Retail media networks want to be more than the place where a shopper clicks “buy.” They want brand budgets, upper-funnel campaigns and a role in shaping demand before the shopping trip begins.
That ambition is now visible in the way networks are expanding beyond retailer websites and apps. In Digiday’s reporting, partnerships involving Walmart, TikTok, Meta, Snap, Disney Advertising, Instacart and NBCUniversal show how retail media is moving into social, streaming, audio and programmatic inventory.
The full-funnel pitch is already here
The logic is straightforward. Retailers have first-party shopping data, physical stores, digital screens, apps and direct access to purchase behavior. That gives them something traditional media cannot easily replicate: audience signals tied to actual receipts rather than modeled intent.
Walmart Connect says its network can reach shoppers across websites, social networks, streaming television and playlists, while Walmart’s wider commerce media strategy now emphasizes full-funnel solutions and measurement. Instacart has made a similar argument by extending its retail media data into TikTok, streaming TV, search and social discovery.
For advertisers, the appeal is the possibility of connecting awareness to action without losing the measurement discipline that made retail media attractive in the first place. The networks are effectively arguing that the same data used to close a sale can also help create demand earlier in the journey.
The infrastructure still pulls toward performance
The problem is that the media products and budgets have not caught up with the pitch. Much of the inventory remains small digital units designed for conversion, sold through auctions optimized for conversion and judged through attribution models that naturally favor the last measurable action.
Digiday’s interviews suggest that the cost of proving brand impact can also be substantial. One expert cited more than $500,000 as a possible threshold for testing whether a retail media investment is increasing household penetration nationally. Access to useful data may also depend on spend commitments or joint business plans.
That creates a structural conflict. Retail media networks want marketers to fund brand-building work, but many of the budgets controlling those activations still sit with trade or shopper teams measured on immediate return. Until measurement becomes less conversion-led and budget ownership becomes less fragmented, retail media will keep asking brands to believe in a broader promise while selling them through a narrower system.
The strategic consequence is clear: retail media may have enough reach and data to become a brand channel, but it will not become one simply by adding streaming or social partnerships. The networks that win brand budgets will be the ones that make upper-funnel investment as measurable, fundable and operationally straightforward as the conversion campaigns that built the category.