Retail-Media Mania: Amazon’s Ad Play Is About to Rewrite How You Measure Toy Sales

In March 2025, Amazon made a move that could ripple across every toy brand’s media plan: it announced the launch of a Retail Ad Service—a bold play to unify and simplify how brands advertise across retail ecosystems.

The idea? To create one API-friendly interface where advertisers can manage campaigns across Amazon, and eventually, tap into a web of third-party retail media networks (RMNs). In theory, this offers toy marketers a streamlined path to more shoppers and better performance.

But in reality? It threatens to widen the measurement gap marketers are already struggling to close.

Retail Media Is Booming—But So Is Confusion

Retail media is the fastest-growing channel in digital advertising. Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, and Amazon Ads are all commanding bigger portions of toy brands’ budgets. Why? Because they promise performance, proximity to purchase, and precision targeting.

But here’s the problem: each RMN is a walled garden. They track clicks, views, and conversions within their own ecosystems, and they rarely speak to each other—or to your brand campaigns on Meta, YouTube, or TikTok.

As a result, you’re likely seeing:

• Overlapping crediting: Multiple channels claiming the same sale.

• Undervalued brand campaigns: Awareness-driving media isn’t getting proper attribution if it didn’t result in a last-click.

• Misallocated budget: Over-indexing on conversion-rich RMNs, while underfunding upper-funnel growth.

Why Toy Brands Are Especially Exposed

For brands like Funrise, where products span bubbles to blind packs to licensed entertainment lines, retail partnerships are everything. Most sales happen in big-box retailers or marketplaces, not on owned DTC sites.

So when a parent sees your TikTok ad for Gazillion Bubbles, then two days later adds it to their Target pickup cart—your attribution engine likely gives credit to Target’s Roundel, not TikTok.

Worse still, when RMNs claim performance success, they often do so without proving incrementality. You may be paying to convert shoppers who were already going to buy.

Amazon’s “Fix” Might Make This Worse

Amazon’s Retail Ad Service claims to make things simpler by standardising how brands interact with multiple retail ad platforms.

But what it doesn’t solve is the fundamental issue: retail media measures performance in isolation.

In a world where parents browse on TikTok, search on Google, compare on Walmart, and buy on Amazon, you need to understand how channels work together—not just who got the last click.

Consolidation may create smoother ad buying. But unless it also consolidates measurement—or opens the black box—it’s simply amplifying the illusion of control.

What Smart Brand Marketers Are Starting to Do

Leading brand teams aren’t waiting for the platforms to fix this. They’re:

• Running incrementality testing across Meta, Google, CTV, and TikTok to see what’s really driving sales.

• Building or buying media mix models (MMM) that account for halo effects and time-lagged impact.

• Using first-party data and third-party modeling tools to stitch together a full picture of performance across channels.

They’re not just asking what converted?—they’re asking:

• What wouldn’t have converted without brand media?

• Where should I shift my next dollar to grow, not just harvest demand?

Three Questions to Ask Before Budgets Are Locked In

As we head into the key planning window for summer and back-to-school campaigns, here are the questions every VP of Marketing should be asking:

1. What is the true incremental impact of our upper-funnel spend on Amazon and Walmart sales?

2. How much are we double-counting across Retail Media Networks?

3. Are we investing in driving new demand, or just paying to show up at the cash register?

The Bottom Line

Retail media isn’t going anywhere—but the way it’s measured needs to evolve. Amazon’s new service might simplify operations, but it won’t magically fix attribution.

Brand marketers who get ahead of this shift—by building a clearer, cross-channel view of performance—will win not just more budget, but more confidence in how it’s spent