Digiday+ Research: Amazon gets an even stronger hold over retail media

This is according to Digiday+ Research surveys of marketer professionals conducted every six months.

Retail media still has room to grow compared to other ad channels. It came in third place among marketer pros who identified where the highest portion of their marketing budgets goes and which channels they’re most confident drive marketing success. Twenty-seven percent of marketers said in Q1 2025 that retail media is one of the two channels where they put the highest portion of their marketing spend and 33% said it’s one of the two channels they have the most confidence in when it comes to driving marketing success.

But even so, more than half of marketers are advertising on retail media. Fifty-four percent of marketer pros said in Q1 that their companies currently use retail media as a marketing channel.

Digiday’s survey found that the vast majority of this retail spend happens on Amazon, which isn’t exactly Earth-shattering news. But what’s interesting is that this year, it looks like Amazon’s stronghold on retail media is getting stronger, not weaker, even as players like Walmart and Target get further into the retail media space and more retailers enter it.

Case in point: 86% of marketer pros said in Q1 of this year that their companies currently use Amazon as a retail media network, making it the top-used RMN among marketers, followed by Walmart, which 34% of marketers use as of Q1 2025. That usage gap between the top two RMNs is significantly bigger than it was six months ago. In Q3 2024, 77% of marketers said they were using Amazon, followed by Walmart, which was being used by 53% of marketers. That marks a significant gain for Amazon and a significant drop for Walmart.

Target’s place on the list is also getting weaker. In Q1 2024, 28% of marketers told Digiday that their companies used Target’s Roundel RMN. That percentage fell very slightly to 27% in Q3 2024, and in Q1 2025 it fell again, this time much further, to just 14%.

Digiday’s survey found that marketers’ spend on RMNs reflects their usage. A higher percentage of marketers said they spend at least a little bit on advertising on Amazon in Q1 2025, while fewer marketers said the same of Walmart and Target, the other two big players in the space.

Eighty-seven percent of marketer pros told Digiday in Q1 of this year that at least a very small portion of their marketing budgets goes toward Amazon, up from 77% in Q3 2024. This marks more of a return to previous levels than a notable rise, though: 85% of marketers had said in Q1 2024 that they were spending at least a little on Amazon advertising.

It’s a different story for Walmart and Target. Walmart has seen a downward trend in marketing spend: 45% of marketers said in Q1 2025 that they spend at least a very small portion of their marketing budgets on advertising through Walmart’s RMN, down from 50% in Q3 2024 and 52% in Q1 2024. Marketing spend on Target held steady through 2024, with 39% of marketers saying in Q1 of that year that they spent at least a little on advertising on the retailer’s Roundel platform and 40% saying the same in Q3. But as of Q1 2025, just 24% of marketers said they’re investing in advertising on Roundel.

It’s also worth noting that the percentage of marketers spending a lot on Amazon advertising is up this year. Thirty-seven percent of marketer pros told Digiday in Q1 2025 that they invest a large or very large portion of their marketing budgets in Amazon, up from 27% six months prior. Interestingly, though, the percentage of marketers who said they spend just a very small or small portion of their budgets on Amazon also saw a jump, from just 12% in Q3 2024 to 33% in Q1 2025.

The (big) jump in the percentage of marketers spending just a small amount on advertising on Amazon goes to show that even the RMN behemoth isn’t without its issues. Digiday’s survey found that the biggest thing holding marketers back from spending more on the platform is money. More than half of marketer pros (56%) told Digiday in Q1 2025 that money is their biggest challenge when it comes to Amazon.

Specifically, 38% of marketers said that cost of media is the biggest challenge they face on the platform, and 18% said lack of budget is their biggest challenge there — making those the top two challenges holding marketers back from advertising on Amazon.

And they’re the top two challenges by a significant margin: Lack of scale, lack of expertise and difficulty integrating offline and online options tied for the third-biggest challenges marketers face on Amazon (10% of marketers said they’re the biggest challenges they face on the platform).