Those acquisitions have put Publicis aheads of other holding companies, according to experts.

“If I’m at an agency holding company, I’m looking at what Publicis has been doing around retail media and saying, ‘We’re going to get totally left in the dust if we don’t look really hard at some companies to shore up our offering to the market,’” said Sean Cheyney, head of retail media at Vistar Media.

It’s something that analysts including Lipsman have speculated factored into Omnicom’s decision to acquire IPG, as the two holding companies combined have a better chance at competing against Publicis for commerce ad dollars.

“That Mars acquisition is going to flourish pretty strongly in 2025,” Cheyney predicted.

Microsoft shutters PromoteIQ, strikes deal with Criteo

Microsoft first acquired retail advertising startup PromoteIQ in 2019, signaling that it, too, wanted in on the retail media dollars that Amazon was raking in.

In July, though, Microsoft and Criteo announced a new retail media partnership. That deal seems to have eclipsed its work with PromoteIQ, effectively shutting down the retail media firm, according to retail media observers.

The collapse of PromoteIQ created a frenzy among commerce platforms vying for the business that was left over, Cheyney explained. That prompted some retailers to rethink their overall retail media strategy, which led to the rise of tech firms like Zitcha, Placement.io, and Pentaleap, he continued.

These tech firms serve as a “single front door” to retail media businesses so that advertisers can more simply buy inventory across on-site, off-site, and in-store placements.

“There may be multiple platforms [powering the backend], but to whoever is interfacing with the UI, it just seems like a ‘one-stop shop’ where all of the buying and reporting funnels through,” Cheyney explained.

Best Buy and CNET combine ad inventory and first-party data

In the first of what Lipsman predicts will be many partnerships of its kind, Best Buy and CNET combined their ad inventory and audiences in April.

“[It was] the first domino of this inevitable trend of digital publisher partnerships with retail media networks,” Lipsman explained. It’s not just delivering Best Buy ads into CNET content, he emphasized, it’s also bringing CNET content into the stores in a way that aims to support in-person consumer experiences.