The Rise of Retail Media Networks

Retail media networks have become one of the fastest-growing segments in advertising. Following in Amazon’s footsteps, retailers like Walmart, Target, and Kroger have built their own media groups. Platforms including Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, and Kroger Precision Marketing let brands monetize first-party data through sponsored search, display, and programmatic advertising within closed-loop attribution models.

This shift was sparked by Amazon’s launch of the Amazon Ads Platform (AAP) in 2012. In its first year, the retailer reportedly generated approximately $600 million in ad revenue. Since then, it has seen consistent double-digit growth. Last year, the company reported $56.2 billion in advertising revenue, making it the third-largest digital ad platform in the U.S., behind only Google and Meta. By contrast, Walmart generated $4.4 billion and Target $649 million from their respective RMNs. These networks are growing, but they’re still following the same predictable template: banner ads, search results, and programmatic placements. Amazon, meanwhile, is already moving beyond its own original blueprint.

Amazon’s Generative Media Strategy

Despite building a dominant RMN, Amazon’s investment in Showrunner suggests a new long-term path built on participatory advertising. Showrunner lets users generate animated episodes using AI prompts and then insert themselves into the content. Contributors become influencers and can earn a share of revenue when other creators iterate on their episodes, such as adding new characters, alternate endings, or spin-offs within the Showrunner environment, similar to how user-generated game mods work with games like Roblox and Minecraft. It’s a remixable, creator-first approach.

The platform aligns with Amazon’s broader ecosystem. Content generated in Showrunner is intended to integrate with Alexa, Fire TV, and Prime Video, while also unlocking new pathways for shopping, discovery, and engagement. Rather than simply producing content, Showrunner is an integrated commerce platform. It serves as a tool for product discovery by linking creative content to Amazon’s retail offerings. Imagine a creator producing a fashion show where every outfit links directly to Amazon listings. Or an animated series where a robot chef teaches recipes that sync with cookware and grocery orders. Or a travel documentary where the host visits street markets and every handmade item can be purchased instantly via Amazon.

Amazon’s media ambitions aren’t new. They’ve taken major chances on content before, often at great cost. The company has poured billions into content production through Amazon Studios, including a reported $715 million on the first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a project that drew sizable audiences but faced creative criticism and questions around return on investment. The Showrunner investment is a departure from these past efforts, aligning more closely with Amazon’s legacy of building scalable transactional platforms over producing top-down content.

Consumer Behavior Has Already Moved On

Amazon’s pivot to participatory content doesn’t come out of the blue. Consumer behavior is shifting, and audiences are choosing creator-led, short-form content, and niche communities over traditional studio-created storytelling. YouTube was recently ranked as the most popular media platform in the U.S. by time spent. Consumers spend over 11 billion minutes on the platform every day. That’s more than Netflix, and more than Facebook and Instagram combined.

In response to this shift, companies are approaching the convergence of media and retail from different angles. Netflix is going physical. In 2025, it plans to launch Netflix House, immersive retail spaces tied to shows like Stranger Things and Squid Game, complete with branded merchandise, themed food, and experiential attractions. While Netflix is embedding content into physical retail, Amazon is embedding retail into user-generated content. Both aim to blur the line between media and commerce, but from entirely opposite directions. Whether starting from retail or media, everyone is chasing the same outcome: more meaningful engagement and more monetizable attention. The future of retail and media lies in who can best merge storytelling with real-time transactions. Amazon’s strategy stands out because it is building content-native commerce from the ground up. Other retailers have experimented with blending media and commerce, but often as collabs rather than fully integrated models. Walmart’s experience offers a telling example.

How Walmart Failed to Do Hollywood

To understand how different Amazon’s media approach is, it’s worth looking at retail leader Walmart. Walmart’s media efforts have spanned multiple formats; in 2010, it acquired Vudu, a direct-to-consumer video platform meant to rival Netflix. But Walmart never fully integrated Vudu into its retail experience and ultimately sold it to Fandango in 2020. In 2023, Walmart partnered with Hallmark to launch a shoppable holiday movie. The campaign embedded clickable Walmart products into the film, blending entertainment and commerce. Clever in execution, but limited in scope, it was a one-off branded campaign, not a platform.

Walmart’s growing partnership with Zepeto, a virtual social platform where users create avatars and explore 3D spaces, and its acquisition of Vizio suggest it isn’t giving up on interactive formats. In fact, it sees the long-term value of owning both the screen and the signal. But where Amazon is betting on participation and creation, Walmart is still chasing distribution and display. Both investments align with social commerce trends and Gen Z behavior. Yet, the contrast is clear. Walmart is retrofitting entertainment with commerce. Amazon is building a new layer of content-native commerce infrastructure.

What It Means for the Future of Retail Media

Retailers have spent the last few years building ways to monetize attention. Amazon is now investing in how customers can create it, unlike the others that remain tethered to traditional marketing tactics. Target leans into curated seasonal drops for attention, Sephora blends commerce with community tools, Nike experiments with gated co-creation via .Swoosh, and LVMH has high-production AR campaigns. All are tightly managed, brand-led ecosystems. Walmart, for its part, continues to invest in acquisitions, but its efforts still focus on distribution and display, not participatory creation.

This shift toward participation isn’t happening only in retail. In the agency world, R/GA’s work with Google’s Veo for luxury brand Moncler shows how AI is transforming storytelling itself. The campaign compressed production to just four weeks, replacing the traditional linear process with a fluid, iterative model where human creative direction blended with AI’s unexpected outputs. R/GA’s first-ever acquisition of AI studio Addition signals a deeper commitment to building proprietary systems for next-generation, participatory storytelling. For brands and retailers alike, it’s a reminder that the creative infrastructure supporting retail media is evolving just as quickly as the platforms themselves.

Amazon, by contrast, is transforming customers from targets into co-creators. Showrunner signals that the next wave of RMNs may not look like media buys or display ads. They may look like customer-created worlds, stories, and tools, crafted not just for watching, but for remixing. And they’ll be built into ecosystems where transactions, content, and data aren’t siloed but synchronized.

As promising as the model is, Showrunner brings new risks. How will Amazon manage IP ownership for user-generated content? Can it maintain quality control while scaling content creation? Will creators embrace the platform or push back, as they have with other generative AI tools? And what guardrails will Amazon apply around moderation, misinformation, and monetization? These are not small concerns. Unlike others testing the waters of content-commerce convergence, Amazon has a decade of media experience to build on, even if some of those efforts missed the mark.

If the future of commerce is about who captures and sustains attention, then building the infrastructure for co-creation may be retail’s most powerful move yet. Retailers can no longer rely solely on data-driven targeting or traditional media placement. The next competitive advantage lies in enabling customers to generate the stories themselves.

Amazon’s bet on Showrunner isn’t just an experiment in generative entertainment. It reflects a broader shift as the boundaries between media, commerce, and technology are collapsing into a single participatory ecosystem. Platforms that effectively support co-creation may better influence how consumers interact with brands and navigate the shopping journey.