Retail Media Networks: The $184B Question

A senior commercial leader walks out of the annual Joint Business Plan (JBP) meeting with a slide deck whose final page reads twenty-five percent. Twenty-five percent year on year, the retailer says, on the retail media line. It is the single largest ask in the entire JBP, and the retailer presents it not as a question but as the price of remaining a strategic supplier. This is the new arithmetic of growth, and three out of four Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies are now negotiating some version of it.

What "$184B" actually means

In October 2025 Forrester published its Global Retail Media Forecast and put world spend on retail media at one hundred and eighty-four billion United States dollars in 2025, growing to three hundred and twelve billion by 2030 at a compound annual rate of eleven percent. That figure is the largest defensible number on the table. By 2030 retail media will be roughly twice global television advertising spend, per Forrester's framing.

GroupM, in its 2025 "This Year, Next Year" forecast, places the same global pool slightly lower at one hundred and seventy-seven billion, and reports that retail media will represent fifteen point nine percent of total global advertising spend in 2025 with a nine point one percent compound annual growth rate through 2029. eMarketer, narrower in scope, sees the United States alone reaching just under fifty-nine billion in 2025 and almost seventy billion in 2026, an annual growth rate of seventeen point nine percent. The forecasts disagree on the absolute number by tens of billions, but the underlying conclusion is identical: retail media is now larger than any individual television, search, or display category in any major Western market.

Fig 1. Three views of the 2025 retail media market. The forecasts disagree by tens of billions but agree that retail media is now larger than any individual television, search, or display category.

Two facts about the pool matter for every CPG planner. The first is geographic: more than eighty percent of global retail media spend sits in two countries, China and the United States, with Europe and Latin America growing faster but from a far smaller base. The second is that off-site retail media, the slice powered by the retailer's first-party data but served outside the retailer's own properties on Connected Television, programmatic display, and social, is growing two to three times faster than on-site sponsored product placements. The Trade Desk and Walmart Connect together extended their multi-year off-site partnership in August 2025; off-site retail media is no longer the new layer, it is the dominant growth layer.

Why every retailer is now an ad seller

Walmart's full-year retail advertising business in fiscal year 2024 reached four point four billion United States dollars, a twenty-seven percent increase year on year. By the time Walmart reported its fiscal year 2026 results, the global advertising line was running at six point four billion, up forty-six percent. Inside the company, advertising and Walmart Plus membership combined now account for roughly one third of total operating income while sitting at less than one percent of revenue. The grocery business that surrounds it earns somewhere between three and four percent operating margin; the ad business reportedly carries gross margins north of seventy percent.

That is the gravity well. A retailer who sees this math on its own profit and loss statement does not stop pushing for more retail media spend, because every additional advertising dollar flows almost intact through to operating income. Amazon's advertising business closed fiscal year 2024 at fifty-six billion in revenue, with the fourth quarter alone bringing in seventeen point three billion at eighteen percent year-on-year growth. Kroger Precision Marketing, the smaller and more focused player, contributes meaningfully to Kroger's "alternative profit businesses" segment that delivered one and a half billion in operating profit in the most recent fiscal year. Tesco, Carrefour, Sainsbury's, Albertsons, and Target are running the same playbook with smaller numbers and similar margin shape.

Fig 2. Walmart fiscal year reporting. Less than one percent of revenue, roughly one third of operating income.

The implication for the CPG planner is uncomfortable. The retailer is now in a business with much higher margins than the business it has been doing with you for thirty years. Every conversation where the retailer trades a list-price concession for a retail media commitment is, from the retailer's side, a margin upgrade.

How much CPG money is already moving

A NielsenIQ and Coresight Research survey of one hundred United States CPG and Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) brand manufacturers found that ninety-six percent had used at least three retail media networks in the prior twelve months, and forty-six percent had used six or more. The average advertiser was spending across six networks. A separate Skai survey put eighty-one percent of advertisers at very or extremely important for retail media in their channel mix.

The math at brand level is even more instructive. A mid-sized CPG company with two billion in net revenue, running across six retail media networks at three to five percent of revenue per network, is committing somewhere between three hundred and six hundred million dollars annually to retail media. That money is pulled from somewhere. Either it is net-new investment (rare in mature CPG cost structures), or it is reallocated from traditional trade investment, or it is reallocated from brand-equity advertising. Over the last three years it has been some mixture of all three, and the proportion is consequential.

Nielsen's June 2025 Future of Retail Media report adds a forward-looking signal: sixty-five percent of marketers globally expect retail media to play a bigger role in their media mix in the next twelve months, rising to seventy-four percent in North America. The slope is up.

When the line item becomes the relationship

The strategic concern is no longer how much retail media to buy. It is how the retail media commitment sits inside the Joint Business Plan with each strategic retailer.

In the words of Kevin Weiss, vice president of retail media at Skai: "what once was a tiny retail media test budget has become one of the most significant line items to negotiate in the annual JBP." A March 2025 Digiday investigation captured the practitioner side of the same dynamic. Walmart was reportedly pushing brands for twenty-five percent year-on-year increases in retail media commitments, and several anonymous CPG executives told the publication that despite reservations they could not walk away because half of their sales depended on the relationship.

This is where the JBP architecture matters. Three patterns are now visible across negotiated annual plans.

Pattern one: substitution. The retailer asks for a retail media commitment in exchange for a softening of trade investment elsewhere. List-discount levels stay flat or drop while retail media commitment rises. From the retailer's perspective, substitution is a margin upgrade because retail media revenue is high-margin and the foregone trade investment was lower-margin. From the brand's perspective, the trade-investment-per-incremental-case may worsen if the new retail media spend does not produce equivalent incremental volume.

Pattern two: addition. The retailer asks for retail media commitment as net-new spend on top of existing trade investment, often justified as a separate growth layer or shopper-marketing layer. If the brand agrees, total trade spend (broadly defined) rises. The brand's headline gross-margin equation is squeezed unless retail media demonstrably pulls incremental volume.

Pattern three: absorption. Some retailers fold retail media commitment into the existing trade-terms framework and treat it as a deductible from gross-to-net the same way fixed listing fees or merchandising fees are. The accounting line is cleaner, but the brand loses negotiating optionality on the retail media slice.

In every pattern, the underlying question is whether the retail media commitment generates enough incremental volume to justify its cost. That question rarely gets answered with rigour at the JBP table because the measurement systems have not caught up with the spend.

Two cases where the math works

In late 2025 PepsiCo launched Poppi prebiotic cola at Walmart with the heaviest support behind a Black Friday exclusive. Mark Kirkham, the company's Chief Marketing Officer for Beverages North America, told MediaPost that the exclusive sold out in under twenty-four hours. More instructive than the stockout was the upstream insight loop: Walmart Connect's shopper-data feedback during the launch period revealed that taste-led messaging was outperforming functional-benefit messaging, and the brand reallocated creative inside the launch window. Kirkham's framing in the interview is telling: "I'm not a big fan of the term retail media network. It's more than that."

Mondelez ran a different shape of test through Albertsons Media Collective with its Sargento Cheese Bakes campaign in 2025. The execution combined in-store retail media with matched-market measurement. The reported result was a fourteen percent in-store sales lift, five and a half million campaign impressions, and a two-dollar-and-forty-one-cent incremental Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). The number that matters is not the lift; it is the matched-market measurement. Mondelez's Melissa Pitmon, quoted in the Marketing Dive coverage, made the point that controlled measurement was the unlock. Without it the brand would have had a campaign with attractive vanity numbers and no defensible incrementality story.

The two cases share a shape. The retail media spend was integrated with a measurement loop that could distinguish incremental volume from cannibalised base, and the creative or pack mix could be adjusted within the campaign window using shopper-data feedback. When that integration is missing, retail media operates as expensive shelf-tagging.

Four questions every RGM leader should ask

The strategic question for the Revenue Growth Management (RGM) leader is not whether to commit retail media spend in the JBP. It is how to commit it in a way that holds up to three years of annual review. Four questions structure that decision.

Fig 3. Four questions every RGM leader should walk before locking a retail media commitment into the JBP.

Question one: are we measuring incrementality, or just attribution? Most retail media platforms report attributed sales, the share of in-network purchases that touched an ad. Incrementality is the lift versus a holdout group that did not see the ad. The two numbers can differ by a factor of three or more. If your measurement is attribution-only, you cannot have a defensible budget conversation at the JBP. The first step is a small-scale matched-market test, exactly the architecture that Mondelez ran with Albertsons. The second is making incrementality the default reporting frame for every retail media commitment over a meaningful threshold, perhaps two hundred thousand dollars per campaign.

Question two: how is the off-site and on-site allocation calibrated to the brand's funnel position? On-site retail media (sponsored products on the retailer's own site) captures shoppers in late-funnel intent. Off-site retail media (the retailer's first-party data activated on Connected Television, social, or programmatic) reaches shoppers earlier, often before they decide which retailer they will buy from. A penetration-led brand allocating only to on-site is leaving funnel coverage on the table; a fast-growth challenger over-investing in off-site without converting late-funnel intent is paying for awareness it cannot bank. The allocation is brand-specific, and the right answer for one Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) in a portfolio is rarely the right answer for another.

Question three: how does retail media sit inside the JBP envelope? The three patterns above (substitution, addition, absorption) carry different commercial consequences. The brand's negotiating posture should pick one explicitly rather than letting it default. A useful internal rule: retail media commitments are negotiated alongside trade investment, never as a separate workstream, and the team that owns trade terms also owns the retail media commitment letter at each retailer. When a single team owns both lines, the temptation to optimise one against the other disappears.

Question four: what is the attribution chain back to baseline? Retail media activations interact with promotional events. A promotional event that runs concurrently with an off-site retail media campaign will be credited with lift that may belong to the campaign, and vice versa. The Trade Promotion Optimization (TPO) Return on Investment (ROI) bridge needs to net out retail media exposure, and the retail media platform's ROAS needs to net out promotional lift. If neither side is measuring the overlap, both numbers are overstated, and the JBP commitment that follows is built on double-counted air.

The $184B is not a number, it is a portfolio

The strategic reflex when faced with a one hundred and eighty-four billion dollar forecast is to ask "how much should we spend?" That is the wrong question. The right question is how much of the existing trade investment, brand-equity advertising, and innovation funding should be reorganised around the retail media architecture, which retailer commitments deserve which treatment, and which measurement standards the brand will hold its commitments to.

In a world where Walmart reports a third of operating income from advertising, where ninety-six percent of CPG advertisers run three or more retail media networks, and where the underlying forecast is for retail media to roughly double again by 2030, the brand that treats retail media as a budget question loses ground each annual cycle to the brand that treats it as a JBP architecture question.

Three habits separate the second group from the first. They negotiate retail media commitments alongside trade investment, not as a separate channel decision. They run measurement designs that produce incrementality numbers, not attribution numbers. They review the retail media commitment annually inside the JBP review with the same rigour applied to listing fees and joint promotional commitments. The one hundred and eighty-four billion is real, the growth is real, and the answer for any single brand is going to look like a portfolio of six or more decisions, not one.

References

Forrester Research. "Global Retail Media Forecast, 2025 To 2030." Published October 9, 2025. https://www.forrester.com/blogs/global-retail-media-forecast-2030/
WPP Media (GroupM). "This Year, Next Year 2025 Forecast." https://www.wppmedia.com/news/tyny-2025
eMarketer / Insider Intelligence. "Retail Media Ad Spending Forecast Trends, H2 2025 Update." https://www.emarketer.com/content/retail-media-ad-spending-forecast-trends-h2-2025
AdExchanger. "Amazon Advertising Raked In $17 Billion During Q4 And It Is Still Speeding Up." Published February 6, 2025. https://www.adexchanger.com/commerce/amazon-advertising-raked-in-17-billion-during-q4-and-its-still-speeding-up/
Marketing Brew. "Walmart's Ad Business Grows To $4.4 Billion." Published February 20, 2025. https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/2025/02/20/walmart-s-ad-business-grows-to-usd4-4-billion
Modern Retail. "Almost A Third Of Walmart's Profit Now Comes From Selling Ads." Published November 19, 2024. https://www.modernretail.co/marketing/almost-a-third-of-walmarts-profit-now-comes-from-selling-ads/
Nielsen. "The Future Of Retail Media." Published June 2025. https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2025/future-retail-media/
Skai. "Joint Business Plan And Retail Media Mastery." Published March 22, 2024. https://skai.io/blog/joint-business-plan-retail-media-mastery/
Digiday. "We Have Got To Call Their Bluff: Amid Retail Media Spend Scrutiny, Advertisers Pull Out Of Negotiations." Published March 25, 2025. https://digiday.com/marketing/weve-got-to-call-their-bluff-amidst-retail-media-spend-scrutiny-advertisers-pull-out-of-negotiations/
MediaPost. "PepsiCo CMO: Walmart Connect Turns Retail Media Into Co-Creation." Published April 27, 2026. https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/414635/pepsico-cmo-walmart-connect-turns-retail-media-in.html
Marketing Dive. "Mondelez Lifts Sales As Albertsons Tackles In-Store Retail Media Measurement." https://www.marketingdive.com/news/mondelez-lifts-sales-albertsons-tackles-in-store-retail-media-measurement/808842/
Modern Retail. "Retail Media And Private Label Are Helping Boost Kroger's Margins." https://www.modernretail.co/operations/retail-media-private-label-are-helping-boost-krogers-margins/
eMarketer / Insider Intelligence. "Worldwide Retail Media Ad Spending 2025." Published May 2025. https://www.emarketer.com/content/worldwide-retail-media-ad-spending-2025
The Trade Desk. "The Trade Desk And Walmart Connect Partnership Goes From Strength To Strength." Published August 14, 2025. https://www.thetradedesk.com/press-room/the-trade-desk-and-walmart-connect-partnership-goes-from-strength-to-strength
Marketing Charts (citing NielsenIQ and Coresight Research). "CPG and FMCG Statistics And Trends." Published April 1, 2024. https://www.marketingcharts.com/industries/cpg-and-fmcg-232648

Learn more on RGM Academy

Take this article deeper with lessons from RGM Academy:

Promo ROI Fundamentals (TPO Lesson 1) is the framework that nets out retail media exposure from promotional event lift. It builds the bridge that turns a retailer's reported ROAS into a defensible incremental Return on Investment for the brand. Why this matters for this article: question four (the attribution chain) lives inside the Promo ROI bridge. → Start the lesson
Cross-Lever P&L Sensitivity (Integration Lab Lesson 2) is the layer where retail media, trade terms, pricing, and promotion decisions are evaluated together as one Profit and Loss outcome. Why this matters for this article: the four questions cannot be answered one at a time, and the synthesis lives in this lesson. → Start the lesson
Trade Terms Negotiation (Trade Terms Lesson 7) is the live JBP simulator that walks a brand through trade-investment trade-offs against a counterparty playing the buyer. Why this matters for this article: the three patterns (substitution, addition, absorption) are JBP architecture choices, and the negotiation table is where they get locked in. → Start the lesson
Promo Calendar Optimization (TPO Lesson 8) is where retail media commitments meet the fifty-two-week promotional calendar. Why this matters for this article: substitution-versus-addition is a calendar architecture decision before it is a JBP line item. → Start the lesson