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Retail Media vs. Trade Marketing: Navigating the New Landscape

Published 23rd Feb 2025 by Adonis Hertz

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From Trade Marketing to Retail Media: A Brief Historical Evolution

Trade Marketing’s Origins: Trade marketing emerged as brands’ strategy to win over the “middlemen” – distributors, wholesalers, and retailers – to stock and promote their products. It’s inherently a B2B strategy focused on the supply chain. The goal was simple: secure shelf space and in-store visibility. Tactics included volume discounts, co-op advertising funds, in-store displays, and joint promotions. Trade marketing ensured retailers would list a brand’s products and give them prime placement ( Trade Marketing \| Retail Media \| Advertima Audience AI) ( Trade Marketing vs Retail Marketing: Key Differences Explained \| trademarketinginsider). Essentially, trade marketing is about marketing through the trade channel – incentivizing your retail partners so that your product ultimately sells to consumers.

Shopper Marketing and the Path to Purchase: As retail environments grew more sophisticated, shopper marketing emerged as a subset of trade marketing. This practice focused on influencing consumers at the point of purchase (in-store signage, sampling, loyalty programs, etc.), often funded by trade budgets. For years, shopper marketing and trade promotions were how brands influenced decisions inside a retailer’s walls. However, measurement was often crude – success was gauged by spikes in sales or market share, without detailed attribution. Creative control in these efforts often lay partly with retailers (e.g. a grocer’s weekly ad circular) and partly with brands supplying collateral, leading to blurry lines in brand messaging.

The Digital Disruption – Rise of Retail Media: Enter the e-commerce revolution and digital advertising. As shoppers shifted online and retailers built robust websites and apps, a new opportunity surfaced: retailers themselves selling advertising space. What started in the 2010s as simple banner ads or product search ads on retailer websites (often managed under trade/shopper teams) has exploded into Retail Media Networks (RMNs) – a full-fledged media business for retailers. Amazon was the trailblazer: by 2020, Amazon’s advertising business grew 52% in one year to $21.5 billion ( Trade Marketing vs Retail Marketing: Key Differences Explained \| trademarketinginsider), making it the third-largest digital advertising player after Google and Facebook. Seeing this success, nearly every major retailer – Walmart (Walmart Connect), Target (Roundel), Kroger, Tesco, and others – launched their own retail media platforms.

Today, retail media has “ballooned into an independent new media category” ( Trade Marketing \| Retail Media \| Advertima Audience AI) rather than just a line item in a trade marketing plan. In fact, 68% of advertisers are already working with one or more retail media networks ( Trade Marketing \| Retail Media \| Advertima Audience AI), and GroupM forecasts retail media to be the fastest-growing media channel, with an expected 17.5% growth in 2024 ( Retail Media: Why Advertisers Need to Address How Different Teams Collaborate to Ensure Success – Advertising Week). Within the next two to three years, U.S. retail media ad spend is projected to top $100 billion (triple its 2021 size) ( Driving Brand Success With Retail Media Innovation \| BCG). This historical shift didn’t happen overnight – it’s the result of changing shopper behavior (online research, hybrid shopping), retailers realizing the goldmine of their first-party data, and brands chasing more measurable ROI.

Retail Media vs. Trade Marketing – Key Differences

While they both ultimately aim to drive product sales through retail channels, retail media and trade marketing differ in fundamental ways. Here are the key differences across budget, measurement, and strategic objectives:

- Audience & Focus: Trade marketing is B2B-focused – its “audience” is the retailer or distributor. Success in trade marketing means your product is stocked, visible, and promoted by the retailer ( Trade Marketing vs Retail Marketing: Key Differences Explained \| trademarketinginsider). Retail media, on the other hand, is B2C-focused (through a B2B2C lens). It targets end consumers within a retailer’s ecosystem (online or in-store) with advertising messages. In simple terms, trade marketing influences the retailer, while retail media influences the shopper (often at the point of purchase). This shift in focus means retail media is effectively a form of shopper-facing advertising, powered by the retailer’s data and channels. - Budget Allocation: Traditionally, trade marketing budgets have been part of sales expenditure – often a separate bucket from brand advertising budgets. Companies allocate a percentage of revenue for trade spend (e.g., trade promotions, slotting fees, etc.), managed by sales or shopper marketing teams. Retail media spend, however, blurs the lines. Initially, brands funded retail media campaigns largely out of those same shopper marketing/trade budgets – in fact, 56% of companies say their retail media spend comes from shopper marketing budgets ( Trends 2023: Retailer Media Networks Ratings and Challenges \| Path to Purchase Institute). This made sense as early retail media buys were seen as “digital end-caps” or online promos. But as retail media matures into a strategic advertising channel, we’re seeing a shift: brand marketing is now overtaking shopper marketing as the source of retail media funding ( Retail Media: Why Advertisers Need to Address How Different Teams Collaborate to Ensure Success – Advertising Week). In other words, CMOs are starting to carve out portions of the media budget (traditionally meant for Google, Facebook, TV, etc.) for retail media networks. This difference in budget sources is critical – it influences who “owns” the strategy (more on that conflict later). - Measurement & Data: One of the biggest divides between trade marketing and retail media is the measurement capability. Trade marketing has historically been hard to measure precisely – you might see an uplift in sales during a promotion or increased orders from a retailer, but attributing that to specific trade activities can be murky. It’s often measured in broad strokes (e.g., quarterly sales volume, market share gains, or meeting a retailer’s sell-in targets). Retail media, by contrast, is highly data-driven and measurable. Because it operates like digital advertising, it offers verifiable audience data and campaign metrics in real time ( Trade Marketing \| Retail Media \| Advertima Audience AI) ( Trade Marketing \| Retail Media \| Advertima Audience AI). Brands can track impressions, clicks, and conversions on retailer sites, and even link exposures to in-store sales in some cases (through loyalty programs or in-store digital tracking). Closed-loop attribution – connecting an ad view to an actual purchase in the same retailer’s store or site – is the holy grail, and retail media is delivering on it ( Driving Brand Success With Retail Media Innovation \| BCG). For example, retail media networks enable brands to see how an online ad influenced in-store buying via loyalty account data, something traditional trade spend could only guess at. This superior measurement appeals to any data-driven CMO: it’s no surprise one study found 34% of advertisers now say retail media networks are more effective than other digital media (versus just 15% a year prior) ( Trends 2023: Retailer Media Networks Ratings and Challenges \| Path to Purchase Institute). The ability to target and optimize Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) with retailer data (and even calculate incremental ROAS or iROAS) gives retail media an edge over blunt trade promotions. - Strategic Objectives: Trade marketing’s objective is to “seal the deal” in the distribution channel ( [\[PDF\] Trade Marketing in Transition. \| Criteo](https://www.criteo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Report-criteo-trade-marketing-in-transition.pdf#:~:text=,with%20retailers%20through%20local%20media)). That means securing retailer buy-in, negotiating shelf space, running joint promotions – all to ensure your product is available and pushed by the retailer. It’s very much about driving volume through retailer relationships and often short-term sales boosts (think: “sell-in” volume and trade deal efficiency). Retail media’s objective is to influence the consumer’s purchase decision at the critical moment and drive sell-through. It operates across the marketing funnel: initially, retail media was seen as lower-funnel (sponsored product ads that drive immediate conversion). Now, many retail media networks are expanding to upper-funnel offerings like video, CTV, and off-site ads for awareness ( Retail Media: Why Advertisers Need to Address How Different Teams Collaborate to Ensure Success – Advertising Week) ( Retail Media: Why Advertisers Need to Address How Different Teams Collaborate to Ensure Success – Advertising Week). So the strategy for retail media can span from building brand awareness (top of funnel, via a retailer’s audience data on external channels) to closing the sale (bottom funnel, via sponsored search on the retailer’s site). Brands use retail media not just to get the sale but also to glean insights (since retailers share rich data) and even to build loyalty (through personalized offers in retailer apps ( Driving Brand Success With Retail Media Innovation \| BCG)). In summary, trade marketing is about getting your product in the store, while retail media is about making it jump off the shelf (physical or digital) into the customer’s cart, with precision targeting along the way. - Creative Control & Format: In traditional trade marketing, creative executions are often retailer-centric. For example, a brand might co-fund a retailer’s print ad or in-store signage – the retailer’s marketing team often designs the creative to fit their store theme or flyer format, with the brand’s input being indirect. With retail media, the brand typically supplies the ads (banners, sponsored product content, etc.), so there is more direct creative control but within the retailer’s ad platform constraints. Advertisers do voice concerns about creative freedom on retail media networks, asking questions like “How much creative control do I have over the ads served, and will it align with my brand identity?” ( Pentaleap Blog: RMNs: This is What Your Advertisers Want from You). The reality is that retail media ads must conform to retailer guidelines (size, style, context relevance), and sometimes brands feel the formats (e.g., a sponsored product listing) limit their storytelling. On the flip side, new retail media offerings (like custom brand pages on retailer sites or in-store digital displays) are giving brands canvases to express their identity – albeit in collaboration with the retailer. The key difference is co-creation: in retail media, brands and retailers often co-create ad content that balances brand messaging with retailer context, whereas in trade marketing, a lot of the consumer-facing creative (like a price promo tag or endcap sign) was controlled by the retailer with less focus on brand storytelling.