How to Spot the 5 Most Expensive Retail Media Mistakes

Most suppliers are making at least two of these right now and don't know it. This short report shows you what they are, why they happen, and the questions to ask to catch them — before your next budget cycle.

What's Inside

You'll learn five mistakes that quietly drain retail media budgets — and the specific signals that tell you whether your organization is making them.

Mistake #1

Treating platform-reported ROAS as the truth. Why the number your platform shows you is built to favor the platform — and what it's hiding.

Mistake #2

Managing each tactic in its own silo. How spending tactic-by-tactic guarantees you over-fund the wrong ones.

Mistake #3

Confusing demand harvesting with demand creation. The reason your best-looking campaigns may be the ones doing the least new work.

Mistake #4

Trusting vendor recaps at face value. The reporting patterns that make a campaign look better than it performed.

Mistake #5

Letting the people who sell you spend also grade the spend. The structural conflict hiding inside your retail media program.

Why This Report

Written from inside the network, for the supplier's side of the table.

This isn't generic best-practice content. It's written by a former Chief of Staff at Walmart Connect who spent a decade inside the network side of retail media and has since consulted for other retail media networks.

These are the mistakes she watched suppliers make over and over — and the ones the platforms and agencies have no incentive to point out.

If you're spending real money on retail media, this is for you.

Written for marketing and sales leaders at retail suppliers running spend on Walmart and other retail media networks — especially mid-sized brands without an internal data science team to make sense of it all.

If you've ever suspected the numbers you're being shown aren't the whole story, this report is the fastest way to find out where to look.