Retail Media Has Quietly Become the Most Profitable Business in Global Retail

For most of retail history, the highest-margin part of a supermarket was a slot on the shelf. Today, the highest-margin slot is a sponsored placement on the homepage of the retailer's own app — and the largest grocery chains in the world are reorganising around that fact. The story matters because retail media has become the structural profit pool that subsidises the rest of the retail business.

The numbers behind the shift Walmart Connect is on track to exceed an $8 billion run-rate this year. Tesco Media in the United Kingdom is approaching the £1 billion mark. Carrefour Links is one of the fastest-growing pieces of any French retailer's P&L. At gross margins north of 70 percent, retail media is dramatically more profitable than the underlying grocery business and is increasingly where the equity value sits.

Why CPGs are paying First-party purchase data, in-store closed-loop attribution and a measurable impact on shelf velocity make retail-media inventory more accountable than equivalent spend on Meta or TikTok. For categories where shelf placement was historically the only marketing lever, retail media has become the dominant digital channel.

Every major grocer in the world is now also a media company. The org chart hasn't quite caught up, but the P&L already has.

What to watch next Expect more retail-media networks to launch outside grocery — beauty, home improvement and pharmacy chains are the obvious next wave. For operators and investors, the read-through is clear: cpg and brand budgets are being permanently rerouted away from open-web media.