Retail media network (RMN)

A retail media network is an advertising business a retailer builds on top of its own site, app, and sometimes physical stores, selling ad placements, such as sponsored product listings and on-site banners, to brands and other advertisers. Because the retailer owns the shopping data itself, retail media targeting draws on real purchase and browsing history, a form of first-party data, rather than on inferred or third-party signals.

Retail media differs from most digital advertising in that ads run at or very near the point of purchase, inside search results and product pages the shopper is already browsing with buying intent, rather than earlier in the funnel. Placements are typically bought through the retailer's own auction system, similar in mechanics to programmatic advertising elsewhere, and priced on a cost per click or cost-per-impression basis specific to that retailer's inventory.

Retail media matters to brands because it offers a closed-loop view from ad exposure to actual purchase within one retailer's data, making return on ad spend measurement unusually direct compared with channels where the ad and the sale happen in different systems. It matters to retailers as a new, high-margin revenue line built on inventory and data they already own. Because each retailer runs its own separate network with its own measurement standards, comparing performance or share of search across retail media networks is not straightforward.