Retail Media in Academia: EMAC special session

How far retail media has come! Back in 2019, when I started at Amazon Ads, few outside wanted to hear about it. And while practice has caught on, academia has not: the few retail media articles I review are a paltry picture of the promise. In 2025 however, Journal of Retailing editor Katrijn Gielens organized and introduced a full special session with new academic articles in the packed room at the European Marketing Academy (EMAC):

Featuring

1) prof. Bernd Skiera on retail media as the future of advertising in commerce;

2) my four stakeholder framework for new research questions in retail media;

3) prof. Dennis Herhausen on the purchase effect of in-store digital signage.

Our first presenter, Prof Bernd Skiera set the tone in defining retail media and demonstrating its importance: as the largest growth trend in advertising:

Bernd described the retailer as the matchmaker between buyer and producer – a role retailers have always filled.

Retail media adds the retailer making advertising space available to brands:

1)        In the physical store

2)        On the retailer’s website

3)        On the broader Web using the retailer’s first-party data

Though Bernd objected to the latter being classified as retail media, because it represents a ploy from search and social media sites to (re)claim the revenue stream they are losing.

Without retail media, it is tough for a retailer to turn a profit:

And Amazon only recently became #1; overtaking Alibaba:

Surprisingly though, retail media does not always increase retailer revenues:

Because most of the brand budget comes from the trade marketing they traditionally spent on retailers:

Finally, many other companies can start serving ads as retailers do:

Next, I presented the highlights of a recent working paper with the 4 stakeholder framework for evaluating retail media:

My definition was shorter than Bernd’s:

While I illustrated the growth of the number of retail media networks (RMNs), offering opportunities but also fragmentation for brands.

While over 70% of consumer brands include retail media in their planning, only 57% trust the Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) the retailers report to them

Leading to tough balancing acts:

Meanwhile, academic research is limited to:

1)        Practical reports and interviews on how to do retail media;

2)        Game theory on why we observe brand-retailer power dynamics;

3)        A few empirical papers by Bernd and coauthors, and my own.

As a result, many interesting research questions remain unanswered:

Finally, prof Dennis Herhausen brought retail media into the physical store:

Collecting data with shopping cart RFID, a video starts playing on the screen and audio starts playing directly at the shopper:

This field experiment has a control group, which is similar to the exposed group in this randomized design:

Dennis and friends expected product, timing, and campaign characteristics to influence the ad effect on purchase:

The results? Ad exposure increases purchases by 8.1% on average, with positive effect of product popularity and novelty, but negative effect of price and promotion signals, which likely indicates substitution:

And an unexpected positive effect of crowdedness: the more folks in the store, the more likely the ad to drive purchase.

The bottom line? Brand manufacturers greatly benefit from digital signage:

As these quotes illustrate

While retailers break even in 1-2 years given the cost of the equipment. Interestingly, most of the revenues come from selling this form of retail media, instead of increasing store sales:

So that's a wrap! Which retail media questions would YOU like to ask or answer?