Why Retail Media Campaigns Are Still So Hard To Launch, and What To Do About It

Why campaign execution is harder than it looks

If you ask anyone who manages retail media campaigns day to day, they’ll tell you the same thing: the work is more complicated than it looks from the outside.

Not because the fundamentals are especially difficult, but because everything surrounding them is. Building, targeting, approvals, and activation are often spread across disconnected systems and teams, creating friction at nearly every step. What should be a straightforward process turns into something much heavier. Campaigns take longer to go live than expected. Advertisers rely on others to make even simple changes. Teams spend more time managing the process than improving performance.

And this friction isn’t incidental. It’s structural. It tends to show up in the same ways as campaign volume increases.

For retail media operators, campaigns are often built across multiple steps, passed between teams, and reworked before they ever go live. That leads to slower launches, higher cost to serve, and less confidence in when committed revenue will actually materialize.

For advertisers, the experience is different but just as frustrating. Budgets are approved and goals are clear, but execution is constrained by limited controls or dependent on someone else to make updates. Campaigns go live close to what was intended, but not exactly. Over time, “close enough” execution creates the friction you were hoping to avoid.

At the root of both experiences is the same issue: campaign workflows that weren’t designed for the scale and complexity they’re now expected to handle.

When execution works, everything downstream gets easier

With Vantage, campaign building, targeting, and activation now happen within a single, connected workflow.

Instead of stitching together multiple steps across systems and teams, operators can build end-to-end campaigns in one place, with platform requirements and best practices already built in. What gets planned is what actually goes live. The manual coordination that used to stretch timelines is replaced by a process teams can rely on.

Retailers using Vantage have reduced campaign launch times by more than 50%.

But the impact goes beyond speed. It introduces a level of predictability that most teams haven’t had before. When execution becomes repeatable, operators can scale their programs without proportionally increasing overhead. They can deliver more consistent outcomes for advertisers and build the confidence to sell forward, knowing campaigns will launch as committed.

Advertisers shouldn’t have to approximate their intent

Advertisers are already making informed decisions about how their campaigns should run. They know which search terms are worth investing in, which markets matter most, and how different audiences behave. They understand that a returning customer represents a different opportunity than a new one. What’s often missing is a direct way to translate that thinking into execution.

Instead, advertisers are frequently navigating indirect workflows—submitting requests, waiting for updates, or working within constraints that prevent them from fully expressing their strategy. The result is a gap between what they intend to run and what actually gets activated.

That gap is starting to close.

Advertisers can now build campaigns that reflect how they actually think about their customers, with native support for targeting by search intent, geographic market, and audience behavior, all within a single workflow. These aren’t separate configurations or add-ons, but part of the same campaign setup process from the start.