Retail Media Networks Are Changing the Game and Most Brands Are Late

The Three Waves of Digital Advertising

Digital advertising has gone through two massive waves. The first was search — Google Ads launched in 2000 and fundamentally changed how businesses reached customers at the moment of intent. The second was social — Facebook Ads (around 2007-2008) and later Instagram, TikTok, and others gave brands access to unprecedented audience targeting based on interests, demographics, and behavior.

We're now in the middle of the third wave: retail media. And just like the brands that were early to search advertising in 2003 or early to Facebook Ads in 2012, the ones getting into retail media now are building advantages that will be extremely difficult for latecomers to match.

Retail media ad spend globally surpassed $140 billion in 2025. To put that in perspective, that's larger than the entire global television ad market was just five years ago. This is not a niche trend — it's a structural shift in how advertising works.

What Retail Media Networks Actually Are

A retail media network (RMN) is an advertising platform built and operated by a retailer, using the retailer's own first-party customer data and owned media properties. When you see a "Sponsored" product at the top of an Amazon search result, that's retail media. When a banner ad on Trendyol promotes a specific brand's product, that's retail media too.

But retail media goes far beyond on-site sponsored listings. Modern RMNs include:

• On-site search ads (sponsored product listings within search results)
• On-site display ads (banners and carousels on category and product pages)
• Off-site programmatic ads (using the retailer's data to target users on other websites)
• In-store digital media (screens, digital shelf labels, checkout displays)
• Retailer apps (push notifications, in-app placements)
• Email and SMS (featured products in retailer newsletters)

The Global Players

Amazon Ads

Amazon is the pioneer and dominant force in retail media. With over 300 million active customer accounts and detailed purchase history data, Amazon's advertising platform offers targeting precision that's hard to match.

Key ad formats:

• Sponsored Products (search result listings)
• Sponsored Brands (banner with brand logo and multiple products)
• Sponsored Display (retargeting and audience-based display)
• Amazon DSP (programmatic display and video, on and off Amazon)
• Streaming TV ads (through Prime Video and Freevee)

Amazon's advertising revenue exceeded $50 billion in 2025, making it the third-largest digital ad platform globally after Google and Meta.

Walmart Connect

Walmart Connect has been the fastest-growing major retail media network over the past two years. With 240+ million weekly customers and a massive physical store footprint, Walmart offers something Amazon can't — connecting digital ad impressions to in-store purchases.

Key capabilities:

• On-site search and display across Walmart.com and the app
• Off-site programmatic through The Trade Desk partnership
• In-store TV screens and self-checkout advertising
• Closed-loop measurement covering both online and physical store sales

Other Global Networks Worth Knowing

• Instacart Ads — Grocery-focused, strong for CPG brands
• Target Roundel — Growing platform with unique audience insights
• Kroger Precision Marketing — Deep grocery purchase data
• Carrefour Links — Major player in Europe and Middle East
• Mercado Libre — Dominant in Latin America

The Turkey Context — Trendyol Ads and Hepsiburada Ads

Turkey's retail media landscape is developing rapidly, driven by two major e-commerce platforms.

Trendyol Ads

Trendyol is Turkey's largest e-commerce platform with over 30 million active buyers, making its advertising platform the most significant retail media network in the Turkish market.

Available ad formats:

• Sponsored Products — Boosted product listings in search results and category pages. This is the bread and butter of Trendyol advertising, similar to Amazon's Sponsored Products
• Store ads — Promote your Trendyol store to drive traffic
• Display banners — Homepage and category page placements for brand awareness campaigns
• Campaign participation — Premium placement during Trendyol's mega sale events

• Start with Sponsored Products. It's the most straightforward format and delivers the clearest ROI
• Monitor your ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales) closely — aim for 10-20% depending on your category and margins
• Bid higher during campaign periods (mega sale days) when traffic surges but conversion rates also increase
• Optimize product listings (title, images, description) before investing in ads — a poorly listed product won't convert no matter how much you spend on traffic

Hepsiburada Ads

Hepsiburada, as Turkey's other major e-commerce platform, has been building out its advertising capabilities steadily.

Available ad formats:

• Sponsored Products — Similar to Trendyol, product-level ads in search results
• Brand ads — Higher-visibility placements for brand awareness
• Category sponsorships — Own a category page for maximum visibility
• Hepsiburada Premium Store features that include advertising elements

The Closed-Loop Measurement Advantage

This is the single biggest reason retail media is growing so fast, and it's worth spending a minute understanding why it matters so much.

Traditional digital advertising has an attribution problem. Someone clicks a Google ad, visits your website, leaves, comes back three days later through an organic search, and buys. Who gets credit? The Google ad? The organic search? Both? It depends on your attribution model, and every model makes assumptions.

Retail media doesn't have this problem — at least not for sales that happen on the retailer's platform. When someone clicks a Sponsored Product ad on Amazon and buys the product, that's a direct, verified connection. No probabilistic matching. No multi-touch modeling. The ad drove the sale. Period.

This is why CFOs love retail media. When you tell them "we spent $50,000 on Amazon Ads and generated $300,000 in Amazon sales that we can directly verify," it's a fundamentally different conversation than "we spent $50,000 on Meta Ads and our attribution model estimates it drove $200,000 in revenue across all channels."

For brands used to arguing about attribution models and incremental lift studies, the clarity of retail media measurement feels almost too good to be true. (There are nuances — cannibalization of organic sales is a real concern — but the directness of the data is genuinely refreshing.)

How to Get Started

Step 1 — Pick Your Platform(s)

Go where your customers are buying. If you sell on Amazon, start with Amazon Ads. If you're a Turkish brand selling on Trendyol, start there. Don't spread across five platforms at once — master one first.

Step 2 — Fix Your Product Listings First

This is the step most brands skip, and it costs them dearly. Before you spend a single lira on retail media ads, make sure your product listings are optimized:

• High-quality images (minimum 5-6 per product, including lifestyle images)
• Keyword-optimized titles (include your main search terms naturally)
• Detailed product descriptions covering features, specifications, and benefits
• Competitive pricing (ads won't save an overpriced product)
• Strong reviews (aim for 4+ stars and 20+ reviews before investing heavily in ads)

Step 3 — Start With Sponsored Products

Sponsored product ads are the most efficient entry point on virtually every retail media platform. They're keyword-based, they appear in search results, and they catch shoppers at the moment of highest purchase intent.

Start with automatic targeting (the platform selects keywords based on your product listing), run it for 2-3 weeks, analyze which keywords convert, then create manual campaigns targeting your best-performing terms.

Step 4 — Set Your Measurement Framework

Decide on your key metrics before launching:

• ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales): Ad spend / ad-attributed revenue. Lower is better, but what's "good" varies wildly by category
• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): The inverse of ACoS. A 5x ROAS means $5 in revenue for every $1 in ad spend
• TACoS (Total Advertising Cost of Sales): Ad spend / total revenue (including organic). This is the more honest metric because it accounts for whether your ads are cannibalizing organic sales

Step 5 — Budget Allocation

A common question: how much of your marketing budget should go to retail media?

There's no universal answer, but here's a framework:

Why Most Brands Are Late

Despite the growth numbers, most brands — especially in Turkey and other emerging markets — are significantly underinvesting in retail media. Here's why:

Organizational silos. In many companies, the team managing Amazon or Trendyol sits under e-commerce or sales, not marketing. They focus on logistics, pricing, and inventory — not advertising. Meanwhile, the marketing team focuses on Google and Meta. Nobody owns retail media strategy.

Agency gaps. Traditional media agencies aren't always equipped for retail media. It requires understanding of both advertising AND e-commerce operations. Specialized retail media agencies are growing but still relatively rare, especially in Turkey.

Measurement comfort. Marketing teams are comfortable with impressions, clicks, and estimated conversions. Retail media introduces new metrics (ACoS, TACoS, Buy Box win rate) that feel unfamiliar.

Underestimating the channel. Some senior marketers still think of retail media as "just Amazon product ads" and don't recognize the broader strategic shift happening.

The Bottom Line

Retail media networks represent the most significant shift in digital advertising since the rise of social platforms. The combination of purchase intent data, closed-loop measurement, and growing inventory makes this channel impossible to ignore for any brand that sells through retail — online or offline.

If you're selling on Trendyol, Hepsiburada, Amazon, or any major e-commerce platform and not actively advertising on those platforms, you're subsidizing your competitors' growth. Their sponsored products are showing up where your products should be.

Start small, measure rigorously, and scale based on data. But start now — because the brands that waited three years to get on Google Ads or five years to get on Facebook all tell the same story: they wish they'd started sooner.

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