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2025 Retail Media Advertising Trends Driving Growth

By 01.23.25
Reading time: 4 minutes

We’ve been keeping an eye on the rise of retail media for a few years now, but not even we could have predicted just how much the industry would grow in such a short period of time. Reports forecast that by 2027, retail media will account for more than 25% of U.S. digital ad spend, and it often seems like anyone with advertising capabilities is spinning up a media network, from stores to rideshare companies, airlines, and credit card companies. 

Everyone is jumping in at the same time because they see huge potential for growth, but most of these organizations don’t have a traditional background in selling advertising. These are some of the biggest trends we’re seeing among companies that are leading the charge, turning to technology to help them master retail media advertising. 

Investing in technology that will help scale business

Many of the companies we’re engaging with are relatively new in the retail media arena, and the ones that are doing things right are investing in tools that help them scale their business. I commonly see a lot of retailers either trying to bastardize existing software or create their own applications because they’re just getting into ad sales, so they don’t know exactly where they should invest. Do they need an order management system? Should they have a real CRM that’s tailored to media? The ones that are doing well recognize the need to get these systems up and running.

From a CRM perspective, they’re looking at things like Salesforce and Media Cloud. From an order management perspective, they are looking at the Salesforce Media Cloud Order Management Suite. They’re also looking at purpose-built OMS tools from other vendors and then integrating those into Salesforce, buying those best-in-breed solutions and then connecting them to their CRM environment.

One of our clients was dealing with a legacy Salesforce instance that was not equipped to deal with the ever-changing retail media advertising business. Systems were siloed, data was stale, and sellers were operating in a reactive capacity instead of proactively selling to agency and advertiser partners. The process was also legacy, and not reflective of the current objectives of sales, marketing, operations, and finance teams.

The Salesforce and Mphasis Silverline teams presented a new vision for how the company can execute against their growth objectives with a connected platform that includes a suite of Salesforce products, connected with both middle- and back-office systems. The overall solution puts information at the hands of the seller, and empowers them to have better conversations with their agency and advertiser partners.

Incorporating AI into the RFP process

Every company wants to know how they can incorporate AI into their processes, and the big trend we’re seeing in retail media is the concept of using generative AI to build proposals based off of RFPs that are being sent by agencies and various advertising clients. 

Let’s say there’s an advertiser issuing an RFP for a big campaign, and they’re sending it out to a bunch of retailers. They’ll submit the RFP, and there’s an AI opportunity to take that document in any format (PDF, Excel doc, etc.) and feed it into an AI engine that can analyze it and provide a salesperson with recommendations on things like different potential ad products to position to best satisfy the KPIs of that RFP. 

Another example: The advertiser submits an RFP, you give it to the AI, and it says for this type of campaign, things like in-store displays and running video ads on in-store monitors every 10 minutes or so have historically seen good returns. So let’s recommend those types of ad products based on this RFP or other examples of how we’ve responded to an RFP from this client in the past. 

Maybe the client really likes to run their campaigns on the digital side of things outside of a physical store, so you should look at search optimization within your own e-commerce platform. The AI play here is to take the content of that RFP, analyze it, and generate a response in whatever format is needed. 

Gaining a better understanding of campaign funding

At the beginning of a retailer’s fiscal year, they reach out to all their vendors and pre-secure commitments for advertising spend. They sell products on their shelves, so they need to commit to spending. If the spend is a million dollars, that can be broken down in various ways: this much for a particular type of ad campaign, this much for your in-store campaigns, this much for overarching brand-led campaigns. 

Let’s look at the common example of back-to-school campaigns. A business is having a big back-to-school campaign and they want Samsung, Microsoft, and Apple to participate. At the start of the year, they go through the process of negotiating what those initial commitments will be. No one’s actually bought anything yet, but they’re committing to fill an account with funds that will then get drawn from throughout the year as people actually buy campaigns. 

We are currently working on a Retail Media Campaign Funding Accelerator that manages the process of tracking all of that funding throughout the year. As sellers are building campaigns, they can see where they have funding available to be spent, where people are pacing well against their commitment, and where they’re not pacing well against their commitment. They can then either suggest new campaigns, changes to campaigns, different product mixes, or different types of campaigns based on the funding that the client has available. The accelerator manages the allocation of funds to various ad campaigns, all within Salesforce. 

Learn more about how our experts can grow your retail media network. 

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