How smart retailers are using media in uncertain times

Major big box retailers are giving lukewarm outlooks for this year amid growing geopolitical tensions and economic uncertainties, and consumers appear spooked. Retailers are no strangers to pressure, but based on Q1, 2025 is shaping up to be a particularly challenging year. Experts are anticipating 15,000 store closures this year—23% more than at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Could advertising help retailers weather the storm? A new report by advertising intelligence platform MediaRadar, Future Titans of Retail, examined the spending trends and media strategies of over 35,000 U.S. retailers and found that their annual media spend for the year ending in May 2024 was down 8% compared with the same period the year before. Digital was by far the preferred channel for retailers anxious to manage expenses, get their message across to budget-conscious consumers near the point of sale and drive sales in a difficult economic environment. Retailers big and small spent an average of 71% of their media budget on digital channels (like search and display) in 2024, well ahead of TV (11%) and paid social (11%). But in today’s fast-changing and highly competitive marketplace, simply betting on digital is no guarantee of success. The best performers doubled their share of voice By monitoring millions of brands around the clock and keeping track of their day-to-day media investment decisions, MediaRadar helps advertisers understand what their competitors are doing. In its “Future Titans of Retail” report, they ranked retailers by their share of voice (SOV)—that is, their share of total media spending amongst their peers. They found that the top three—Amazon, Walmart and Temu—combined for 20% of all media spend by retailers in 2024, which was twice as much as in 2023. Those three companies alone were responsible for $six out of every $10 spent by the top 10 retailers in the U.S., a list that also includes heavyweight retailers Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Kohl’s, Macy’s, Wayfair and Best Buy. While many others pulled back to manage uncertainty, Amazon, Walmart and Temu saw an opportunity to press on and seize SOV. Amazon, for instance, increased its media spend by 46% in 2024. Walmart went bigger with 121%, and Temu increased its media spend by a staggering 404%. By analyzing a company’s SOV alongside its year-over-year growth (or decline) in media spend, MediaRadar developed a useful framework to identify “Titans” (dominant industry players) and “Future Titans”—challenger brands that aren’t yet dominant incumbents but are rapidly closing the gap by unabashedly investing in their brand and using original creative and media strategies to stand out. Using that framework, we recognized the Chinese e-commerce company Temu as a Future Titan in 2024. Accolades are nice, but the key benefit of the Future Titans framework is that it allows us to identify media patterns worth emulating. For example, let’s look at what retailers could learn from Temu’s recent media strategy. Be different, stay agile Temu made a big splash with multiple showings of its Super Bowl ad in 2023, but the new online retail darling only spent 8% of its media budget on TV that year. Fast forward to 2024 (and another Super Bowl ad), and that number dropped to 2%. So where is the company spending the bulk of its advertising budget? Nearly two-thirds (64%) go to digital channels like paid search, display and online video, and one-third (34%) went to paid social. Two things stand out about Temu’s media mix: it’s considerably different from its peers, and it’s also very different from one year to the next. Many top retailers still rely heavily on TV to build their media presence. Lowe’s, for instance, spent 30% of its budget on TV in 2024, and Kohl’s spent 27%. Not Temu. And while the rest of the retail world remains relatively timid with paid social (it represented just 11% of media budgets among all retailers in 2024, and only 9% among top retailers), Temu threw caution to the wind and allocated 34% of its budget to paid social. The brand is now nearly ubiquitous (and largely unchallenged) on Facebook and Instagram, where it’s able to target consumers of all ages with personalized offers. To deliver on that strategy, Temu reallocated nearly 60% of its budget to different channels in 2024 while the industry averaged 5%. It’s difficult to predict how “the world’s biggest online dollar store” will fare in 2025 considering the impact of new tariffs and anticipated changes to de minimis provisions in the U.S., but Temu’s willingness to stand apart and experiment with its media mix are big reasons for its success. Don’t spend less, spend smarter Marketing budgets are often the first to get hit during difficult times, but there are plenty of cautionary tales of brands that stopped advertising during a crisis and never fully recovered. For Titans like Amazon and Walmart and Future Titans like Temu, a crisis is an invitation to make every dollar work harder, not cut spending. Those leaders showed the way in 2024 by filling the void left by their competitors, fine-tuning their creative messaging to highlight their price advantage and remixing their media investments to engage consumers more strategically. “We have to acknowledge that we are in an uncertain time,” Walmart chief financial officer John David Rainey said during a recent earnings call, “and we don’t want to get out over our skis here, (...) but we feel good about our ability to navigate the environment.” It’s time to start thinking like a Titan. MediaRadar, now including the data and capabilities of Vivvix, powers the mission-critical marketing and sales decisions that drive competitive advantage. Our competitive advertising intelligence platform enables clients to achieve peak performance with always-on data and insights that span the media, creative, and business strategies of five million brands across 30+ media channels. By bringing the advertising past, present, and future into focus, our clients rapidly act on the competitive moves and emerging advertising trends impacting their business.

How smart retailers are using media in uncertain times

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