Retail media fragmentation: 7 challenges brands must solve to scale

No other digital channel looks like this. Paid search has Google. Social advertising has Meta, TikTok, and a handful of others. But retail media has dozens to hundreds of networks globally, each with its own data, metrics, reporting, and ways of working. That structural fragmentation is not a phase the industry is passing through. It is the nature of the channel itself, because every retailer is, by definition, its own walled garden.