According to PYMNTS.com, a recent CES panel titled “Fueling Innovation: How Retail Media Accelerates the Next Wave of Tech Growth,” presented by Target’s Roundel network, featured executives from Target, Meta, and Oura. The discussion framed today’s marketing landscape by fragmentation, tighter budgets, and high expectations for personalization. Panelists detailed how retail media is evolving beyond ad inventory to leverage first-party data signals, like those from CVS, to connect consumer intent with messaging. A key example was Oura Ring, which cited projected sales jumping from $500 million in 2024 to about $1.5 billion this year, partly fueled by retail media exposure. The core shift emphasized was from just delivering ad performance to continuously proving it, using AI for efficiency while keeping human strategy central.
The Real Shift: From Ads to Anchor Experiences
Here’s the thing: the most interesting part of this isn’t the growth numbers. It’s the fundamental reframing of what a “retail media network” even is. For years, it was basically, “We have website traffic and a loyalty program, so buy some banner ads.” Now, as Roundel’s Guthrie Collin put it, it’s starting with the customer experience. His story about the Target app’s store mode predicting his cereal need while he hunted for milk is the perfect micro-example. That’s not an ad. That’s a utility powered by data. The argument is that the same predictive signal—”person buying milk in the morning”—is what makes a promoted cereal offer actually relevant rather than annoying. The “anchor experience” is the core utility (finding your stuff in the store), and the media or promotion becomes a “boost” that feels native to it. That’s a much harder, but more valuable, proposition than just selling digital billboard space.
AI’s Role: Efficiency, Not Replacement
AI came up, of course. It always does. But the tone was refreshingly pragmatic. Meta’s Alicia LeBeouf nailed it: AI is for efficiency and productivity, freeing up marketers to focus on broader strategy. Guthrie Collin was even more direct, dismissing the idea that tech can outperform humans at everything. The goal is humans plus technology. Think about it: the sheer volume of data from loyalty transactions, in-store navigation, and online browsing is impossible for a team to parse manually. AI can process that at scale, spot patterns (like the milk-cereal link), and prioritize opportunities. But the creative strategy, the brand voice, the decision on what that “anchor experience” should be? That’s still firmly in the human realm. AI just lets them make those big calls based on better information.
The Ultimate Challenge: Proving It
And this leads to the biggest hurdle and the biggest selling point: measurement. Collin’s line, “You don’t just deliver the performance, you always prove the performance,” is the new mantra. In a world of tighter budgets, CMOs are getting grilled on ROI. The promise of retail media networks is that they close the loop. Because they own the transaction data (whether online or in-store), they can theoretically connect an ad seen on Meta, informed by Target purchase history, to an actual sale at a register. That’s the holy grail. But it’s also incredibly complex, requiring deep integration of data across platforms that are often wary of sharing. When it works, as LeBeouf noted with Meta and Roundel, it improves return on ad spend by aligning ads with precise moments of conversion. The question is, how many retailers have data clean enough and tech stacks sophisticated enough to truly “prove it” at scale?
Beyond CPG: What It Means for Tech
Look, retail media wasn’t born in the tech aisle. It was born with toothpaste and soda. But Oura’s presence on the panel is a signal. A high-consideration, premium tech product using retail media as a discovery channel and feedback loop? That’s new. It shows this is becoming a mainstream channel for any brand that relies on retail partners. The physical shelf space and the digital promotional space are merging into a single continuum of discovery. For a hardware brand, that means retail media can drive awareness, but also provide immediate data on what messaging works to convert a curious browser into a buyer. That feedback is gold when you’re scaling. Basically, the playbook CPG companies wrote is being adopted by everyone else, and the networks that can handle complex, high-value products will win.
So what’s next? The fundamentals won’t change: customer expectations for relevance and convenience will only grow. The networks that win will be the ones that, like Target’s example, use tech to make the core shopping experience better first. The advertising that fits seamlessly into that flow will feel less like an interruption and more like a service. And in an uncertain economy, the ability to prove that service actually drove a sale is what will get the budget allocated. It’s a more mature, more challenging, and ultimately more interesting phase for retail media. The easy money in selling ad space is over. Now the real work begins.
