Retail Media’s New Battle Is Positioning, Not Reach

Every retailer with a loyalty card now has an ad business. Which means the hardest job in retail media is no longer building the tech — it’s answering the question every category leader eventually faces: why you?

That question hung over Showcase, a retail and commerce media upfront staged in New York by advertising events company Ascendant Network, reported by Modern Retail and republished by Digiday. Fifteen presentations, from The Home Depot to Albertsons to PayPal, each making a case for why their slice of shopper data deserves a line in the media plan.

When everyone has data, data stops being a story

Legacy retailers and banks leaned on decades of first-party history. E-commerce and fintech players leaned on breadth across merchants. Specialty retailers argued their audience is interesting to brands far outside their own shelves.

Arun Ramaswamy, vp of tech and product at The Home Depot, said the recurring themes were measurement, outcomes and interoperability, with incrementality the central ask — advertisers want proof the money actually moved something.

Here’s the branding lesson: once a claim becomes universal (“we have rich first-party data”), it converts from a differentiator into a hygiene factor. Buyers stop scoring it and start looking for the next axis of comparison. That’s true of retail media, and it’s true of your category too.

The smarter networks sold context, not coverage

Look at how the sharpest pitches were framed. They weren’t about audience size. They were about the meaning of a moment.

• The Home Depot: Kailey Emery of Orange Apron Media described a store trip as a signal of a life stage — a renovation, a downsizing, a growing business. She cited a 30% lift in brand trust, 70% in recall and 40% in purchase intent for brands appearing alongside the retailer’s brand.
• DoorDash: CMO Tim Castree pointed to behavioural rhythms — roughly 30% more health food ordered on Tuesdays than Fridays, toothbrush orders up nearly 30% at weekends. Individually trivia; together, a map of intent.
• Macy’s: Michael Krans argued most retail media obsesses over demand capture, while Macy’s can help brands “create demand, shape choice and capture demand” — a discovery position, not a checkout one.
• Dick’s Sporting Goods: David Young leaned on youth sports and identity, citing research with eMarketer that 63% of US parents have kids in youth sports and 84% of those say it shapes purchase decisions.
• Chewy: Frank Mulcahy noted 84% of sales are subscriptions — a habit-loop audience rather than a browsing one.

Meanwhile PayPal’s Mark Grether argued the opposite advantage: breadth. A single retailer sees one store; PayPal claims visibility across merchants and Venmo. Instacart’s Ali Miller positioned the company as retail technology rather than a retailer, pitching a shared ecosystem over more fragmentation.

Storytelling is quietly entering the aisle

Albertsons offered the most interesting shift. Retail media svp Brian Monahan described moving beyond item-and-price advertising toward content distribution, pointing to a “micro sitcom” built around a Rico’s Tacos campaign that ran online and on in-store screens. Ad placements next to those videos beat benchmarks by 200%, he said, while an America 250 campaign drove a 24% lift in units sold for participating brands.

DoorDash’s Katie Daleo made the same observation from the other side: networks are realising they can run upper-funnel work, influencing shoppers early and getting surgical later. Walgreens announced digital screens across 1,200 stores from October with in-store firm Looma; H-E-B pitched 8 million Texas households weekly across nearly 500 stores.

What marketers should take from this

Three practical moves:

1. Buy occasions, not audiences. The differentiating asset is the psychological state a shopper is in — renovation, new pet, weekend restock. Match the message to that state, not just the demographic.

2. Ask what the platform cannot see. A single retailer’s view is deep and narrow; a payments network’s is wide and shallow. Choose based on the decision you’re trying to influence.

3. Stop treating retail media as a lower-funnel line item. If in-store screens can carry story, the brand-building budget and the shopper budget need to be planned together.

The wider signal is simple. In a crowded category, the winner is rarely the one with the most data. It’s the one that can explain, in a sentence, what its data means.

Source: Digiday