TripleLift released case studies in June 2026 documenting that off-platform retail media networks delivered new customer growth and measurable ROI for global brands across beauty, toys, food & beverage, and home & living, according to PR Newswire. The studies measured performance when brands ran media on retail networks operating outside the Amazon and Walmart walled gardens — the retailer-owned platforms where most CPG and product marketing budgets have concentrated since 2020.
The mechanism is inventory access. When a brand buys media on Amazon's demand-side platform, it reaches shoppers already browsing Amazon. When it buys offsite retail media through a network like TripleLift, it uses first-party purchase data from a retailer but serves ads on publisher sites, social feeds, and open-web inventory where the shopper has not yet decided where to buy. The brand captures intent earlier in the journey and competes for attention before the customer lands on a marketplace dominated by twenty other listings.
The reported results show new customer acquisition, not just retargeting existing buyers. That distinction matters because most on-platform retail media delivers high conversion rates by showing ads to people who already bought the category or visited the product page. Offsite networks use retailer purchase data to model lookalike audiences and prospect beyond the existing customer file. A beauty brand running a TripleLift campaign can target households that bought prestige skincare at a partner retailer in the past ninety days but have never purchased that specific brand. The ad runs on Condé Nast, recipe sites, or news inventory. The customer clicks, buys on the brand's DTC site or at the retailer, and the brand attributes the sale back to the offsite media spend.
The play is straightforward. A small physical-product brand identifies a retail partner with a media network — not Amazon, not Walmart, but a specialty chain or regional grocer that sells the product and operates its own ad platform or works with an offsite network. The brand allocates 10 to 15 percent of its total media budget to a test campaign. It provides creative in standard display sizes, sets a cost-per-acquisition target, and runs the campaign for thirty days. The network uses the retailer's purchase data to build the audience, serves ads across publisher inventory, and reports back on new customer file growth and blended CAC. If the test clears the brand's acquisition hurdle, the brand scales the spend and pulls budget from Meta or Google, where frequency has driven up costs.
The broader pattern is retailer data becoming portable. For five years, brands paid Amazon and Walmart to access their own customers because the platforms controlled both the inventory and the audience. Now mid-tier and specialty retailers are monetizing their purchase data by letting brands buy offsite media that uses that data for targeting but runs anywhere. The brand gets reach, the retailer gets margin on media sales, and the publisher gets display revenue. The trade is not speculative — TripleLift's case studies document it working across four high-volume physical-product categories in a single quarter.