Observed Signal · Aug 18, 2026 · Market Signal · Source: Topsort · Impact: 3/5
Build vs Buy: The True Five-Year Cost of Retail Media Infrastructure
Compare the true five-year cost of building vs buying retail media infrastructure, including engineering, maintenance, operations, opportunity cost, and execution risk.
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Retail Media Can Build Brands—Including Ways Other Media Can’t
This opinion column argues that retail media, often dismissed as performance-only, is a powerful brand-building channel. It challenges Mark Ritson's critique by citing research from Binet & Fields and Ebiquity that brand building should account for 55-60% of ad spend, while most budgets go to performance. The author claims retail media offers reach, mental availability, and higher ROI, citing Emarketer data showing its share across formats. P&G's off-site retail media investment reportedly doubled in a year. The piece advises shifting budgets from low-performing performance channels and black-box AI tools to retail media, emphasizing causal modeling over MMM to reveal its true value. It positions retail media as a complement to TV, not a threat.
Retail Media Is Not Brand Building
The article argues that retail media — exemplified by Walmart Connect and other retailers’ ad arms — is a highly profitable, fast-growing, bottom-of-funnel channel that should not be conflated with brand-building. It cites Walmart’s recent ad revenue gains and the wider retail media boom (Target, Instacart, DoorDash, Amazon) while warning about inconsistent ROI measurement across retailers and the fact that much retail media spending is reallocated from existing brand budgets rather than being incremental. The author recommends treating retail media as a defensive, trade-type investment that secures distribution, not as a substitute for broad brand-awareness investment.
It’s Not Enough to Have LLMs. Commerce Needs LCMs.
Discover why Large Language Models aren't enough for online retail and how Large Commerce Models (LCMs) like Topsort's Theo power real-time commerce decisions and agentic retail.
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