Retail media is a landlord, not a partner.

A CPG brand I worked with got the pitch last spring. The retailer's media team came in with a deck that used the word "partnership" fourteen times. Closed-loop measurement. First-party shopper data. Full-funnel activation. By the end of the meeting, the brand team was genuinely excited. They felt like they were being invited into something. What they were actually being shown was a rent increase dressed up as a co-investment opportunity.

Retail media networks are the fastest-growing advertising channel in a decade. The revenue numbers are staggering, and every major retailer is either running one or building one. The pitch is always the same: we have the data, we have the shoppers, and we can close the loop between impression and purchase better than anyone. All of that is true. None of it makes the relationship a partnership.

The economics are landlord economics

Here's what the partnership narrative obscures. The retailer controls the shelf. The retailer controls the search algorithm. The retailer controls the customer data. And now, through the media network, the retailer is selling brands the right to be visible on a platform the retailer already owns and operates. That's not collaboration. That's a toll road.

In traditional media, you buy reach from a publisher who doesn't also control whether your product gets distributed. The publisher and the distributor are separate entities with separate incentives. In retail media, they're the same company. The entity selling you advertising is the same entity deciding where your product sits on the shelf, how it appears in search results, and whether your promotions get featured. The leverage is structural and permanent.

I've watched brands increase their retail media spend three years running and still lose shelf placement. The spend doesn't buy loyalty. It buys temporary visibility in a system designed to extract maximum revenue from every square foot, physical and digital. The moment you stop paying, the visibility disappears. That's rent.

The data asymmetry is the real problem

The partnership pitch leans hard on data. And the data is genuinely valuable. Knowing what shoppers actually buy, not just what they click on, is a meaningful advantage for media planning. But the data flows in one direction. The retailer gets richer shopper profiles with every campaign you run. You get an aggregated performance report you can't take anywhere else.

Try asking a retail media network for customer-level data you can use in your own models. Try asking for a clean room that actually gives you portable insights. The answer is almost always no, or yes with so many restrictions that the data is functionally locked inside their ecosystem. The retailer accumulates intelligence about your customers. You accumulate invoices.

This matters because it compounds over time. Every dollar a brand spends on retail media makes the retailer's data asset more valuable and the brand's own customer understanding more dependent on the retailer's reporting. The information asymmetry widens with every campaign cycle. That's not a partnership dynamic. That's a dependency dynamic.

Why brands keep paying

If the economics are this lopsided, why does every brand keep writing the check? Because the alternative feels worse. If your competitor is buying sponsored search placement and you're not, you lose the digital shelf. In categories where online search drives a significant share of purchase decisions, going dark on retail media means going invisible at the moment of highest intent.

This is the landlord's ultimate leverage. You're not paying because the return is exceptional. You're paying because the cost of not paying is catastrophic. The same way a restaurant in a prime location pays above-market rent not because the space is worth it but because losing the location would kill the business. Retail media operates on the same principle. The value proposition isn't "this will grow your brand." It's "this will prevent your brand from shrinking."

I understand why brand teams go along with it. The reporting looks clean. The attribution is tight. The internal story is easy to tell. But clean reporting on a structurally disadvantaged investment is still a structurally disadvantaged investment.

What honest strategy looks like here

I'm not arguing that brands should abandon retail media. That would be naive. The channel works, and in many categories it's a necessary cost of doing business. But it should be treated as what it is: a distribution cost, not a media strategy. The line item belongs next to trade spend, not next to brand building.

The brands I've seen navigate this well do a few things differently. They set a ceiling on retail media spend as a percentage of revenue at that retailer and they hold it. They invest separately in channels where they own the data and the customer relationship. They build direct-to-consumer capabilities not as a replacement for retail but as a counterweight, a way to develop customer intelligence that isn't locked inside someone else's platform.

Most importantly, they stop pretending the relationship is something it's not. Calling your landlord a partner doesn't lower the rent. It just makes you less likely to negotiate.

The framing matters

Language shapes strategy more than most people admit. When a brand team calls retail media a "partnership," they plan differently than when they call it a "cost of distribution." The partnership frame encourages co-investment thinking, shared roadmaps, deepening commitment. The distribution cost frame encourages efficiency, diversification, and leverage-building elsewhere. Same dollars, completely different strategic posture.

Retail media is not going away. The retailers have too much leverage and the data is too valuable. But brands that treat it as the center of their media strategy are building on rented land. And the rent only goes up.

Know what you're buying. Call it what it is. Plan accordingly.