Digiday+ Research: How do other retail media platforms measure up to Amazon?

Walmart and Target specifically are gaining ground among the marketers investing in retail media advertising, according to a recent Digiday+ Research survey of brand, retailer and agency professionals.

Digiday’s survey found that, outside of Amazon, a whopping 85% of marketers invested the most in Walmart’s retail media platform as of the first quarter of this year. Just six months prior, 54% of marketers said they were spending at least a very small portion of their marketing budget on Walmart’s retail media network. And a year ago, Digiday’s survey only had nine respondents out of more than 180 say they invested in RMNs outside of Amazon. So clearly there’s been a lot of growth in the space, and it’s possible that marketers are starting to see Walmart’s RMN as a given when it comes to allocating their retail media spend.

Target’s Roundel platform also accounts for a significant share of marketers’ retail media spend, Digiday’s survey found. As of Q1, more than a third of marketers said, outside of Amazon, they invest the most retail media spend in Target (39% of respondents said this).

After Amazon, Walmart and Target, 13% of marketers said they invest the most in eBay, 11% said they invest the most in Kroger and just 2% said they invest the most retail media spend in Best Buy.

Digiday’s survey found that, overall, nearly half of marketers are using Walmart’s retail media platform. Forty-six percent of brand, retailer and agency pros said in Q1 that their companies or clients were using Walmart for retail media marketing.

And more than a quarter of marketers said they use Target’s Roundel platform. Twenty-eight percent of respondents to Digiday’s survey said they invest in Target’s retail media platform. Kroger came in behind Target, with 12% of marketers saying they use the grocer’s retail media platform.

Interestingly, more than a quarter of marketer respondents (27%) said they use retail media platforms outside of Digiday’s list of responses. Notable responses in the “other” category included several food and beverage retailers, including Instacart, Ahold, Drizly and United Natural Foods. Several specialty retailers were also mentioned, including Etsy, Home Depot, Lowes, Michaels, Sephora and Ulta.

So how much are marketers spending on the non-Amazon RMNs, exactly? Digiday’s survey found that more than half of brand, retailer and agency pros (52%) spent at least a very small portion of their marketing budgets on Walmart’s retail media platform as of Q1 of this year, on par with the 54% who said the same in Q3 2023. At the same time, more than one-third of marketers (39%) said in Q1 that they spent at least a little on Target’s Roundel platform. So spending on both platforms is strong.

It is worth noting, however, that the 39% of marketers who said this year that they spend at least a little on Target’s Roundel platform is a drop from the 44% who said the same in Q3 of last year. Meanwhile, while it still accounts for a small percentage of retail media spend, eBay saw a slight jump in the percentage of marketers who said they spend at least a very small portion of their budgets on the platform over the six-month period — just 4% of marketer pros told Digiday in Q3 2023 that they spent at least a little on eBay’s retail media platform, compared with 9% who said the same in Q1 2024.

Kroger is holding at about a quarter of the market share. Twenty-one percent of marketers said in Q1 of this year that they spend at least a very small portion of their budget on Kroger’s retail media platform, almost unchanged from the 21% who said the same six months prior.

As with Amazon (and the retail media ecosystem as a whole), marketers who invest in advertising on RMNs look to commerce or sales as the metric that best gauges the success of their campaigns. About three-quarters of marketer respondents told Digiday in Q1 that commerce or sales is their main measurement of success on Walmart’s retail media platform (73% said this) and Target’s Roundel platform (78% said this).

At the same time, though, cost of media on both of these platforms is marketers’ biggest challenge when it comes to investing in retail media marketing. One-third of marketer pros (33%) told Digiday that cost of media is their biggest challenge with Walmart’s retail media platform, and an even larger 44% said the same of Target’s Roundel platform.

For a more in-depth look at how marketers are spending in the retail media channel as a whole, read the latest report from our CMO Strategies series.