Retail media was supposed to be advertising’s redemption arc. The anti-programmatic. A redemption tour with fewer acronyms, fewer black boxes, and more results. It had the branding of a messiah and the promise of a clean, transparent marketplace—first-party data, closed-loop attribution, and ad placements right at the checkout line. Heaven with a dashboard.

Instead? Welcome to the Retail Media Fee-palooza, where your ad budget gets fed into a vending machine operated by three different departments and six different pricing models—and every time you push a button, the “optimized” campaign results in a stale bag of impressions, a 40% markup, and a tech fee hidden like MSG in a gluten-free granola bar.

Let’s be clear: the idea of retail media is brilliant.

The execution is a Rube Goldberg machine duct-taped together by lawyers and revenue operations teams trying to hit quarterly targets.

Here’s how it works in the real world:

You, the brand, want access to high-intent shoppers at the point of purchase. You get pitched a campaign from an RMN (Retail Media Network)—say, Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, or Target Roundel.

They say: “We’ll use our first-party data to target people in-market, measure actual purchases, and report back with closed-loop attribution. What could be better?”

Here’s what they don’t say:

It’s not just an ad buy. It’s a toll road with six booths, and every booth is run by someone who swears you need them for “brand safety.”

The emperor of retail media. And like any good emperor, they collect taxes on everything—access to audience segments, use of their own DSP, campaign reporting, and more.

Ever seen those "Sponsored Products" taking up 30% of a search page? That’s not just visibility. That’s real estate you’re leasing at $4.50 a click, plus a margin to whoever helped you place the ad. Hint: it’s usually Pacvue, Quartile, or Teikametrics—resellers and optimization layers that often function as a middleman tax.

You thought you were advertising.
What you’re actually doing is paying Amazon to let you show up in the store you already sell in.

Walmart wants to be Amazon so badly it’s basically roleplaying. But the transparency? Let’s just say it’s more “aisle 12 clearance bin” than premium shelf placement.

Their platform is powered by CitrusAd, a third-party ad tech provider that’s effectively invisible to most advertisers. You buy through Walmart, but Citrus is powering the engine—and adding their own markups, quietly and without detailed disclosure.

Want granular insights? That’ll be another fee.
Want off-site targeting? You’ll need to run through The Trade Desk, where—surprise!—another tech fee appears like a hidden resort charge at checkout.

If Amazon is the walled garden, Instacart is the labyrinth with a punchline.

They’re selling first-party data like it’s the Ark of the Covenant, while charging "managed service fees" of 10–15% on top of everything else. Their internal reps often run campaigns manually—yes, manually—and still pitch this as “automated retail media.” It’s like paying a valet to hand you your own keys.

Instacart also loves to tout their “incrementality measurement”, which is a fancy way of saying: “We think your ad helped sell something, maybe.” But if you want to know how they calculated it? Hope you’re into PDFs without source methodology.

Sleek branding, lovely decks, and deeply integrated with Criteo—which means if you’re not careful, you’re not buying media; you’re buying into a loop of recycled impressions routed through a third-party DSP that looks independent but quietly kicks back margin upstream.

Target will sell you on personalization, in-store alignment, and omnichannel brilliance. What they won’t tell you is how much of your spend actually lands on media—because Roundel blends reporting, targeting, platform cost, and activation into one mysterious number that makes your finance team twitch.

Let’s not pretend they’re neutral here.

The Trade Desk, Criteo, and others are often in cozier partnerships with RMNs than their public positioning lets on. In many cases, DSPs receive incentives—call them rebates, kickbacks, “strategic alignments”—for routing spend toward “preferred” retail media networks.

Translation: Your DSP might be steering your campaign toward platforms that pay them, not the ones that perform best for you.

If this feels familiar, it’s because we’ve been here before.
Programmatic advertising in 2016 was a mess of middlemen, markups, and mystery margins. Retail media has just reinvented the playbook—with better graphics, more PDFs, and tighter control over who sees what.

Because brands are scared.

They’re afraid not to spend on Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart—because if they don’t, their competitors will. And those competitors will show up higher in search, in sponsored shelves, in recirculated email promos. This isn’t media planning. This is hostage negotiation dressed as performance marketing.

And marketers? They’re too often judged on activation and share of shelf, not whether the campaign actually drove incremental sales. So long as the report looks pretty and the brand team is happy, the margins stay buried and the fees go unquestioned.

Retail media promised clarity. What we got was a dashboard-shaped funhouse mirror.
It looks like performance. It feels like control. But when you start asking questions?
The answers are either hidden, bundled, or require a “custom data unlock” that just so happens to cost $75K and your last shred of dignity.

Retailers have become landlords, ad networks, measurement vendors, and judges of their own effectiveness—all rolled into one and delivered in a QBR with four pie charts and zero transparency.

That’s behind the ADOTAT+ paywall.

We’ve reviewed contracts.
We’ve talked to media buyers.
We’ve pulled platform documentation.
We’ve followed the budget trail through DSPs, RMNs, and the margins they don’t want public.

And trust me—if you’re a marketer, a brand lead, or anyone spending more than $1 on retail media?
You need to read it.

Subscribe to ADOTAT+ and see what’s really behind the retail media curtain.
We promise: no BS, no backroom handshakes, just the truth—one receipt at a time.

#StayBold #StayCurious #KnowMoreThanYouDidYesterday
#RetailMedia #AdTech #FeePalooza #ADOTATplus

🔍 The Accusation:
Your retail media budget is being quietly mugged in a back alley by a bunch of middlemen with MBA titles and AI buzzwords. These resellers aren’t optimizing your campaign—they’re optimizing their margin.

📉 The Scheme:
CitrusAd, Skai, Pacvue, Intentwise, Stackline—sounds like an indie band lineup at SXSW, right? But no—these are the middle-layer money movers who dress up in dashboards and whisper sweet nothings like “retail readiness” while charging you 30% to maybe move a metric.

💸 Where Your Money Really Goes:
Every time your budget touches one of these “performance enhancers,” it sheds a few thousand bucks like a cat molting in summer. By the time your campaign reaches the actual shelf—oops, screen—you’re paying $100K to get $65K worth of ads and a PDF full of fuzzy KPIs that can’t be exported.

🧠 Thought Bubble:
If your campaign has more intermediaries than a bad Hollywood divorce, you’re not running a media strategy—you’re funding a multi-level tech resale pyramid.

🔥 The Big Question:
Who hired these guys? Seriously. Did you choose them, or were they foisted on you by a “preferred partnership” contract wrapped in NDA tape?

🎤 Industry Vibe Check:
Brands are just now realizing they’ve been paying optimization fees to companies who can’t even prove they moved a needle, let alone a product.

Let’s talk about one of the dirtiest open secrets in retail media—the part they whisper about over oat milk lattes and pretend doesn’t exist on stage at Cannes.

Let that marinate in your overpriced attribution dashboard.

You sell a product on Amazon. Congrats. Your widget moves, your brand grows, your little team in Brooklyn celebrates with lukewarm sake.

Then comes the twist: Amazon scoops up all that delicious purchase data—your customers, your SKU velocity, even the time Karen in Ohio clicked on your organic deodorant—and sells it back to your competitor.

Yep. You taught the algorithm how to win. And now that data is being used to help someone else knock you off the shelf.

🧾 You don't get a cut.
🔕 You don’t get to opt out.
🎯 You just get to pay more for ads so you can bid against…yourself.

It’s the digital version of that playground game where you punch yourself and someone says, “Why are you hitting yourself?”

And if you think it’s shady, you’re not alone. Some EU regulators are giving this the side-eye like it just cut the cheese at a GDPR conference.

Because here’s the reality: retail media is increasingly pay-to-play, but the rules are rigged and the dealer has your cards. You fund the ecosystem, then get charged rent to walk through your own front door.

We call it innovation.
They call it monetization.
But it feels a lot like extortion with a Prime badge.

📌 Should this be legal?
🤔 Should there be a “data dividend” for the brands generating the value?
🧠 Should regulators wake up before retail media becomes a one-sided surveillance economy?

Probably. But first someone has to stop clapping for “closed-loop attribution” long enough to notice they’re the mark.

If you think your CTV ad buy is clean, think again. In the latest ADOTAT+ breakdown, we map the 14 middlemen slicing up your $50 CPM like it’s Thanksgiving at a reseller’s house.

Some of them add value. Most just add margin.

📉 Real CPM math:
You spend $50 → Publisher gets $8 → Everyone else takes a bite.

We’re not moralizing—we’re just showing the full receipt.

🔐 In this issue (ADOTAT+ only):

💥 This is the playbook nobody hands you at an upfront.

You can keep pretending your “premium” CTV buy isn’t routed through RelaxingLakeSoundsTV, or you can subscribe to ADOTAT+ and know exactly who’s profiting from your optimism.