Why Full-Funnel Retail Media is the Ultimate Shopper-Media Strategy in 2025

Why Full-Funnel Retail Media is the Ultimate Shopper-Media Strategy in 2025
Photo by Melanie Deziel / Unsplash

Retail media networks (RMNs) have been on a tear, dominating budgets with conversion-driven ad formats. But as we enter the second half of 2025, industry sentiment is shifting: this isn't just about point-of-purchase anymore. Now, full-funnel performance—awareness, consideration, and conversion—matters.

1. The Mid‑2025 Challenge

According to Digiday, it's make-or-break time. RMNs must prove they influence the entire customer journey. If they don’t, advertisers will reallocate spend. Retailers like Amazon lead with a robust DSP and Marketing Cloud, delivering top-of-funnel reach and closed-loop measurement. Others like Walmart, Instacart, and Kroger, are catching up fast.

2. Beckoning Advertiser Expectations

Today's media buyers demand more. They want:

  • Programmatic placements across display, CTV, social
  • Transparent reporting from awareness through purchase
  • Seamless integration with broader marketing ecosystems
    • Deanna Mulkeen of Wpromote stresses that data, scaled inventory, reach, and closed-loop analytics must all align—or dollars move elsewhere.

3. RMNs Rising to the Occasion

Amazon's DSP remains the gold standard, offering broad reach and deep insights. But Walmart and Instacart are forging ahead, enhancing their media platforms with cross-channel offerings, like off-site programmatic ads and CTV placements that link back into their data infrastructure .

4. Shopper Marketing Implications

The rise of full-funnel RMNs impacts shopper marketing in several ways:

  • Unified creative messaging: Brands must craft consistent narratives spanning awareness to purchase.
  • Cross-functional orchestration: Media, analytics, creative, and trading teams need to collaborate at new scale.
  • Measurement discipline: Key metrics now include reach, lift, conversion rates, attributed sales, and lifetime value. It's not enough to just report RoAS.

5. Steps to Win

  1. Audit your current RMN mix for siloed vs. full-funnel capabilities.
  2. Identify gaps—are you missing upper-funnel video, CTV, or programmatic reach?
  3. Push integration to ensure tracking, creatives, and strategy connect to your brand’s broader media ecosystem.
  4. Define success metrics like campaign lift, reach growth, purchase rates and set benchmarks accordingly.

6. Long-term Brand Advantage

Retail media growth isn’t going down. The winners will be those who embed awareness-building within their RMN DNA; where a shopper learns about a product in video or social, sees supportive messaging digitally, and then engages at shelf...all tracked and optimized in a loop.


Full-funnel isn’t a buzzword—it’s the evolution of retail media. As budgets mature, the systems that treat consumer journeys holistically will see more trust, more spend, and measurable ROI that spans impressions to lifetime value.