How to Build Brand Relationships That Grow Retail Media Revenue

Retail media sales can’t scale through relationships alone

When we had 3,000 suppliers on our platform at Overstock, and later Bed Bath & Beyond, our retail media sales team had four sales reps. That meant each rep was responsible for roughly 750 brands.

You cannot have a meaningful conversation with every brand, every quarter, about why they should be spending more on media. To scale, retailers need a smarter approach to brand onboarding, self-service enablement, reporting, and transparency.

This is what I learned across a decade of running retail media—and what I'd recommend to any retailer building or scaling their retail media network (RMN) today.

What brands expect from a retail media network

Most brands that land on your retail media network aren't marketing experts. Many are talking to you at the same time they're talking to your merchant about first cost and promotional pricing. Your job is to make retail media easy to understand, simple to adopt, and worth the investment.

Retailers that do this well build sustainable, compounding media revenue because brands keep coming back. Retailers that don't end up with a program that feels transactional, struggles to gain adoption, and eventually loses momentum.

The strategies below helped us scale retail media across thousands of supplier relationships—and they're the same principles I'd recommend to any retailer looking to grow supplier adoption and long-term media revenue.

Who Are You Actually Selling To? Understanding Brand Contacts

Don't assume every brand contact is a media expert

Here's something many retail media teams get wrong: they assume the person they're talking to on the brand side is a sophisticated media buyer. Sometimes they are. More often, you're talking to the same person the merchant is talking to—someone managing the commercial relationship who may have never planned a digital advertising campaign.

At Overstock, we'd sometimes get on a call and realize we were literally talking to the person who shipped the boxes. No marketing background, no familiarity with ROAS or CPCs, no idea what Sponsored Products even are. That's not a disqualifier—it's a design brief. Your onboarding, your pitch, and your reporting all need to work for that person.

Why brand contacts wear two hats

Brand contacts are often balancing two conversations at once. They're trying to satisfy the merchant's expectations on cost and promotions, and now you're asking them to spend additional money on media. Without proper context, that can feel like competing priorities. The solution isn’t to separate those conversations—it’s to connect them.

As we explained to brands: "You still need to do all the things the merchandising team wants—great first cost, good images, and sharp pricing. Once all of that is in place, media is how you pour gasoline on the fire."

When brands understand that retail media amplifies the work they're already doing with merchants, the conversation becomes much easier. Instead of feeling like another expense, media becomes a way to accelerate the commercial outcomes both teams are trying to achieve.

What's the Right Way to Introduce a Brand to Your Retail Media Network?

Start with Sponsored Products

Unless you're dealing with a nationally recognized brand with a real brand-building mandate, start with Sponsored Products. The concept is easy to understand: pay to show up higher in search results, move more units. You can build the campaign for them and propose it. They can approve it in a few clicks. It's the lowest-friction entry point into your retail media network, and it consistently performs.

By the time I left Overstock, Sponsored Products represented roughly 90-95% of our $55 million in annual retail media revenue. Display, email, homepage—all of it combined was 5-10%. That ratio might surprise you. It shouldn't. Sponsored Products scale because the value proposition is simple and brands can quickly see the impact on sales.

Build the campaign before you get on the call

One of the highest-impact things we did was bulk campaign building before we spoke to the brand. We'd look at a brand's Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), identify their top-selling products, or propose an all-SKU campaign, assign a budget at roughly 5% of their GMV, and have the campaign waiting in the platform before the first conversation.

When brands logged in, they weren't staring at a blank screen. They saw a campaign that was ready to review and activate.

Pairing those pre-built campaigns with an in-platform tutorial that explained how Sponsored Products worked and where ads would appear removed the biggest barrier to adoption: friction.

When you only have four sales reps supporting 3,000 suppliers, the platform has to do some of the selling for you.

How do you reach brands in the first place?

No single channel works on its own. The best-performing retail media programs consistently reach suppliers through multiple touch points.

The channels that worked best for us, in roughly descending order of effectiveness, were:

• Warm introductions from merchants (when the relationship was good enough to ask)

• Supplier newsletters and webinars with case study content front and center

• Annual supplier summits—we'd present retail media as a key theme, not an add-on

• Direct outreach via email or supplier portal notifications to activate pre-built campaigns

• Trade shows—furniture, decor, and lighting shows were where our brands live

Across all of these channels, we led with commercial outcomes, not platform features. Brands care less about your retail media platform than they do about increasing sales, improving sell-through, and growing their business. Case studies and category-specific results consistently outperformed our RMN platform demonstrations because they answered the question every brand was really asking: How will this help me sell more?

What Do Brands Want From Your Retail Media Network?

Not every brand measures success the same way. The most successful retail media networks tailor their recommendations to the commercial objective the brand is trying to achieve rather than leading with a single advertising product. 

Here's a breakdown of what we saw most often:

Most brands focused on moving units. Those brands were consistently our easiest Sponsored Products customers. Brands that needed to justify every dollar with a minimum ROAS threshold—typically 3x to 5x, with some expecting 10x—required a more consultative approach. A much smaller group cared primarily about impressions and brand awareness.

The lesson was simple: understand the commercial objective before recommending a retail media solution. The right recommendation is the one that best supports the outcome the brand is trying to achieve.

What Reporting Do Brands Actually Need?

Transparency builds trust—even when performance isn’t perfect

Early in our program, when our reporting wasn’t where it needed to be, we made the mistake of waiting for brands to ask for performance data instead of sharing it proactively. When brands don't see reporting, they assume it's bad. When they do see reporting, even if the performance isn’t perfect, they at least feel respected.  Then you can have an honest conversation about what to improve.

When we improved our attribution, including solving for cross-device tracking, our reporting became healthier. But the bigger shift was deciding to be radically transparent, including when things weren't that flattering.

The reporting layers that actually moved the needle

We gave brands performance data at three levels: brand, campaign, and SKU. But the feature that really changed behavior was competitive intelligence.

Without revealing the identity of competitors, we showed each brand:

• ROAS compared to the top five suppliers in their category

• Click-through rate (CTR) and average bids compared to category peers

• Market share rank within their category

• SKU-level click-to-purchase data, including where shoppers clicked one SKU but ultimately purchased a different SKU

That last insight was gold. Brands would log in, see that a promoted SKU got the click but a different colorway or size was purchased, and immediately adjust their campaign. They were tinkering constantly. That kind of active engagement is what you want. It means they're invested.

We would show brands everything in comparison to their top competitors in their category, just to spur that competitive instinct. For a category with hundreds of thousands of SKUs, that kind of data was incredibly valuable. They needed that context to know how to succeed.

The ROAS conversation—how to handle it

Most brands targeting 3x to 5x ROAS on Sponsored Products will get there with good campaign setup and dynamic bidding enabled. For the ones that struggle, don't hide from the conversation—reframe it. ROAS is only one metric. Unit velocity, page rank improvement, new customer acquisition, and sell-through are others. Build the habit of showing the full picture, not just a single number.

Don’t undervalue your inventory

One mistake we made was setting our Sponsored Products bid floor too low for too long. We started at five cents per click because we weren't confident anyone would pay more. They would have. Brands spending on Amazon, Walmart Connect, and Criteo are accustomed to real CPCs.  Low floors signal low confidence in your own inventory. Charge with confidence!

How Do You Scale Without Growing Your Team?

Self-serve is the only path at scale

You cannot have managed-service conversations with hundreds or thousands of suppliers. At Overstock, we had about 50 - 60 top brands on full managed service—quarterly IOs, us running everything on their behalf, and regular performance calls. All other brands were self-service.

Making self-service successful required investing in enablement infrastructure:

• In-platform tutorials that auto-triggered for new advertisers
• Contextual tooltips at every step of the campaign builder
• Pre-built campaign proposals waiting in the dashboard when brands logged in
• Automated notifications via the supplier portal to activate dormant campaigns

We also tracked the UX data obsessively. Where were brands clicking? Where were they dropping off? Where did they need help? That feedback loop made the product better and reduced the support burden.

Free trial campaigns for the skeptics

For brands who were skeptical, we offered complimentary Sponsored Products trial campaigns—typically a week or two. Yes, we were giving away clicks that could have been paid for by someone else. But the conversion rate on trial-to-paid was strong enough to make it worthwhile. Seeing real performance data—even if the week happened to be soft—built far more credibility than any sales presentation could.

This is a lever more RMNs should consider, especially in the early stages of their program when inventory utilization is low and the marginal cost of giving away a few clicks is minimal.

Always-on as the default ask

We pushed hard for always-on campaigns as the baseline, with additional burst campaigns layered on top for new arrivals, seasonal peaks, or specific promotional events.

The rationale:

• Always-on campaigns defend your organic position and keep top sellers in front of shoppers.

• Seasonal or burst campaigns help brands capitalize during high-traffic moments.

Most brands that combined always-on campaigns with seasonal bursts saw significantly better results than those doing one or the other.

The Bottom Line

Building successful brand relationships in a retail media network is fundamentally a partnership challenge, not a sales challenge. The brands who succeed on your platform—who grow their spend, run always-on campaigns, actively engage with reporting—are the ones who feel like you're actually invested in their outcomes.

That means meeting them where they are, recognizing that many aren’t media experts, building for self-service rather than assuming you'll always have people to walk them through it, being transparent about performance even when the numbers are messy, and pricing your inventory with confidence.

Retailers that get this right don't just build retail media revenue. They build a media network that brands want to be part of. The conversation shifts from “How much do you want us to spend?” to “What else can we do together?”

At Zitcha, we’ve built these lessons into our platform to help retailers get here faster—with the campaign orchestration, reporting infrastructure, and performance-to-commercial linkage that used to take years to build in-house. If you're working through any of these challenges, let’s talk.