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10 minutes of expert insights every weekday. Your morning ritual for staying ahead in retail media.
Why Brands Are Building Their Own Operating Systems On Top Of Retail Media
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[00:00:00] Kiri Masters: Here's a little riddle for you. You probably have this thing in your home that is ugly but essential. It conjures feelings of overwhelm, but also sanity. It's color [00:00:15] coded, duct tape together and constantly changing. It has multiple contributors as data sources. Some capable, some of whom need everything done for them.
[00:00:28] So you embrace the [00:00:30] ugliness, the chaos, as an imperfect solution because there's really no other way. I am talking about the family calendar, but I'm also talking about how brands manage retail [00:00:45] media. In 2026, the best performing brands have stopped waiting for any single retailer to hand them a clean, unified view.
[00:00:55] Of their advertising. Instead, top performing brands are building [00:01:00] their own control layers, their own operating systems on top of retail media networks, possibly even a little bit ugly right now, but functional in ways that no individual retailer dashboard can replicate. [00:01:15] The fifth annual sky state of retail media report, which came out a few weeks ago in partnership with Strata.
[00:01:23] Puts real numbers behind this shift with 166 marketers [00:01:30] surveyed. and 61% of those at direct level or above and 40 qualitative interviews with retail media leaders. It's the longest running study of its kind, and this year's findings point to a widening gap between brands that are [00:01:45] designing systems and brands that are still managing platforms.
[00:01:50] Let's jump in.
[00:01:51]
[00:01:52] Kiri Masters: According to this report, brands now plan to manage an average of eight retail media networks By the end of [00:02:00] 2026, platform by platform management is breaking under its own weight. So brands are building unified control layers and their priorities are, are telling.
[00:02:12] 77% want better measurement [00:02:15] across networks. A single view of performance instead of fragmented reports from each retailer, not a particularly new observation. 68% want operational efficiency, less manual labor wrangling, siloed [00:02:30] tools. Now, this is interesting. 52% are shifting budget from open web DSPs to retail media DSPs chasing the closed loop attribution that native and open web tools struggle [00:02:45] to provide.
[00:02:46] Fascinating. 20% are already applying incrementality insights in flight, not waiting for post-campaign reports to ask, Hey, did that idea work? But steering their active [00:03:00] campaigns in real time and. This one's important. We're gonna come back to this. Only 12% of respondents fully integrate media spend with commerce side data like inventory, health pricing, and digital [00:03:15] shelf performance.
[00:03:16] And that last number is the one to sit with. It means that 88% of brands are still running media and commerce as separate operations, Adjusting bids manually when a product goes out of stock or worse, not adjusting at [00:03:30] all.
[00:03:30] So that gives some context about the lay of the land. Let's now talk about why brands are building these systems themselves. Last year I did a lot of digging into retail media's, measurement problems, what they are, why they [00:03:45] exist, and why actually brands are a little bit complicit in some of the problems that we have today.
[00:03:52] So the thing is not that the standards don't exist, the IAB released [00:04:00] comprehensive guidelines for retail media measurement back in 2024. The problem is that the infrastructure underneath is often broken identity fragmentation. Siloed impression logs, tech stacks cobbled [00:04:15] together from non-retail native partners.
[00:04:18] As one retail media leader on the measurement side told me the problem isn't that the IAB guidelines are wrong. It's that the infrastructure they depend on [00:04:30] is often broken. my interpretation from a lot of conversations is that these retail media networks would love to have a better system.
[00:04:38] They would love to have better attribution, but often these tech partnerships are [00:04:45] multi-year. They're locked in. It was a tech decision that they necessarily didn't make themselves and difficult to unwind. So the, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak in a lot of these scenarios. [00:05:00] And And that's the context that makes this report Click.
[00:05:02] Brands aren't building control layers because. They enjoy complexity. They're doing it because the fragmentation problem isn't getting solved for them, and it doesn't look like it's gonna get solved anytime soon. The retailers [00:05:15] can still provide the essentials, the inventory, shopping data, native ad tools, but brands are layering in on top cross retailer normalization, independent measurement, incrementality testing, budget orchestration, and [00:05:30] they're building that connective tissue that doesn't exist.
[00:05:33] Natively the family calendar that no single family member was going to make for them. Miracle [00:05:45] Ads is the only retail media solution designed for both one P and three P Marketplace brands. Why does that matter? Marketplace sellers demand a seamless advertiser experience that still offers [00:06:00] full funnel ad formats, and retailers need a flexible solution that allows you to scale your media business.
[00:06:07] Learn more@miracle.com. That's M-I-R-A-K l.com.
[00:06:15] Now, how about on the retailer side? There was a great online summit last year put on by E-marketer, the 2026 Commerce Media Summit, and what the sponsor of this podcast, actually, miracle Ads. Uh, [00:06:30] Anne Hallick, the VP of Miracle Ads, described the moment every retail media revenue leader dreads,
[00:06:36] which is when the CEO or CFO walks in and says, alright, we've built this great retail media business, now let's go [00:06:45] capture the long tail. And Anne's response was, well, what staff do we have for that? What technology do we, the technology that we have wasn't set up for that. And so when retailers can't scale service to thousands of [00:07:00] advertisers and, and many of them can't, brands need to fill in those gaps themselves.
[00:07:05] So they build the self-serve infrastructure.
[00:07:08] So they build the reporting layer. They build that optimization logic because they have to. Anne also flagged a [00:07:15] structural shift on the retailer side that mirrors what brands are doing the most innovative retail media network. She said. Are the ones where a Chief digital officer now oversees both e-commerce and retail media, breaking down the old [00:07:30] silos between merchant teams who own the website and media teams who sell the ads, when those two teams are pulling in the same direction.
[00:07:37] Retailers move faster, but many of them haven't gotten there yet. Both sides are converging on the same conclusion that the siloed [00:07:45] model doesn't work. But brands can't afford to wait for each retailer to reorganize.
[00:07:51] All right, let's bring it home. Here's where I get a little bit spicy. The industry's fixation on which retail media [00:08:00] network should I add Next is the wrong question. The right question is what system am I building to manage all of them? And most brands aren't asking it.
[00:08:10] That 12% of brands that have full integration of media spend with commerce side [00:08:15] data
[00:08:15] is a tiny fraction of what it really should be. That gap between the leaders and everyone else isn't budget size or agency roster. It's systems.
[00:08:26] Leaders are compounding advantage through measurement [00:08:30] infrastructure, tighter organizational integration and automation. The rest are logging into eight separate dashboards and hoping that the spreadsheet holds, and that gap gets harder to close every quarter because the advantage compounds to [00:08:45] those who got in early.
[00:08:47] Look, the family calendar isn't pretty, but the family without one is the one that misses everything.
[00:08:54]