Quick answer: Brands buying across retail media today are managing more than 200 separate walled gardens, each with its own login, data policy, and measurement standard. According to Matt Vignieri, Chief Growth Officer at Skai (formerly Kenshoo), the brands winning right now are the ones consolidating budget, audience data, and reporting into a single environment instead of running Amazon, Walmart, and Kroger campaigns as separate, disconnected businesses.
Retail media has scaled fast. What started as a handful of networks built around Amazon and a few big grocers has turned into a fragmented map of more than 200 retail media networks, each asking a brand to log in, build a campaign, and report results on its own terms. James Avery, Kevel's CEO, has joked for years that ad tech is on track to launch "a thousand walled gardens." On a recent episode of Unlocking Retail Media, he sat down with Matt “Vig” Vignieri, Chief Growth Officer at Skai, to ask what that fragmentation actually feels like from the brand's side of the table, and what the most sophisticated advertisers are doing about it.
Below are the takeaways from their conversation, framed as the questions brands and retail media networks are actually asking right now.
What Is the "Thousand Walled Gardens" Problem?
Quick answer: It is the operational cost brands pay for retail media's growth. Every new network is a new login, a new reporting format, and a new team, and most brands are still managing that complexity manually.
Vig described the reality bluntly: a brand running campaigns on Amazon, Walmart, Kroger, and Albertsons is already juggling four separate consoles. Add the other 30 or so grocery retailers alone, and a brand trying to cover the category fully is running dozens of disconnected campaigns with no shared view of performance.
"If one of your products is doing well, or a competitor is out of stock in a number of locations, you don't want to run to your Amazon Ads console, then your Walmart one, then your Kroger one, and start boosting those campaigns one at a time." - Matt Vignieri
Brands need to act in one place, and apply what they learn on one network across all of them.
Why Do Brands Struggle to Buy Across Multiple Retail Media Networks?
Quick answer: Swivel chairing. Manually moving between consoles is slow, error-prone, and blind to opportunities happening in real time on other networks.
Vig calls this pattern “swivel chairing.” A brand sees a spike in demand or a competitor stock out on one network so they manually work across the separate retail media networks they utilize to adjust their campaigns accordingly. Without a quick and efficient way to shift budgets or launch a matching campaign elsewhere as quickly as possible, the brand will not be able to make an impact before the moment passes.
The brands that understand how consumer behavior and network dynamics interact, and can act on that understanding quickly, are the ones that win.
What Are Brands Actually Asking Retail Media Networks For?
Quick answer: Access to usable audience data, without giving up the retailer's ownership of it.
Audience data is the single biggest point of friction. Retailers hold valuable first-party data and are, understandably, cautious about how much of it leaves their walls. Brands want to use that data to shape and improve campaigns, which is why cleanroom environments like Amazon's AMC have become a standard feature of mature retail media networks.
Vig expects the number of cleanroom solutions to keep growing, which raises a new problem: brands will soon need to curate and secure data across multiple cleanrooms, not just one.
How Are Brands Solving Retail Media's Data Fragmentation Problem?
Quick answer: By building a single, brand-owned environment that harmonizes data across every retailer relationship, rather than starting from scratch inside each retailer's cleanroom.
Skai recently launched a product called Data Hub, built to give brands, particularly large CPGs with data scattered across dozens of systems, one unified environment in their own language and structure. Vig called it foundational to where Skai is headed for the rest of the decade.
The workflow still requires pushing data into each retailer's cleanroom individually. What Data Hub changes is what happens before that: getting a brand's data into a single, actionable environment first, so every cleanroom interaction starts from the same clean foundation instead of a fresh, siloed effort each time.
Why Is Measurement Still Retail Media's Hardest Problem?
Quick answer: Because there is no universal measurement standard, and every retail media network defines success differently.
Every network has its own nomenclature, ad formats, and reporting structure. A six-pack of soda sold at Dollar General and a thirty-pack of soda sold at Costco need to be measured as the same underlying unit, and today that rationalization work falls almost entirely on the brand or its platform partner.
Skai's answer is Measurement Hub, designed to bring a brand's data into one unified measurement environment. But Vig is candid about the limits of that ambition.
"There is no one mathematical equation that everybody agrees on." - Matt Vignieri
Some brands want incremental ROAS. Others want new-to-brand customers or lifetime value. Rather than forcing a single formula, Vig says the platform's job is to consume multiple measurement approaches, including third-party tools, and let the brand apply whichever one answers their specific question. Incrementality remains, in his words, close to "a PhD level problem," one that AI can accelerate but will not fully solve on its own.
Will Agentic Commerce Replace Retail Media As We Know It?
Quick answer: Not anytime soon, and not fully. The more immediate shift is agents assisting the humans who manage retail media, not replacing the purchase decision itself.
Vig sees AI reshaping the operating model of retail media before it reshapes consumer buying behavior. Skai's marketing agent, Celeste, has spent the past year learning to answer questions like which channel is driving performance on another, or how an incremental hundred thousand dollars should be allocated. Skai Studio, announced more recently, lets brands build and deploy their own task-specific agents, sometimes working in squads, alongside a human who stays in the loop.
On the buying side, Vig is skeptical of the maximalist view that agents will simply place orders on a consumer's behalf. "I still like to go pick my own tomatoes." said Vig
He compared full agentic checkout to convenience-driven categories like grocery delivery, where adoption has been gradual and situational rather than total. He expects agents to quietly manage replenishment categories, like knowing when to reorder razor blades, well before they take over discretionary, high-consideration purchases. Trust, in his view, will build in stages.
"Once we can trust that the data is right, and the agent trusts it, then we can trust the agent with the data," he said. Until then, as he put it, "there is always going to be a man behind the curtain."
Key Takeaways at a Glance
1. What is the biggest operational problem in retail media today?
Managing 200+ disconnected networks, each with its own login, format, and report.
2. What do brands want most from retail media networks?
Usable, trustworthy audience data, without losing the retailer's ownership of it.
3. What is Skai doing to solve data fragmentation?
Data Hub, a brand-owned environment that harmonizes data before it ever reaches a cleanroom.
4. Is there a single standard for measuring retail media performance?
No. Skai's approach with Measurement Hub is to support multiple methodologies rather than force one.
5. Will AI agents take over retail media buying?
Not soon. Expect agents to assist human decision-makers first, starting with replenishment categories.
Conclusion: Stop Managing Walled Gardens One at a Time
Retail media's fragmentation is not going away. If anything, more networks, more cleanrooms, and more measurement standards are coming. The brands and platforms pulling ahead are not waiting for the industry to standardize itself. They are building their own unified layer, for data, for budget, and for measurement, and applying it consistently across every network they touch.
That is the same structural problem Kevel was built to solve from the retailer's side of the table: giving retail media networks the infrastructure to own their data and their monetization strategy, instead of renting it back from someone else. As the brand side of the market consolidates around platforms like Skai, the retailers with the most control over their own stack will be the easiest, and most valuable, partners to work with.
Listen to the Full Conversation on Unlocking Retail Media
For more insights like these, tune in to the full episode of Unlocking Retail Media, the podcast where Kevel CEO James Avery sits down with industry leaders and innovators shaping the future of retail and commerce media.
Listen to the full conversation with Matt Vignieri on Unlocking Retail Media.
