How smaller retail media networks are stepping out from the shadow of Amazon and Walmart

“If these small networks can play their data cards right, they can set themselves apart from Walmart and Amazon,” Cindy Meltzer, vp of research and analytics at ad agency Dagger, said in an email to Digiday. “Sometimes niche is more profitable than scale.”

Retail media is a $140 billion global business, according to 2024 figures from eMarketer. For all the dollars being pumped into retail media, 85% of spend goes to Amazon and Walmart, leaving the remaining 15% for the smaller RMNs, per recent research from retail media platform Zitcha. (Read more about why media buyers see Walmart’s RMN as the “one to watch” here.)

Expanding ad formats and inventory

In an effort to grab a bigger share of the RMN market, Best Buy Ads announced Social+ earlier this month, a new offering allowing brand and agency partners to reach Best Buy’s audience across social campaigns on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms. Meanwhile, Volta Media, oil and gas company Shell’s ad network, rolled out a “No Risk, All Reward” program, which guarantees incremental return on ad spend. This week, DoorDash announced banners as a new ad format, as well as new bidding and reporting capabilities for sponsored products in its DoubleDash (a feature that allows DoorDash users to combine orders). And Instacart announced a partnership with supermarket chain Hy-Vee that allows Instacart brand partners the opportunity to extend Instacart Ads campaigns to Hy-Vee.com to try to reach more shoppers.

All signs point to these smaller players heating up the RMN marketplace, but advertisers’ dollars haven’t yet started following. Three of the four agencies Digiday spoke with for this story said the bulk of their clients’ retail media ad spend goes to Amazon and Walmart as opposed to smaller competitors. Brunner, a full-service marketing agency, said it’s recommended clients allocate 10% to 15% of total budgets for testing and learning, with budget allocation ultimately hinging on performance. (Neither Brunner nor the three other agencies Digiday interviewed offered detailed client ad spend figures.)

“When our clients are thriving and experiencing growth on platforms like Walmart or Amazon, there’s little reason to shift or test those dollars,” said Kevin Amos, Brunner’s partner and chief media and data officer. While the agency has seen some success with the smaller RMN players, there’s still the issue of scale and limited audience size, which often means returns diminish quickly, Amos added.

Banking on niche audiences

While it’s true that ad dollars don’t seem to be shifting toward these smaller RMNs just yet, it’s still early days for their changes to ad formats and inventory, and experts believe the “everybody else” beyond Amazon and Walmart do have a fighting chance. In comparison to Amazon and Walmart, other RMN players lack scale, but they have a chance to snap up some ad dollars from the two biggest names in the space if they can innovate around their niche audiences to offer advertisers more data-fueled, hyper-targeted ad campaigns.

“For some, especially in the grocery side, they have loyalty programs,” said Brandy Alexander, founder and managing director of Tandemtide, a performance marketing and omnichannel commerce firm. “When you look at a Target or a Kroger, the big thing is you’re going to have that loyalty purchase data that you wouldn’t get with a Walmart or Amazon.”

To Meltzer’s point, niche audiences do have the potential to be more profitable than scale. But the question remains whether the smaller RMNs that have these niche audiences will be able to steal a significant market share away from Amazon or Walmart. Roxanna Larizadeh Nassif, deputy managing director or retail media at Brainlabs, a digital marketing agency, said she looks at it as a series of opportunities and challenges. For example, on one hand, Best Buy has a strong brand reputation, which makes its retail media network prime real estate for tech and consumer electronic brands. On the other hand, Nassif pointed out that Amazon has a massive e-commerce presence and the retail data to go with it, while Walmart has its own media network in addition to an in-store and online presence.

“Best Buy will need to offer something uniquely compelling in terms of targeting and creativity to carve out a space for itself,” she said.

Growing third-party partnerships

To better set themselves up in the retail media market, some smaller RMNs are looking to partnerships with third-party platforms to differentiate themselves. In addition to Instacart’s partnership with Hy-Vee, Albertsons Media Collective teamed up with TransUnion at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show to offer marketing mix modeling measurement (dubbed TruAudience) as well as launched a new API to help advertisers compare performance across retailers and channels. Also at CES this year, DoorDash linked up with The Trade Desk, making a similar move to connect its data with TTD’s programmatic technology. These partnerships come as RMNs push growth into off-site channels, making it harder for advertisers to measure return on investment, per Marketing Dive.

Best Buy got ahead of this curve in 2023, when Roku and Best Buy announced a partnership allowing Roku to use Best Buy’s data to target ads.

As Amazon and Walmart continue to grow their RMs and their audiences become less unique, these smaller retail media networks with niche audiences may get their chance to seize some of the growing RMN ad spend for themselves. At the same time, brands are eager to diversify their retail media investments, making smaller RMNs’ case even stronger, per media buyers and agency execs.

“Smaller platforms can usually be more nimble, while their data may not be as vast as Walmart’s or Amazon’s, they can create bespoke solutions for individual partners,” said Ashley Karim-Kincey, svp of media at Dagger. “This will inherently push the industry challenging the behemoths and how they use their data and platforms for advertisers.”

This post has been updated to clarify Albertson’s partnership with TransUnion.