Retail media has become one of the buzziest terms in marketing over the past few years, but a lot of people still don't have a clear picture of what it actually is, how it differs from traditional paid media, or what the day-to-day looks like for someone working in it. Let me break it down from the ground up — and talk about how to get in if it interests you.
The Business Logic
At its core, retail media is retailers monetizing their own platforms and customer data. Retailers sit on something incredibly valuable: real, first-party purchase data. Not inferred behavior, not cookie-based proxies — actual purchase history, search patterns, and browsing habits from people who are actively buying things. For brands, being able to target consumers with real purchasing intent is worth a significant premium over other advertising channels.
So retailers started packaging their ad inventory and audience data and selling access to brands through an auction model. If you've ever noticed "Sponsored" results on Amazon, that's retail media. The brand paid to appear there because Amazon knows you've been shopping for that category.
Who's on Each Side
Retail media has two ends. On the sell side are the retailers themselves — Amazon, Walmart, Target, CVS, Instacart, Uber, and others. They're the publishers. On the buy side are brands like Unilever, P&G, or any company selling products through these platforms. Between them sit agencies managing campaigns for brands, and ad tech companies providing the infrastructure.
One of the persistent headaches for brands is fragmentation: every retailer platform has its own interface, its own bidding logic, its own reporting. So there's a layer of third-party platforms — Criteo and Epsilon Retail Media being two of the bigger ones — that aggregate multiple retailers into a single place where brands can manage and measure cross-retailer spend.
Ad Formats: Onsite and Offsite
Retail media isn't just banner ads in search results. The format landscape breaks into two categories.
Onsite ads run on the retailer's own property: sponsored search results, display placements, native ads, in-app messaging, and even in-store digital screens. Offsite ads follow the retailer's audience out to external platforms — the open web, social media, connected TV, digital audio. The idea is that a retailer's first-party data travels with the consumer, so a brand can reach someone on Instagram using data from their Amazon shopping history, and then close the attribution loop using Amazon's sales data to prove whether the ad drove a purchase.
That closed-loop measurement capability is one of the biggest selling points of retail media. It's genuinely difficult to replicate with other channel types.
What Brands Actually Care About
From what I've seen working with brands and students in this space, the core priorities are consistent: Is the targeting precise enough? Can we avoid wasting budget on people who already bought? Is the ROI actually measurable? And do we have enough transparency and control over the data?
As third-party cookies continue to disappear, the value of retailer first-party data keeps going up. That's the fundamental tailwind behind retail media's growth.
What the Job Looks Like
On the brand side, retail media roles carry titles like Retail Media Manager, eCommerce Marketing Manager, or Retail Marketing Director. Day-to-day work includes budget allocation across platforms, campaign setup, bid optimization, reporting, communicating ROAS and share of voice to internal teams, and maintaining relationships with retailer account teams.
On the agency side, you're typically running campaigns across multiple brand clients on multiple platforms simultaneously — Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect being the most common. The pace is fast, the breadth is wide, and the learning curve is steep in a useful way.
How to Get In
My advice to students who want to enter retail media: start at an agency or a smaller brand where you'll actually have hands on the platforms. Even in a junior or assistant role, running real campaigns and reading real data is what builds the instincts you can't get from reading about it.
The certifications are worth doing: Amazon Ads has a free learning platform (Amazon Ads Learning Console) with certification tracks. Walmart Connect has its own training resources. These don't replace experience, but they establish baseline credibility and signal genuine interest to hiring managers.
Once you have a year or two of hands-on experience, the natural next move is either to a larger brand's in-house retail media team, or to the retailer or ad tech side — joining Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, Criteo, or Epsilon directly. These roles typically want candidates who understand the brand's perspective and pain points, which is exactly what agency experience gives you.
Retail media is still early enough that people with real operating experience are genuinely scarce. If ecommerce is already on your radar, this adjacent lane is worth understanding — and the skills transfer directly.
Feel free to reach out if you want to talk through how your background maps to this space.
© 2026 Rachel Hong · Accelerator Consulting