Retail Media Radar - September 2025: Voice, Loyalty and New Frontiers
September’s updates show retail media pushing into spaces that once felt experimental:
voice-commerce is staging a comeback through Amazon’s Alexa+
loyalty is emerging as the deciding factor in the age of agentic AI
offsite opportunities are multiplying through community-interest & discovery platforms such as Reddit.
Meanwhile, Instacart is extending its Carrot Ads into alcohol ecommerce, and Google’s latest loyalty ad features highlight both the potential and the risks of retailers partnering with their so-called “data enemies” for short-term gains.
Rather than incremental change, these stories point to retail media’s willingness to revisit old promises, redefine community value, and rewire decision-making, making the landscape more unpredictable, and more exciting, than ever.
1. Amazon Ads Integrates with Alexa+: Conversational Commerce Comes Back Into Play
Amazon Ads has unveiled a new wave of features that integrate sponsored product placements directly into shopping conversations with Alexa+. For the first time, voice-led assistants are blending organic discovery with retail media monetisation.
When users ask Alexa+ for product recommendations on devices like the Echo Show, they now receive a curated mix of organic and sponsored results.
Component-based creative formats allow advertisers to deliver more engaging display and video assets on Alexa devices without building custom units.
AI-driven campaign automation is being rolled out globally, offering dynamically optimised targeting for sponsored display campaigns.
Amazon Marketing Cloud now features an AI chatbot interface to help advertisers create segments and build strategies using natural language prompts.
For years, industry watchers predicted that voice would transform retail, yet it remained on the fringe. Alexa+ could mark the moment voice shopping moves from novelty to necessity, finally realising its potential as a mainstream retail media channel.
We see this as an important inflection point. Retailers and brands need to ensure their data and creative assets are structured for deployment across multiple channels, including conversational discovery. Because when AI-agents become the ‘new retail shelf’, visibility depends on relevance in dialogue, not just placement.
Find out more here.
2. Agentic AI: Loyalty Becomes the Deciding Factor
Agentic AI - autonomous digital agents capable of shopping on behalf of consumers - is changing the rules of retail media. In this new landscape, loyalty isn’t just a retention tool, it’s the key to staying visible.
According to eMarketer, when AI agents shop, they weigh not only price but also loyalty perks like points, free delivery, or exclusive promotions.
Retail media networks tied to strong loyalty schemes - like Tesco Clubcard or Nectar360 - will gain an edge as agents optimise decisions based on program value.
This could shift ad relevance - retailers that integrate loyalty data into agent-friendly APIs will become the preferred partners of AI-driven shopping assistants.
Brands, meanwhile, will need to plan for a future where the agent, not the shopper, is the first audience.
Retailers that fail to adapt risk being left out of autonomous purchase journeys entirely.
We believe agentic AI reframes the retail media challenge. It’s no longer enough to personalise for human shoppers, the next battleground is making your brand discoverable and desirable to AI agents.
Find out more here.
3. Instacart Expands Carrot Ads with Bottlecapps Integration
Instacart Expands Carrot Ads with Bottlecapps Integration
Instacart has extended its Carrot Ads technology into Bottlecapps, a platform powering ecommerce for 1,300+ independent alcohol retailers across North America.
The move allows brands to extend their Instacart campaigns seamlessly into alcohol ecommerce, one of the most fragmented and compliance-driven verticals.
Advertisers can now reach high-intent shoppers at the point of digital discovery with sponsored placements and personalised product recommendations.
Bottlecapps retailers benefit from new monetisation streams and data insights tied directly to same-day fulfilment.
Instacart gains broader offsite reach, reinforcing its position as more than just a delivery platform - it’s a media activation layer across fragmented retail ecosystems.
The integration underscores retail media’s ability to extend into specialist verticals, not just mass-market grocery.
This is a great blueprint for how retail media networks can scale: partnering with niche ecommerce platforms to bring advertisers reach and precision in categories where shopper intent is high but fragmented.
Find out more here.
4. Google Upgrades Retail Ads with Personalised Loyalty Perks
Google Ads has introduced enhanced loyalty features, allowing retailers to showcase member-only benefits such as exclusive pricing and shipping directly in both paid and free shopping listings. The update also adds a new campaign optimisation goal that enables brands to prioritise high-value loyalty members, with early tests from Sephora showing a 20% lift in click-through rates among signed-in shoppers. With 61% of U.S. adults saying loyalty programs are the most compelling part of a personalised shopping experience, the timing ahead of the holiday season is no coincidence.
These enhancements aim to shift retail media strategies from acquisition-focused campaigns toward retention, using loyalty data as a lever for performance.
By enabling automated bidding against loyalty goals, Google is positioning itself as the connective tissue between brand strategy and customer retention.
For retailers, the move offers undeniable convenience and performance gains, but it also raises important questions about control. Sharing proprietary loyalty data with Google risks ceding visibility and customer ownership to an external “data enemy.”
Over-reliance on Google’s algorithm-driven optimisation could reduce transparency, with retailers left dependent on a black-box system for performance insights.
The critical challenge is finding balance, leveraging Google’s scale and tools to deliver short-term results, without undermining long-term brand equity, privacy, and trust.
The real winners will be the retailers who use Google’s tools as an accelerator, not a crutch - capitalising on its reach to complement, not replace, their own ecosystems. Success will depend on setting guardrails that protect proprietary data and brand equity, while doubling down on building in-house retail media networks that ensure the customer relationship stays in their hands, not Google’s.
Find out more here.
5. Reddit: Community-Driven Engagement Propels Ad Revenue Toward $1.8 Billion
One area that’s often overlooked in retail media is the power of an engaged community base. And Reddit are showing that this could be an important frontier. Reddit is on track to hit $1.8 billion in global ad revenue in 2025, up nearly 50% year-over-year.
In Q2 alone, Reddit generated $465 million in ad revenue, an 84% annual increase.
Growth has been driven by AI-powered ad products, enabling contextual targeting across its 100,000+ active communities.
Investors have responded positively: Reddit’s stock surged 15% after strong earnings and user engagement metrics.
The platform’s strength lies in authentic, high-intent conversations that often mirror shopper search and discovery behaviour.
For advertisers, Reddit represents not just reach, but depth - intent-rich audiences who are actively researching and recommending products.
Reddit therefore becomes an important testing ground for the future of offsite retail media. As AI agents and conversational commerce expand, platforms built on community trust could become the most valuable conduits for brand discovery.
Find out more here.
September’s edition highlights how retail media is circling back to old frontiers while opening new ones. Amazon’s Alexa+ push shows voice commerce may finally step out of the sidelines, powered by better data and sharper ad formats. Google’s latest loyalty ad features highlight both the promise of personalised retention and the risks of ceding too much power to external platforms, raising critical questions about control, data and brand equity. Instacart’s move into alcohol ecommerce underscores how retail media can unlock fragmented categories, while Reddit’s ad surge shows the growing pull of communities as intent-rich environments for discovery.
And then there’s agentic AI: shifting the question from “how do we win shoppers?” to “how do we win their digital agents?”. Loyalty is no longer just retention - it’s a lever in algorithmic decision-making, determining which brands surface and which disappear.
We believe the opportunity isn’t simply in adding more channels, but in orchestrating them. The retailers and brands that can align voice, loyalty, community, and AI into a connected retail media strategy will not just compete for attention - they’ll shape the very pathways of commerce.