For decades, retailers’ power resided in their shelves. Whoever controlled the shelves controlled consumption: product visibility, proximity to the checkout, aisle order… Everything responded to a physical logic of limited space and tight margins. But today, that logic has changed.
In the digital environment, retailers have ceased to be simply places where products are sold. They are becoming advertising platforms , not because they place banners on their websites, but because they accumulate one of the most valuable assets in the market: data on actual purchasing behavior .
Every click, every internal search
every product added to the shopping cart, every online purchase, and every digitalized physical receipt becomes a signal. Data that, when processed properly, can feed advertising algorithms as powerful algeria phone number list as those of Google or Meta. This transformation has given rise to a new era: that of retail media , a model in which retailers themselves monetize their digital ecosystem by selling more than just products: they sell contextualized visibility and direct access to the consumer.
And most importantly, they’re doing so at a time when traditional digital marketing is faltering. Cookie restrictions, skepticism toward programmatic advertising, and the need to measure results in real time have caused brands to start looking differently at supermarkets, marketplaces, and large retail chains.
But is retail media simply a new advertising channel?
Or are we witnessing a deeper structural change in how relationships between brands, retailers, and consumers are built?
This article proposes a different interpretation: that retail media is not just about selling advertising space, but about using data as a strategic lever to redefine the role of retail in the marketing ecosystem. A paradigm shift that goes far phone number list: crowdsourcing applications beyond advertising formats.
What is (and what is not) retail media
The concept of retail media has crept into every strategic presentation over the past year. It appears in trend reports, marketing talks, and expansion plans for major retail chains. But precisely because of this, it has begun to lose clarity. It’s often reduced to “putting ads on the supermarket website,” when in reality it involves a much deeper change.
An incomplete definition: more than “ecommerce advertising”
Traditionally, when we talked about retail media, we referred to the possibility of a manufacturer paying for visibility on a retailer’s digital assets. This includes banner ads, sponsored results in internal searches, or promoted recommendations on product listings.
But limiting retail media to that fails to understand its true potential. Because it’s not just about placing ads where there were previously linear ads , but about using the data generated within those spaces to create hyper-segmented, taiwan lists contextualized, and measurable campaigns in terms of actual sales.
The differentiating value lies not in the format, but in the context: the fact that these ads are served within environments where people are already shopping, rather than simply browsing.