Retail media networks — advertising platforms owned and operated by retailers — continue their rapid rise as a major market force. An eMarketer report forecasts that RMN spend will exceed $62 billion in 2025, representing 17.9% of all digital media spend. That share of digital media is expected to exceed 20% in 2026 and near $100 billion in 2027.
RMNs are a natural result of e-commerce’s explosive growth, leveraging the reach of retailers’ websites, apps, email channels, social media, and even physical stores. Equally important, they tap into the wealth of first-party data generated through high-volume transactions.
While early RMNs like Amazon and Walmart led on volume, other fast-growing platforms like DoorDash Ads are redefining what brands expect from retail media.
Rather than trying to win purely on scale and size, today’s forward-thinking RMNs are winning with differentiation — through unique value propositions, innovative ad placements, and advanced attribution tools. In short: They’re gaining media share by modernizing, not just relying on retail volume.
Here are five ways retail media networks are helping brands turn consumers into customers.
Specialized solutions for specific advertising needs
Media networks run by specialized retailers often offer more agility than those from monolithic retailers like Amazon. While they may not generate data at the same scale, their distinct offerings and data pipelines can provide more tailored solutions for advertising partners.
Toby Espinosa, vice president of ads at DoorDash, explained that much of the company’s media network evolved to support an underserved market segment: franchise restaurants.
“You might think of [most] DoorDash volume as large businesses — you know, a lot of people are ordering McDonald’s,” he said on a podcast aired November 6, 2024. “But the reality is, the spender — the buyer of media — could be a local franchisee. So the brand is national, but the spend is still local.”
This uncommon ability to serve both small local businesses and national brands continues to set DoorDash Ads apart. Savvy buyers are best served by identifying similar situations where an RMN’s value propositions align with an advertiser’s own unique needs.
Leveraging unique insights for unique value propositions
Food-focused RMNs in particular — from grocery chains like Kroger to local commerce platforms like DoorDash — have a unique edge over larger, less specialized competitors: Their offerings inherently generate valuable customer-loyalty data. Used wisely, these insights can help brands support a wide range of marketing goals.
Loyalty data lends itself to a variety of high-value applications, from personalization opportunities to tailored targeting strategies. Brand affinity is often a natural outcome of the kinds of products that food-oriented retailers offer and the relationships that consumers can develop with them.
DoorDash Ads is leveraging its position as a data intermediary across merchants in the literal and figurative online food chain to serve a bevy of consumer packaged goods brands and retail businesses beyond their core restaurant clientele. And all of these are keen to tap into DoorDash’s data pipeline: In Q4 2024, 21 of the top 25 CPG advertisers in the US advertised in the DoorDash marketplace.
Enhancing ad offerings through strategic platform partnerships
These unique audiences and rich data are just the beginning, but turning that potential into value for advertisers requires a sophisticated ad platform.
As RMNs grow in importance, advertisers have noted that their ad serving, measurement, and attribution tools often lag behind those of more mature digital media channels like Google and Meta. As more RMNs expand their footprint, those comparisons will only intensify.
According to eMarketer, advertisers eager to ramp up spend in retail media are looking for RMNs to make it easier to scale buys across networks and streamline reporting capabilities. To quickly catch up with larger competitors, many RMNs have augmented their ad platform offerings through strategic third-party technological partnerships.
For DoorDash, tech integration partnerships with Pacvue, Flywheel, and Skai enable CPG brands to frictionlessly access DoorDash’s onsite ad inventory, enabling optimization opportunities and robust reporting and performance insights.
Diversifying advertiser options and ad formats
The best RMNs aim for ad formats that integrate naturally into the customer journey. Given their inherent retail-oriented nature, RMNs often have a built-in advantage over traditional digital media when it comes to capitalizing on organic purchase behavior. A data-driven understanding of its own customers’ behaviors enables an advanced RMN to deliver the right ad to the right consumer at the right moment.
Advertisers are eager for offerings that convert intent into action. For DoorDash Ads, this led to a mix of promotional offerings and sponsored placements during the consideration stage — and extending those opportunities post-checkout through their DoubleDash feature, which allows customers to add complementary items from a different store or restaurant to their order post-checkout.
Sponsored Products on DoubleDash encourage consumers to discover and add new items while searching or browsing post-checkout. With the ability to independently target and monitor ad performance on DoubleDash, advertisers can experiment and tailor campaigns that perform best for a second order on DoorDash or that resonate most with consumers ordering from restaurants. Sponsored Products on DoubleDash have an 18% higher Click-to-Conversion rate than non-DoubleDash placements.*
Expanding opportunities outside of owned-and-operated channels
To extend the full value of their first-party data to advertisers, retail media networks are expanding beyond their owned-and-operated platform placement opportunities and direct product offerings.
Many leading RMNs are finding that demand threatens to outpace supply. There’s no shortage of advertisers eager to avail themselves of RMN audiences and data, but there’s a limit to how many ads can be run on-site without risking the user experience that brings audiences to their platform in the first place. Conversely, nascent RMNs with less on-platform inventory are at an inherent disadvantage without offsite levers to pull.
As a result, many RMNs are actively expanding their offsite advertising offerings. According to eMarketer data, US retail media offsite ad spend is expected to grow 42.1% in 2025 — more than twice the expected growth rate (15.3%) of on-site ad spend.
DoorDash Ads launched offsite capabilities in October and is doubling down on those capabilities through their recent acquisition of ad tech platform Symbiosys. Symbiosys is a next-generation retail media platform that helps brands expand their reach into digital channels, such as search, social, and display, and enables retailers to extend the breadth of their retail media networks. These updates reflect DoorDash’s bold investment in global ad technology —empowering businesses with greater control, clearer results and insights on their performance, and new ways to connect with customers both on and beyond the platform.
Ultimately, RMN growth may depend on how well retailer data performs off-platform.
“We very well know there are other people that are hungry on a daily basis who are not always on DoorDash,” Espinosa said during his podcast appearance. “And so, can we provide the ability for brands to reach those people using our data?”
Learn more about how RMNs like DoorDash Ads are serving up a better advertising experience for brands and customers alike.
This post was created by Insider Studios with DoorDash Ads.
*Average across Sponsored Product campaigns that ran in Q4 2024 based on DoorDash’s internal analysis comparing performance of DoubleDash vs. other placements
