Retail media networks are surging at a pace the advertising world has never seen. Global retail media growth is accelerating so quickly that GroupM forecasts retail media ad spend will overtake television by 2028. Amazon alone is expected to exceed $60 billion in retail media revenues in 2025, climbing toward nearly $70 billion just one year later. In the U.K., retail media reached £3 billion in spend in only seven years — faster than search or social media in their breakout eras. And by 2028, retail media is projected to surpass $200 billion globally.
The opportunity is enormous — but the gains for your business are far from guaranteed.
For all the momentum behind retail media networks, many remain stuck at the starting line. Minimum Viable Product (MVP) pilots launch, ad products are created, and partnerships form — but sustainable scale, value creation, and measurable outcomes often lag far behind. Retailers and brands know the revenue potential is there, yet many are still missing the structural foundation needed to fully capitalize.
This is why STRATACACHE, Capgemini, and Retail Gazette partnered to publish The Retail Media Reality Check — a new research report designed to separate hype from reality and give retailers the clarity, direction, and frameworks they need to build retail media strategies that last. It equips leaders with the insights to move from experimentation to proven growth — without giving in to the pressure to “just launch quickly.”
Why Scale — Not Speed — Defines Retail Media Success
The last three years were defined by urgency: Enter the market, monetize data, expand media offerings, and keep pace with competition. But now businesses are facing a hard truth: Scaling a retail media network is more difficult than launching one.
Retailers now face the complex challenge of turning early-stage retail media strategies into future-ready networks that drive revenue and deliver clear value to every stakeholder — brands, consumers, and the business.
This requires confronting several industry-wide friction points:
- Fragmented data across digital, physical, and partner ecosystems
- Unclear organizational ownership: Is retail media a retail function, marketing function, or a media business?
- Inconsistent media measurement, especially across in-store retail media, digital channels, and closed-loop attribution
- Lack of unified operations and scalable processes
The Retail Media Reality Check report uncovers how the most mature retail media players are tackling these issues head-on. It reveals a blueprint for how to scale a retail media network sustainably — built on structure, operating model alignment, cross-functional culture, technology modernization, and measurement discipline.
The takeaway: speed may create headlines, but scale creates profit.
Why 2025–2028 Will Be Retail Media’s Defining Window
The next three years will either solidify a retailer’s leadership in retail media — or solidify their irrelevance.
The industry has reached its inflection point. Analysts forecast that retail media networks will dominate the media mix by 2028. The scale and speed of this shift are unlike anything the advertising ecosystem has experienced. For Europe alone, retail media is expected to grow past £17 billion by 2028, mirroring the global jump toward the $200 billion mark.
But growth alone doesn’t guarantee success. The retailers who emerge as leaders will be those who:
- Build for future scale — not temporary solutions
- Establish differentiated retail media strategy and media value
- Integrate physical and digital experiences into a single media narrative
- Prove performance through transparent, reliable measurement
- Form strong partnerships to accelerate capability, innovation, and transformation
The Retail Media Reality Check outlines what “scale-ready” looks like in 2025 and beyond. It provides a map, a compass, and a checklist for retailers at every stage of their retail media journey — whether refining early pilots or transforming into media-first organizations.
Most importantly, it breaks down how partnerships — across tech, data, content, retail operations, and monetization — can help retailers leapfrog slow scaling and accelerate the pathway to profitable, credible, commercially-sound retail media businesses.
Your Retail Media Reality Check
If the last few years were about belief in retail media, the next few will be about proof.
Precision, performance, and partnership will determine which retailers scale their media business — and which stall under the weight of complexity. The window of opportunity is open now, but it won’t stay open for long.
Retailers need clarity on where they stand, what’s required to move forward, and how to build retail media networks that can grow and evolve for the next decade … not just the next quarter.
Get the Report: The Retail Media Reality Check: Scaling Networks That Deliver for 2025 and Beyond
This is the report you can’t afford to skip if you’re serious about growing your retail media business.
Download it now to uncover:
- The five pillars driving next-gen retail media maturity
- The must-solve tensions limiting RMN performance today
- How leading retailers and brands are preparing to scale through 2025–2028
- Insights from STRATACACHE, Capgemini, and industry experts shaping the future of retail media
Download the Retail Media Reality Check report to discover what will separate the retail media leaders from the laggards.
