Digital Front Door
The Digital Front Door explores how technology is reshaping the retail industry and redefining the in-store customer experience. Each episode features conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and solution providers who are driving change at the intersection of digital tools and brick-and-mortar retail. From AI-powered shopping carts to retail media, personalization, and operational efficiency, the show dives into the strategies and solutions that help retailers improve shopper engagement, increase loyalty, and grow revenue. Listeners can expect practical insights, forward-looking ideas, and real-world examples of how the “digital front door” is opening new opportunities in retail.
Digital Front Door
Rethinking Retail Media for Small Brands
The numbers tell a different story than our habits. We unpack new analysis from Bird Dog and Keen—built on real spend and performance data from 400+ brands and roughly $16B in annual investment—to show how small to medium brands can get more out of retail media without spending more. The headline: retail media has matured into a core channel, but the best gains now come from smarter allocation, not bigger budgets.
We walk through why three-quarters of retail media dollars still flow to search, how Amazon absorbs two-thirds of network spend, and where the ROI edge is actually hiding. From under-leveraged networks like Sam’s Club, Meijer, and Albertsons to proven performers such as Walmart, Kroger, and Instacart, we break down where SMBs are finding incremental returns. Category nuances matter: in food and beverage, retailer networks still deliver strong ROAS even as some brands test DTC; in durable goods, Amazon dominates spend, yet alternative retailer platforms often outpace it on efficiency.
Then we get tactical. You’ll hear a clear plan to reallocate 10–20% of Amazon search into higher-ROI retailer platforms, diversify beyond search with on-site display, off-site placements, and retailer-linked streaming TV, and use measured ROI and incrementality as your compass. We talk test design, audience overlap, creative fit, and how to align finance and marketing on what “working” actually means. If every dollar has to count, this is the map to move your next dollar where it works hardest.
If this breakdown helped you rethink your mix, follow the show, share it with a teammate who owns retail media, and leave a quick review telling us where you’ll shift budget next.
Well, hello everyone, and welcome to Scott's Thoughts. I'm Scott Benedict. You know, one of the things I've been reading recently was a brand new report that really stood out to me. It's called the 2025 Small to Medium Brand Retail Media Spend Report. That's that's a mouthful. It was produced by uh two firms, Bird Dog and Team. Now, if you don't know them, uh Bird Dog is a full service retail media agency that's really focused on helping emerging and small to mid-size uh brands to succeed on platforms like Amazon and Walmart and some other marketplaces. Bird Dog's founder, Sean Brown, has been a guest previously on the Digital Front Door podcast and is a trusted voice, in my view, on retail media. Keene, on the other hand, uh is a high-growth software as a service uh company whose marketing mix, modeling technology, and their software help brands uh and even some rather big Fortune 500 marketers connect investment data to real-world marketing performance. And so together, they've brought a unique combination of practical retail media execution and advanced analytics to bear for small to medium uh brands. And so I think that's part of what makes this study that I was rating so valuable is it isn't just uh based on perception or surveys. It's actually grounded in actual spend data and performance uh data. The data set uh that they're referencing in this report represents more than 400 brands and around$16 billion of marketing investment annually. But here's the key. It's really their their analysis really uh isolate small to medium-sized brands, those with under$100 million in annual revenue. And what that makes this report that I've been reading one of the most reliable benchmarks uh that we've seen on how small to medium-sized brands are really spending and what they're seeing in results. So here's some of the insights from that report. One of the things they they spotlight is the fact that small to medium brands are allocating about one-third of their media budgets to retail media. Uh that's about a 50% increase since 2021. That probably isn't uh shocking, but it's still very search-heavy. About three-quarters of the retail media budgets that these brands are spending are going to search ads, while bigger, more enterprise-sized brands tend to diversify between display and streaming video as well as uh search. And while Amazon commands the lion's share of this spend, about two-thirds of all the retail media network dollars from these brands. The best return on investment comes from smaller, under-leveraged brands. And these are not small retailers, among them Sam Club, Myers, Albertson. Again, not small brands, but smaller in terms of retail media uh than Amazon is. About 55% of their budgets uh go to those networks, and that far outpaces what larger, more enterprise-sized brands uh spend. In food and beverage, uh, small to medium brands have shifted some dollars towards direct consumer, but Walmart, Kroger, Instacart are still still delivering very strong uh return on media dollar investments uh for those brands. And in durable goods, Amazon dominates over 80% of the spend, but uh other retailers and other retail platforms actually produce higher ROI, meaning dollars spent outside of Amazon may in some cases work harder for those smaller brands. So, what's the key takeaway from this report? For small to medium brands, it's not just about spending more on retail media, it's about spending smarter. Uh, it means rebalancing budgets by shifting 10 to 20% away from Amazon search and into other uh high ROI retailer platforms. It means broadening tactics beyond just search, testing on-site display, off-site placements, and even streaming TV, uh, where performance is starting to really be fairly uh compelling. And most importantly, it means treating measured ROI as the compass uh for your spend and for what it is that you as a small to medium brand are really focused on where your next dollar should go. So in the end, uh what Bird Dog and Keen have shown us is that retail media has become a core channel for spending for small to medium brands, but that growth opportunity lies in a smarter allocation of dollars, not just bigger budgets. And for small emerging brands, this is especially critical. Every dollar counts, particularly when you're a small brand, and making informed, data-driven decisions about where and how to invest in retail media can really be the difference between wasteful spending and building a sustainable growth for your business and for your brand. So that's one of the fascinating things about this report and what I've been thinking about. Thanks for listening. I'm Scott Benedict.