By Jon Lowen, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Surfside
Retail media is often described as a category in transformation. What began as a lower-funnel tactic—sponsored listings, shelf-level visibility, point-of-sale influence—is now being positioned as a full-funnel channel capable of shaping brand perception, powering off-site media, and informing broader marketing strategy.
That framing sounds progressive, but it misses the point.
Retail media has supported full-funnel outcomes for years. Capabilities like using purchase data to build audiences, activate media beyond owned properties, and measure closed-loop performance have existed well before retail media became a board-level growth story.
What’s changing — and needs to change — is who is able to participate in the funnel.
A familiar story, told too narrowly
Much of today’s retail media narrative is anchored around large enterprise retailers layering new capabilities onto already sophisticated ecosystems. When a retailer controls its data, inventory, and measurement stack, expanding into off-site media or brand-oriented use cases is a logical next step.
These moves are often framed as category-defining innovation. In reality, they reflect structural advantages that have long existed. Full-funnel execution becomes easier when everything is vertically integrated.
This framing treats retail media’s evolution as something that happens only at the top of the market. It assumes progress means doing more with the same handful of retailers, rather than asking whether the category itself has been artificially constrained.
The market retail media has ignored
Most consumer spending flows through independent stores, regional chains, and specialty retailers across grocery, convenience, liquor, and other everyday categories where purchasing is frequent and intent is high. Despite the industry’s fixation on digital and national scale, 74% of consumers prefer to buy locally rather than online.
Together, this “retail majority” represents an enormous share of real-world commerce. Yet it remains largely absent from retail media planning, measurement, and budget allocation.
That absence is the consequence of the infrastructure that hasn’t existed to make fragmented retail environments behave like a scalable media channel. Without standardized data, consistent attribution, and unified activation, these retailers have been effectively excluded from the conversation.
In short, retail media has been limited by who is able to participate on the sell side, not how they unlock exposure to consumers throughout the funnel.
Why access has been the hard part
The challenge of unlocking this part of the market is structural and economic.
On their own, independent and regional retailers rarely have enough GMV to attract national advertising demand. When consolidated, however, they attract ad dollars because they represent millions of consumers.
Tech availability is a related problem. Major tech vendors do not want to support lower-volume stores because they don’t demand enough ad spend and generate enough platform fees to justify the investment.
Finally, buyer education is a problem. Advertisers need training and tools to better allocate spend across local stores and national chains.
As a result, investment has concentrated where execution is easiest, not where commerce is most representative, shaping how retail media is bought, discussed, and valued.
What expanding the market actually unlocks
When fragmented retail environments are unified (purchase data is standardized, media activation is coordinated, and outcomes are measured consistently), the category changes.
Advertisers gain access to high-intent audiences across the places where purchases actually happen, with performance evaluated against real-world transactions rather than inferred behavior.
Retailers gain monetization and insight without building complex ad businesses or managing multiple vendors. At the same time, retail media becomes more about shared infrastructure, something that can be planned, compared, and invested in with confidence.
Legitimate growth for retail media comes from making more of retail itself addressable.
Retail media’s next chapter will be shaped by whoever succeeds in making the broader retail landscape work as a system rather than a collection of silos.
The opportunity ahead isn’t about moving up the funnel; it’s about finally bringing the rest of the market with it.
