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In response to rising costs, retail in 2024 was dominated by consumers’ desire for deals and discounts. And as President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs will raise some prices even higher in 2025, consumers may turn to in-person shopping to control their spending.

Beyond traditional ecommerce, the retailer sees GameChanger, its profitable SaaS platform for youth sports, and the Dick’s Media Network as key long-term growth drivers. The retailer says that while it is still early days for its retail media efforts, results have been promising.

Amazon is also the dominant retail media network by a considerable margin: It accounted for 76.7% of retail media digital ad spending in 2024 as merchants grappling with economic uncertainty tried to get in front of the retailer’s engaged customer base. Amazon’s ad revenues will grow 19.4% in 2025 to $47.52 billion, per our forecast—an acceleration from this year’s already strong performance.

Retail media was the fastest-growing ad channel we tracked in the US in 2024. While that growth will slow slightly (from 20.4% to 20.2%) in 2025, it’s still primed for innovation—and challenges. Here’s what our analysts and podcast guests had to say about retail media, with insights into what it means for 2025.

A merger between the two companies would have been hugely beneficial for both: It would have created a retail media network with access to 85 million US households, a physical store footprint of nearly 5,000 (more than Walmart), and a massive trove of first-party data.

Social media networks, which accounted for over half of the programmatic display market in 2020, have mostly held their own. But everyone else is losing share. Click here to view our full forecast for US programmatic retail media digital display ad spending. It’s worth noting that, by dollar volume, programmatic ad spending is growing across all media categories.

Partnerships between streamers and retail media networks have created more targeted ad experiences, and AI is boosting its potential through automated media buying and optimization. Edmundson said that the targeted capabilities of CTV encourage advertisers to create differentiated messaging, instead of taking a blanket approach to please a wider range of consumers.

Programmatic retail media display ad spending—which is still concentrated in nonvideo formats—will claim a sizable portion of the spend, as both endemic and non-endemic advertisers continue to funnel their budgets into retail media networks (RMNs). The current numbers for programmatic display ad spending don’t fully reflect the challenges many web publishers face.