Retail Media 2025: Why Self-Service Platforms matter now

Retail Media is undergoing a quiet revolution, reshaping how brands grow, where budgets flow, and who controls it. What once played a supporting role is now a strategic centerpiece in the modern commerce stack.

While U.S. players still dominate media spending, the next wave of innovation is taking shape in Europe, especially in Germany, where scalable, privacy-compliant, and intelligence-driven platforms are rewriting the rules of engagement.

The rise of Self-Service Retail Media Platforms is at the core of this shift. But these aren’t just productivity tools. They represent a new power dynamic: giving brands direct access to campaigns, data, and decision-making, and increasingly, augmenting it with artificial intelligence. The result? A new performance, precision, and growth model built for a world that won’t wait.

Self-Service Retail Media: Redefining control and efficiency

Traditional Retail Media was essentially a managed-service model — resource-intensive, slow to scale, and fragmented across teams and channels. This model has reached its operational ceiling with the explosion of product SKUs, partner brands, and campaign demands.

Self-service platforms solve this problem by putting the power in the hands of advertisers, enabling them to:

• Set up and launch campaigns independently, using intuitive tools for targeting, bidding, and creative management.
• Access live performance data, enabling in-flight optimisation instead of waiting for post-campaign reports.
• Scale with precision, managing campaigns across multiple formats (onsite, offsite, in-store) with unified workflows.

However, to fully unlock the promise of self-service Retail Media, AI is another essential ingredient.

Germany at the forefront: Intelligent and compliant Retail Media

Germany has become a laboratory for the future of Retail Media, combining deep respect for consumer privacy with a high level of digital innovation. The market’s leading retailers are already building AI-ready, self-service ecosystems.

Best practices:

• MediaMarktSaturn: Their Self-Service Sponsored Product Ads Platform offers real-time reporting and optimisation, with plans to deepen automation features through AI, including smart bidding and dynamic inventory matching.
• DOUGLAS Group: With a self-service platform launching in 2025 and partnerships with platforms like The Trade Desk, DOUGLAS is laying the groundwork for AI-driven targeting, personalisation, and omnichannel orchestration.
• EDEKA Nord: Through partnerships with FRAMEN and Online Software AG, EDEKA is pioneering dynamic digital signage solutions, where AI may soon tailor in-store content to changing footfall and sales patterns.

The broader European picture

Other major retailers across Europe are also embracing self-service platforms enhanced by AI. The Dutch grocer Jumbo, for example, allows brand manufacturers to manage campaigns independently and is exploring AI-based budget recommendations.

In markets like France, the UK, and the Nordics, AI integration is increasingly considered essential to retail media maturity, particularly for optimising across multi-channel touchpoints (web, app, store, CTV, and more).

The future: Smarter, faster, and more predictive

As self-service adoption grows, AI will define the difference between platforms that facilitate and those that accelerate. The next generation of retail media platforms will evolve from being tools to becoming strategic advisors, assisting brands with:

• Budget allocation decisions based on historical outcomes
• Creative planning rooted in engagement trends
• Audience strategy optimised for purchase propensity
• Campaign pacing aligned to forecasted inventory and demand

Retailers that invest in AI now, while maintaining strong privacy and governance, will be positioned to lead the next phase of digital commerce monetisation.

The bottom line: Self-Service is not a feature. It’s the future.

Retail media is entering a new phase: intelligent, automated, and brand-empowering. A combination of Self-Service Platforms, first-party data activation, and AI-driven intelligence is shaping this shift.

For brands, this unlocks unprecedented agility and ROI. For retailers, it creates scalable, high-margin revenue streams while improving the partner experience. And for the industry at large, it signals a move toward more intelligent, more efficient, and more predictive marketing — grounded in both innovation and trust.

The Retail Media Platform of the future isn’t just self-service. It’s self-optimising.

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