward-looking RMNs see the growing commerce category not as a threat, but as an opportunity to spur innovation. By tapping into nonendemic audiences through data collaboration, RMNs unlock the ability to meet advertisers' demands through stronger omnichannel insights and better performance transparency. With the secure architecture of clean rooms, retailers can securely collaborate across industries — from rideshare to financial services — to enrich insights while maintaining privacy controls.

By collaborating with third-party data, RMNs gain access to fresh insights that extend far beyond transactions to understand attributes like travel patterns, lifestyle preferences, and brand affinities, which can be layered onto existing shopper data. This enriched data ecosystem enables more nuanced audience segmentation, nonendemic marketing opportunities, and personalized messaging, reaching consumers at the right moment and across multiple touchpoints. By enriching their first-party data through third-party collaboration, retailers will better understand cross-category influence and the full customer journey.

Business Value Beyond ROAS

To stay relevant, RMNs must deliver more than campaign metrics. They need to connect media to measurable business value.

Clean rooms unlock meaningful insight into real-world outcomes, from shopper behavior to pricing and store performance. By connecting digital exposures both on and off platform to in-store transactions, RMNs can go beyond ROAS to offer a more complete picture of the customer journey with true incrementality analysis and more accurate attribution.

In times of budgetary scrutiny, the partners that can clearly and efficiently demonstrate media effectiveness will be best positioned as an essential partner. With the right clean room, RMNs gain the ability to customize reporting and insights to what each advertiser needs.

Creating a Smarter, More Collaborative Future

Consistency and transparency in data, measurement and insights aren’t just a technical upgrade; it’s how RMNs build trust, justify value, and future-proof their position in an increasingly crowded commerce landscape. It’s also the key to unlocking bigger budgets from brands that now need every single dollar to drive measurable business growth.

Retail media continues to dominate for a reason. With more consistency and collaboration, its next chapter will be a hallmark of lasting success.

Lori Johnshoy is the head of global retail, media network and CPG industry strategy at LiveRamp, the worldwide leader in data collaboration.