Forrester: Retail Media Networks Failing Advertisers

Measurement Fragmentation Is the Bottleneck

38% of marketers report inability to connect performance across retail media networks. 31% cite fragmented retail sales data as a primary constraint. These are not soft dissatisfaction metrics — they indicate broken attribution layers at the infrastructure level.

The operational picture compounds the problem. Outside Amazon's automated platform, most RMNs still depend on manual workflows for campaign planning, execution, and reporting. The latency introduced by human-in-the-loop processes slows time-to-value and inflates cost per outcome. For any operator running multi-network campaigns, this translates to deterministic attribution gaps and reporting lag that renders real-time optimization impossible.

Budget Origin Reveals Structural Limitation

Forrester's budget source data is telling: 20% of advertisers fund retail media from trade budgets, another 20% from shopper marketing allocations. The channel is effectively a line extension of trade marketing — not a full-funnel acquisition system.

This budget architecture caps retail media's ceiling. When spend is sourced from existing trade and shopper pools rather than incremental brand or performance budgets, the channel competes with itself rather than expanding total addressable media. The result is a zero-sum reallocation game masked by top-line growth narratives.

Commerce Media as the Alternative Architecture

Forrester positions commerce media networks — powered by first-party transaction data from financial services, travel, and mobility sectors — as the higher-performance alternative. The differentiation is structural: rather than impression-based buying on retail inventory, commerce media enables outcome-driven engagement using credit scores, precise location signals, and behavioral transaction histories.

The use case is concrete. A beer brand activating ride-hailing data to serve ads to users en route to bars — that is intent signal at the moment-of-decision level, not retrospective purchase-matching. The result: relevant offers that function as organic recommendations rather than interruptive sponsored placements.

Nikhil Lai, principal analyst at Forrester, frames the pivot explicitly: the opportunity is data activation over inventory procurement — using clean rooms, automation, and interoperable systems to drive outcomes rather than forcing advertisers into siloed platform architectures.

Market Trajectory: Growth Without Maturation

Despite structural deficits, the raw growth numbers remain aggressive. WPP Media forecasts retail media to grow 19.5% to $2.3 billion in Australia this year — the fastest-growing channel in that market. By 2028, retail media is projected to overtake total TV ad revenue at an 8.4% market share ($3.07 billion).

Growth and capability are diverging metrics. The channel is scaling spend faster than it is scaling measurement, automation, and attribution infrastructure. For e-commerce operators evaluating RMN allocation, the binary question is whether to bet on the sector's growth curve catching up to its technical debt — or redirect first-party data budgets toward commerce media architectures that already encode deterministic attribution into their core design.

Amazon remains the outlier: high automation, closed-loop measurement, dominant scale. Every other RMN is running a fragmented stack against a benchmark that most cannot structurally match.