Retail Media 101: Understanding Cross-Platform Marketplace Campaigns To Fuel Holistic Growth

Retail media is the fastest-growing digital ad channel, expected to surpass traditional TV in spend. For mid-sized and enterprise brands, visibility at the point of purchase is now as critical as brand-building campaigns.

The New Battleground of Commerce

The path to purchase is no longer a straight line. It has become a maze of touchpoints, from social discovery to marketplace search to in-store pickup. Today’s consumers might learn about your brand on TikTok, read reviews on Target.com, compare items on Amazon, and finally place the order through Instacart. The paths to purchase overlap, converge, and splinter in real time.

That’s why Retail Media has become the connective tissue of modern commerce. It bridges brand awareness to final conversion in a way no other channel can. But not all approaches are created equal. Holistic growth requires a cross-platform strategy, carefully managed budgets, and the right measurement frameworks to reveal where your investments are truly paying off. At Front Row, that’s exactly how we help beauty, wellness, and CPG brands go from fragmented spend to sustainable, profitable growth.

What Sets Retail Media Apart?

Unlike traditional digital ads powered by rented third-party data, Retail Media taps into retailers’ own first-party shopper insights. That means your ads reach people who aren’t just browsing: they’re ready to buy. The precision of this intent-driven targeting is why Retail Media is outperforming nearly every other digital channel.

For beauty, health, and wellness brands, the implications are huge. The “shelf” of yesterday is now a digital search bar, and winning visibility against competitors requires not only investing in retailer ads, but optimizing them to outperform rival products. From Amazon’s sponsored placements to Ulta’s featured listings, every marketplace has its own ecosystem, algorithms, and consumer behaviors. The challenge is knowing how to navigate them all in harmony.

Our team sees this challenge as an opportunity for something big: a winning strategy that fuels a full-funnel approach. Campaigns that focus solely on search are leaving awareness and loyalty on the table, while display-only activity often misses the conversion moment. The real magic happens when every tactic is connected, measured, and continually refined.

The Cross-Platform Imperative

One of the biggest mistakes our team says they have seen brands make is assuming success on a single retailer equates to long-term growth. But the truth is, your customers shop everywhere. If your media strategy doesn’t reflect this reality, you’re invisible for half the journey. 

We design campaigns that run seamlessly across retailers with a connected strategy, not disjointed experiments. The result is not just stronger performance within each retail channel, but measurable lift across direct-to-consumer sites, social channels, and even in-store sales.

Think of it this way: launching a hero SKU with tailored retail media support on Amazon and Walmart simultaneously doesn’t just maximize sales on those platforms. It also drives branded search on Google, improves in-store sell-through, and strengthens consumer loyalty wherever they shop. Cross-platform isn’t optional anymore; it’s the only way to grow market share in a fragmented retail landscape.

Turning Spend Into Strategy

Investing in Retail Media without a plan is asking for the strategy to sink: you’ll spend heavily and still lose visibility to competitors. Each retailer has its own rules of engagement: unique algorithms, varying ad formats, seasonal events, and auction dynamics that constantly shift performance outcomes. Our team’s expertise lies in taking these complexities off your plate and turning them into a clear framework for growth.


We make sure your budgets operate on two levels: a reliable baseline investment that ensures evergreen discoverability and always-on presence, paired with strategic bursts that maximize impact during key launches, seasonal moments, and high-value tentpoles such as Prime Day, Walmart Deals Days, or Target Circle Week. Without this balance, your brand risks either being invisible at crucial times or overspending in ways that never translate into sales.

Just as important, we will help you avoid the biggest pitfall we see in the industry: chasing retailer “asks” without tying them back to brand-level objectives. Our approach integrates your paid media investments with your overall retail plan, marketing calendar, and sales targets, so every dollar you spend ladders up to sustainable, profitable growth.

Attribution & Measurement: Beyond ROAS

The challenge with Retail Media doesn’t stop at campaign execution. It’s accurate measurement where many brands hit a wall. Every retailer provides its own dashboard, its own KPIs, and its own version of attribution. Without the right expertise, it’s easy to drown in numbers that won’t add up to a real picture of performance.

That’s why we go beyond surface-level ROAS. Our data-driven approach blends retailer-reported results with third-party analytics and advanced attribution methods to answer the real questions: 

• Did this investment generate incremental sales, not just shift volume around? 
• How did retailer campaigns influence off-platform demand in social, influencer, or direct-to-consumer channels? 
• Where should the next dollar go to maximize both near-term efficiency and long-term brand building?

In short: we turn measurement into a strategy tool, not just a report.

The Future of Retail Media in Connected Commerce

As more retailers roll out proprietary platforms, the landscape will only grow more fragmented. Each will demand attention, each will present unique KPIs, and each will push brands toward short-term performance metrics. But real leaders will resist the temptation of short-term-only thinking. The brands that win will balance today’s ROAS with tomorrow’s brand equity, aligning retail media with supply chain realities, inventory planning, and broader marketing goals.

Retail Media is no longer optional. The brands who thrive will be those who recognize that marketplace campaigns are not just ad buys, but strategic growth engines requiring cross-platform alignment, smart budget management, and attribution that looks beyond walled gardens.


That’s where Front Row comes in. We specialize in helping beauty, health, wellness, and CPG brands navigate the nuances of each retailer platform while connecting the dots across the entire commerce ecosystem. Whether you’re looking to launch, scale, or simply make your investments work harder, our goal is the same: turn your retail media into a driver of category dominance and long-term market share.


The Retail Media team at Front Row was built to help you tackle this complexity head-on. We bring media, retail strategy, and brand-building under one roof, helping you rise above channel silos and grow holistically in an increasingly competitive digital shelf.

Ready to take the guesswork out of Retail Media and start turning spend into lasting growth?