Eleven retail media networks fight over the same dollars

At Ascendant Network's Showcase event in New York last week, 15 ad businesses from retailers, banks, and commerce platforms pitched to differentiate themselves from a retail media crowd that has become indistinguishable on paper. Modern Retail's readout lays out how each is angling: The Home Depot's Arun Ramaswamy says "incrementality is a key ask: prove that the investment truly works"; DoorDash's Tim Castree talks up day-of-week purchase patterns (people order 30% more health foods on Tuesdays than Fridays); PayPal's Mark Grether, an Amazon and Uber ads veteran, argues his company's cross-merchant view beats any single-retailer's limited window. The spread is telling. Albertsons is repositioning from "item-and-price advertising" to a "platform for content distribution," with its Rico's Tacos micro-sitcom placements outperforming benchmarks by 200%. Instacart's Ali Miller goes the other way, arguing the answer to fragmentation is "a shared ecosystem" through its Carrot Ads platform rather than more standalone networks.

The crux

Retail media is now competitive enough that the pitch has shifted from "we have data" to "here is why our data is structurally different," and the winners will be networks that can prove incrementality rather than just reach.

Sell-side read

For publishers, the lesson is the same one retail media is learning: closed-loop proof of incrementality is becoming table stakes. The more measurement pressure shifts to outcomes, the better positioned publishers with direct first-party data and clean attribution stories are against undifferentiated networks.

Watch

whether the October in-store screen rollout at 1,200 Walgreens stores, announced on stage, signals a physical-retail-media land grab that pulls more dollars out of digital.