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Marketers are adding yet another item on their growing honey-do list for smaller and mid-sized retail media networks. They’re pushing for real-time bidding, a form of programmatic advertising that allows ads to be bought and sold in real time. Instead of retailers setting a fixed cost-per-click or CPM, marketers bid on individual ad impressions and the winner gets the ad space.
It’s a push for more control in the retail media ecosystem. Marketers have been spending more and more on retail media, even in light of economic uncertainty. By the end of 2025, retail media is expected to account for nearly 18% of U.S. digital ad spending — or $62.35 billion dollars. But that growth doesn’t come without scrutiny — or marketers’ hopes to standardize the space.
Marketers have already tasked RMNs with more flexibility in joint business plan (JBP) negotiations and deal making, incrementality and attribution, and transparency in reporting actual return on ad spend.
“Media buyers are very used to and comfortable with auction-based and real-time buying methods from non-retail media now,” said Anthony Costanzo, chief analytics officer at Mile Marker independent media agency. “There’s that expectation they should be able to execute that in the retail media world as well.”
Bigger players in retail media have already offered programmatic tools:
- Amazon has been pitched as a full-scale programmatic solution for years. (Inside the rising ad spend that fueling Amazon’s DSP rapid growth.)
- Walmart Connect transitioned to programmatic with auction pricing for nearly all onsite display campaigns last year.
- Instacart released optimized bidding for its CPG advertisers in 2022 where machine learning algorithms set bids for ads and dynamically adjusts them throughout the day.
- Kroger Precision Marketing began offering its PrecisionBid tool for off-platform ads in 2024 which optimizes programmatic inventory in real-time based on store sales instead of CPMs or click-thru-rates.
To continue taking in ad dollars, retailers have a few industry pain points to address, including fragmentation, measurement and standardization. Marketers say real-time bidding could be resolve, or at least correct their media spend. To put some numbers to it, 80% of buyers look to programmatic to make buying in retail media easier and more efficient, according to recent research from Koddi, a commerce tech company.
The case marketers are making is that real-time bidding allows media buyers to set the price, bidding in the auction-like market, as opposed to having the retailers themselves set the price.
“The world of retail becomes a little bit of a black box, where you maybe necessarily don’t know how much you’re spending versus a competitor,” said Leah Sallen, managing director of commerce media at VML, a creative agency. She added, “It allows us actually to be more competitive and create a more advantageous space.”
Real-time bidding, or programmatic for that matter, may not be the silver bullet marketers think it is. It wasn’t so long ago that Made For Advertising sites became the poster child for the programmatic system being gamed by bad faith actors. Thus casting an unfavorable shadow over programmatic advertising and its offshoots, like real-time bidding. For retailers, handing the reins over to media buyers via real-time bidding and other auction-style bidding features could depress CPMs as marketers look for cheap media of near perfect quality.
Still, at this point, most sophisticated RMNs offer some sort of real-time bidding or auction-based pricing, according to marketers. Meaning, a precedent has been set with no signs of slowing as marketers continue to push for more control over retail media buys.
“In competing with the marketplace, we can choose to put our dollars with this vendor here or we can choose to put it with you, but we need it to be a little bit more apples to apples,” Sallen said.
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