The $200 billion retail media boom is causing headaches for CMOs

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The newish marketing maxim that “everything is an ad network” becomes truer by the week. So, how do marketers feel about the explosion of commerce and retail media networks competing for their budgets?

“It’s quite comical at times,” Rob Edwards, head of media and digital at Arla Foods, told me.

Just last week, McDonald’s and banking giant Citi became the latest entrants to the commerce media scrum. From DoorDash to Dollar Tree, gas pumps to freezer doors, if a company has a website, app, or screen, chances are it’s got a media network in its sights.

With more than 200 retail and commerce media networks worldwide, according to one industry tracker, the space is becoming noisy and fragmented for CMOs.

A marketer working with six retail media networks is effectively running six different playbooks, said Kevin Dunn, chief revenue officer of Experian Marketing Services.

“That makes it hard to plan, compare performance, and scale,” Dunn said.

This month, the ad trade body ISBA and marketing advisory firm MediaSense audited five major UK retail media networks across more than 200 criteria. The study found significant inconsistencies in metrics, including five different versions of what constitutes an “attributed sale.”

“Money exchanges hands at some point,” Clare O’Brien, associate media advisor at ISBA, told me, so it should be easy to agree on the definition of a sale.

The retail media pitch

Commerce media offers companies a high-margin opportunity to monetize space they already own. Most already have a Rolodex of suppliers they can convert into advertisers. The pitch: First-party data, valuable placements near the point of purchase, and closed-loop attribution that shows whether an ad drove a sale.

At McDonald’s investor day last week, CMO Morgan Flatley said the company aims to build the McDonald’s Media Network into “a $1 billion business over time,” offering advertisers access to its 70 million daily global customers through its app, kiosks, menu boards, and other in-restaurant placements.

“It’s an opportunity to generate revenue for the system with little in the way of additional cost, no operational complexity, and no disruption to our customer experience,” Flatley said.

On the face of it, that kind of scale is attractive to advertisers. But commerce media’s sudden growth spurt has several potential headaches for marketers.

Consistent measurement is the top concern.

“There’s a little bit of snake oil,” Arla’s Edwards said, because the data doesn’t always stack up.

Closed-loop measurement systems have the same “grading your own homework” problem that plagued the early days of walled-garden social media. Did the ad on the McDonald’s kiosk persuade the customer to select a Coke with their Big Mac, or were they planning to buy it anyway?

The retail media rush hasn’t necessarily paid off for the networks themselves yet, either. Of the 200-plus companies that have launched a retail media network, fewer than 50 of those are driving enough material revenue to mention them in their earnings reports and releases, said Jeanniey Walden, CMO of the commerce adtech company Fluent. Fewer than five of those can demonstrate a boost to their company’s earnings, by Walden’s count.

“Walk into any room of retail media network leaders, and they will share their stress locking down advertisers who offer both incremental dollars and customers to the network,” Walden added.

Fragmentation for marketers could also mean ad bombardment for consumers. Remember when you kept seeing the same ad over and over again on streaming TV? What happens when an advertiser pays repeatedly to reach you across your banking app, Uber ride, and grocery shop? Frequency capping becomes key, not least because commerce media networks have an incentive to introduce more ad slots over time to keep their businesses growing.

“You’ve got to be really careful about the experience because you’re going to turn people off,” Edwards said.

With global retail media spending on track to surpass $320 billion by 2030 from about $203 billion this year, per Business Insider sister company EMARKETER, O’Brien said it’s time for the sector to introduce a standards body, much like other media have, to live up to its promise for marketers and commerce media operators alike.

The industry isn’t starting from scratch on standards, but adoption is patchy. The IAB in the US and IAB Europe began publishing retail media measurement standards and guidelines in 2024, with that work continuing to expand. Still, IAB Europe’s own research in 2025 found that 53% of ad buyers said a lack of standardization was a barrier to their retail media investment.

“This isn’t one side winning more than the other side,” O’Brien said of the push for standards. “It’s literally about making it easier and more straightforward to invest.”