Retail media networks and mobile games

Retail media networks don't sell app installs. These are the advertising businesses that Amazon and Walmart, along with a growing list of grocery and big-box retailers, have built around their own shopper data; what they sell is placement in front of a retailer's own audience (on that retailer's site and off it), priced against purchase intent for physical and digital goods sold through that retailer's storefront. For most mobile game studios that makes retail media largely irrelevant, because there's no direct route from a retail media placement to an app store install the way there is from a social or video ad.

Where the actual overlap sits

The narrow cases worth knowing about involve products that pass through a retailer's own checkout rather than an app store. Prepaid game currency cards sit inside a retailer's catalogue in a way a pure mobile title never will. So do console or hardware bundles that ship with a mobile companion app, and so do gift cards redeemable for in-app purchases. A studio selling any of these through a major retailer can, in principle, use that retailer's advertising platform to promote the physical or gift card product the same way any other seller would, with the retailer's own purchase and loyalty data informing targeting.

This is a narrow lane, and it only applies to studios with a genuine retail product to sell. Shopping behaviour on that retailer's platform, rather than gaming behaviour, shapes the audience it reaches, so targeting precision for a specific game genre is poor compared with any dedicated mobile ad platform.

Why most studios should wait

A studio without a retail product gets no current install pathway from retail media, and no attribution mechanism an MMP can read. Nor does it get any obvious efficiency advantage over channels built specifically for app marketing. The category is still worth tracking. Retailers keep expanding what counts as sellable inventory; grocery and big-box retail media has grown quickly as a business line and could eventually extend into digital goods sold more directly. Until that happens, the honest answer for most mobile UA teams is that retail media is a category to monitor, not a channel to test.

Related archive reading

• In-house or agency media buying: the decision
• XR headsets as an acquisition surface