Retail Media Grows but Hard-to-Use Offers Hold It Back

Retail media networks are expanding across retailers, marketplaces and financial institutions, as advertising tied to actual purchases can prove more successful than advertising tied to stimulating the intent to buy.

The promise is that brands gain the ability to see whether campaigns drive incremental sales rather than just clicks or impressions.

Platforms are now scaling that capability as they leverage their massive datasets. As reported by PYMNTS, PayPal is using a transaction graph that connects activity across more than 430 million consumer accounts and tens of millions of merchants to map purchase journeys and measure outcomes tied directly to spend.

JPMorgan is extending the same logic into banking through its Chase Media Solutions platform, which leverages transaction data from roughly 80 million consumers to help brands target and measure offers based on real purchase behavior.

Stores Become Media Channels

At the same time, physical retail is being pulled into that same measurement loop. Retailers are evolving into what might be termed “media environments” where brands pay to influence decisions at the moment they are made.

Dollar General’s announcement last week of the expansion of its AI-enabled in-store audio network illustrates that trend. By linking messaging to point-of-sale data and local store conditions, the retailer is attempting to measure whether exposure inside the store translates into purchases. Through that effort, the store itself becomes a measurable channel, not just a backdrop for transactions, allowing brands to move beyond awareness and into influence tied directly to what ends up in the basket.

This scaling of retail media is being driven by how consumers now shop. The PYMNTS Intelligence Global Digital Shopping Index shows that 39% of consumers globally are “Click-and-Mortar” shoppers, blending digital discovery with in-store purchasing, while 71% still view the physical store as central to their experience even as digital tools shape how they navigate it.

Digital signals identify intent and guide the shopper, while the store becomes the place where conversion happens. In theory, this creates a closed loop where data informs targeting and purchases validate the outcome.

Redemption as Constraint

But there are challenges in the mix, tied to what happens at the final step. Data from PYMNTS Intelligence and FIS shows that nearly half of retail shoppers did not notice an offer during their most recent purchase, indicating that offers often fail to reach consumers in a usable way.

Among those who do find them, most offers require multiple steps to redeem, and only a small minority are automatically applied at checkout. That gap directly affects whether retail media can do what it is designed to do—which, in a nutshell, boils down to changing consumer behavior. If the offer is not visible or requires effort to use, the consumer defaults to the existing purchase decision, and the promotional spend fails to generate incremental value.

The research estimated a $42 billion gap between promotional dollars spent and consumer value delivered, reflecting offers that exist but do not translate into changed purchasing behavior.

Even when consumers notice offers, only about 13% of online offers and 10% of in-store offers are applied automatically, leaving the majority dependent on manual steps that introduce drop-off at each stage.

The gap has been narrowed, depending on where you look. Instacart addressed part of this problem by embedding offers directly into the shopping flow, reducing the steps between discovery and redemption.

Amazon operates at a larger scale by integrating advertising, discovery and checkout into a single environment, where offers are visible and easily applied. These models demonstrate that the ability to influence purchasing behavior depends less on data sophistication and more on whether the offer is embedded into the transaction itself. Amazon’s advertising business generated $68 billion in revenues last year, according to company filings.

By way of comparison, Macy’s market cap as of this writing is about $5.1 billion. The contrast highlights the ways in which traditional retail is moving toward the “platformization” and harnessing of data, with a digital thread running through it all, in-store and online.

Automatic application of offers, integration with payment methods and real-time personalization at checkout are the mechanisms that can turn data into measurable outcomes. As Click-and-Mortar shopping continues to grow, consumers are expecting the same level of convenience in physical environments that they experience online.

Retail media has the infrastructure to influence decisions in real time, but its effectiveness will depend on whether the system can make offers visible and usable at the moment those decisions are made.