Retail media networks (RMNs) are facing a pivotal year as industry growth slows to a projected 15.6% in 2025, raising the $179.5 billion question: Can RMNs prove true ROI and justify continued investment as brands and agencies demand more transparent, reliable measurement?
The NEW Reality: Slower Growth, Higher Scrutiny
After years of double-digit expansion driven by pandemic-fueled e-commerce surges, retail media spending is decelerating from a torrid 25.1% growth in 2024 to 15.6% in 2025—though still outpacing the broader digital ad market’s 7.3% forecast. This transition reflects not just market normalization but also heightened pressure on RMNs to deliver measurable, incremental value and to move beyond opaque, single-touch metrics like ROAS.
Fragmentation & Skepticism
With over 200 RMNs vying for attention, advertisers are concentrating budgets among top networks like Amazon, Walmart, and a handful of category leaders, minimizing risk but limiting reach for smaller players. Meanwhile, measurement fragmentation—each network boasting its own reporting standards and attribution logic—has left brands frustrated, unable to compare performance “apples to apples” across platforms.
Hybrid Attribution Models: The New Gold Standard?
To address mounting skepticism and demonstrate true ROI, RMNs are increasingly adopting their own hybrid attribution models. Hybrid models blend multi-touch, software-based attribution with self-reported, first-party data, enabling marketers to track both online and offline influences on consumer decision-making. While this approach assigns credit to all meaningful touchpoints on the path to conversion, brands may still consider this a continued biased approach to assigning attribution whether tracked digitally or reported directly from in store sales.
Key features of hybrid attribution include:
- Software-based multi-touch tracking using models like Linear, U-shaped, and Time Decay.
- Direct customer surveys or post-purchase queries, capturing exposure to less trackable “word of mouth,” events, or influencer campaigns.
- Combined reporting, enabling marketers to adjust attribution splits when customer feedback diverges from digital click paths, thereby refining channel ROI estimates.
Proof Points and Path Forward
As the retail media sector matures, brands now expect proof of incremental value: how RMNs drive new sales above baseline, not just correlated conversions. Full-funnel strategies—linking upper-funnel engagement to lower-funnel sales—are becoming the norm as advertisers demand more robust evidence to justify shifting budgets from trade marketing and legacy channels.
Innovative brands are rising to the challenge, updating their MMM providers from the traditional to the agile, evaluating incrementality integrations based in recursive models, methodology and platforms. The race is on to unified measurement standards and prioritizing transparency during what is quickly becoming a test of survival in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
Conclusion: 2025 is the year RMNs must prove their worth—beyond the promises of reach and audience scale, they need to show that retail media dollars truly drive incremental sales and profit. Those that succeed will help define the next era of digital commerce; those that don’t risk falling behind in the thinning herd.