4 Retail Media Deals That Changed the Industry in 2024

Everybody wants in on the $60 billion that retail media is projected to make in 2025, according to Emarketer. For many agencies, retailers, and adtech firms, that means striking deals with other players to reach new audiences and data about what people buy.

As we close out 2024, ADWEEK asked three execs and industry analysts which partnerships were most significant in reshaping the retail and commerce media landscape this year.

Walmart’s big CTV play: acquiring Vizio

In February, Walmart announced its acquisition of TV manufacturer Vizio in a deal that’s expected to bolster the retailer’s advertising business, Walmart Connect. The $2.3 acquisition closed in December.

The move gives Walmart access to Vizio’s SmartCast Operating System, which has more than 18 million accounts. That data, combined with Walmart’s first-party data and Vizio’s ability to tell what people are watching through its automatic content recognition tech, could create the foundation for a closed-loop system to compete with Amazon.

“The video piece was lacking,” said Andrew Lipsman, an independent retail media analyst. “[Getting] access to the TVs themselves, which are points of integration for all the content and advertising experiences, is strategically important. But also it’s direct access to a nice chunk of CTV inventory, so they can accelerate that ambition much sooner than they would have been able to if they tried to build it organically.”

One question on the minds of media buyers: Will Walmart keep Vizio’s ACR data to itself?

“[That] would be a pretty big shock to the system,” Steven Frey, planning director at Noble People, told ADWEEK. Currently, advertisers are able to use that data to inform their CTV strategy across the ecosystem.

“If they do make that more of an exclusive data set, it would increase the value of Walmart Connect inventory by quite a bit,” he continued. “[It would] make the case for the value that can be propped up in that ecosystem.”

Publicis continues buying spree with Mars United Commerce

Publicis has spent the last five years scouting and acquiring companies to create a retail media powerhouse. The company bought Epsilon in 2019, CitrusAd in 2021, Profitero in 2022, and then Mars United Commerce in September.

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.