Insights from Criteo, Amazon Advertising, and Walmart Connect point to a continuing growth story.
Quarterly earnings are just that – a snapshot into a quarter. But can they indicate a clear view of the sector’s trajectory? Looking across the results of Criteo, Walmart, and Amazon, one point stands out: Retail Media continues to defy gravity.
Let’s look at the evidence by starting with a quote from media analyst Brian Wieser, of Madison and Wall newsletter: “We can now estimate that commerce media / retail media grew by around 24% in the period, an acceleration from the 19% pace observed during 1Q25 and for all of 2024.”
Wieser estimates that commerce media grew 24% in Q2’25, up from a 19% pace in Q1 and throughout 2024. What makes this striking is that U.S. e-commerce sales grew by only 5.3% in the same period. In other words, the advertising layer is outpacing the commerce layer itself.
Far from showing any signs of slowing down, Retail Media is accelerating.
Amazon Advertising scaling DSP and still accelerating
Amazon Advertising delivered $15.7 billion in revenue in Q2 2025, up 22% year-on-year. That’s faster growth than AWS and more than double the pace of Amazon’s core ecommerce business. CEO Andy Jassy put it this way: “We continue to see strength across our broad portfolio of full funnel advertising offerings that in the US alone help advertisers reach an average ad-supported audience of more than 300 million across our own properties.”
The company continues to build out its DSP, integrating with Disney’s DRAX and Roku to assemble the largest authenticated CTV footprint in the US. Add in AI-powered contextual ads that link video impressions directly to sales, and Amazon’s ad business has become a Trojan horse inside the broader TV and video ecosystem.
Walmart Connect and the second P&L
Walmart’s global ad revenue surged 46% in Q2 2025, with U.S. Walmart Connect results up 31%.
CEO Doug McMillon highlighted the structural role of Retail Media in reshaping Walmart’s economics: “These strong growth rates in our newer businesses continue to change the shape of our income statement. Contributions to operating income are increasingly influenced by a diverse set of interrelated drivers, including improved eCommerce, economics, and business mix, most notably from higher margin areas like advertising and membership fees.”
He went further: “For a while now, we’ve described our business as being two P&Ls, the traditional store P&L, and then the new digital P&L, which has got marketplace, marketplace commissions, membership, advertising. We think that the second P&L over time can be more profitable than the first P&L and lift the total.”
In other words, Walmart Connect is an engine of profitability rather than just a new revenue stream. Other retailers should take note.
Criteo: reinvention continues
Last November, I wrote the Criteo’s reinvention was not being rewarded by investors.
As I wrote then, it’s hard to understand why the market is punishing Criteo when the wider stock market is up – and particularly for technology. There are very few stories of reinvention in technology and software: the ones that have managed to ride the new waves, for example, Adobe, building out its ‘Adobe Experience Cloud’ through a series of acquisitions over 10 years and turning its business into a subscription model – are rare – which makes it all the more impressive.
In Q2 2025, Criteo’s Retail Media revenue rose 11% to $61 million, with 200 new brands added. Connected TV (CTV) shows strong potential with new U.S. partnership with WPP Media to run audience-led campaigns on premium platforms like Roku and Samsung.
Criteo is experimenting with AI-assisted commerce by leveraging real-time retail data, developing agentic commerce products, and collaborating with LLM vendors to enhance shopper engagement.
The stock is up 5% since the results were announced, a far cry from last year’s drop when a quarterly results announcement resulted in a 20% drop in Criteo’s share price even though the Retail Media business had grown by 22%.
Insights from the results of the ‘Big 3’
Examining the results shows several lessons:
- Retail Media has not peaked. If anything, Q2’25 shows acceleration.
- There is momentum at all tiers: Amazon with its global scale, Walmart as the bricks and mortar retailer with a huge eCommerce business and Criteo as the specialist platform embedded in retailers all report growth.
- CTV scale and AI are the next battleground: the next ‘story’ from the Big 3 are around CTV, weaving retail data into the TV ecosystem and AI – with the latter playing out in creative and agentic shopping propositions.
- The story has shifted: we have moved on from ‘Retail Media is promising’ to ‘Retail Media is reshaping P&Ls’.
The bottom line: “number goes up”
Let’s leave the last word where we started – with Brian Wieser: “The outsized gains for advertising revenues at retailers of goods and services highlight how growth in competitive intensity – which is a hallmark of most commerce media companies’ digital advertising platforms – causes marketers to increase their overall advertising budgets to a higher level of intensity – such as advertising as a percentage of revenues – than might otherwise occur”.
Wieser continues: “Stepping back, we continue to see this group of companies outperform US advertising more broadly and this latest rate of growth will compare favourably to the broader US ad market once again.”
Wieser now believes that the earlier questions about a “potential pull forward in demand vs. underlying strength in the ad market might have been answered as we see strong momentum across many businesses that sell ad inventory.”
Why is this? Wieser’s argument is simple but powerful: competitive intensity forces brands to spend more on advertising as a percentage of revenue. In a category where every rival is pressing harder, nobody can afford to ease off. This explains why Retail Media has not just avoided a slowdown but has become a structural growth engine, pulling in budgets that might otherwise have gone elsewhere.
In other words, Retail Media is still ‘hot’ and will continue to be ‘hot’.
