Vantage Chief Strategy Officer Drew Cashmore discusses the necessity of composable architecture and standardized APIs for retail media networks. He argues that retailers must prioritize connective infrastructure over simple media sales to overcome system fragmentation.
The shift toward composable retail media architecture signals a transition from viewing media as an incremental revenue stream to a core operational strategy. For the streaming ecosystem, this suggests that retailers will increasingly compete with traditional broadcasters by leveraging deep connective infrastructure that links commerce data with video ad serving. As retailers like Walmart invest in long-term technology stacks, the gap will widen between platforms offering unified data and those struggling with disconnected legacy systems. Watch for whether major retail networks prioritize API standardization over the current industry focus on uniform measurement metrics in the coming fiscal year.
Vantage is positioning itself within a rapidly consolidating retail media technology market where interoperability has become a key differentiator. In May 2025, The Trade Desk and Walmart announced a partnership enabling programmatic buying across Walmart Connect's inventory, a move that highlighted how major retail networks are opening their ad stacks to external demand-side platforms rather than keeping everything walled off. That same month, Innovid expanded its retail media capabilities by integrating with Amazon DSP, signaling that CTV-focused ad platforms are racing to plug into retail data ecosystems through standardized connections. These moves underscore the fragmentation problem that Drew Cashmore and Vantage are targeting: without retail media architecture, each new integration becomes a bespoke engineering project rather than a repeatable API handshake.
On the business and standards side, retail media networks are under increasing pressure to demonstrate measurable ROI through unified measurement frameworks. In June 2025, the IAB Tech Lab released updated guidelines for retail media measurement, calling for standardized attribution windows across on-site and off-site retail ad placements, a framework that directly supports the case for composable infrastructure by requiring consistent data flows between systems. Separately, Vantage raised $15 million in Series A funding in early 2025 to expand its retail media orchestration platform across North American and European markets, giving the company capital to build out the standardized API layer that Cashmore advocates. The funding round reflects investor confidence that the middleware and orchestration layer, rather than the media inventory itself, will capture outsized value as retail media matures.
Technical benchmarks for composable retail media architectures remain nascent, but early adopters are reporting meaningful efficiency gains. A 2025 study by Boston Consulting Group found that retailers with unified data infrastructure across their media operations achieved 30% higher return on ad spend compared to those running siloed systems, reinforcing the economic argument for standardized APIs. In the streaming-adjacent space, Roku announced in April 2025 that its OneView platform would support retail media integrations through open APIs, allowing brands to activate commerce data alongside CTV campaigns, a direct example of how composable architecture principles are crossing from pure retail into video advertising. For Vantage, the competitive test will be whether its orchestration layer can become the default connective tissue between these disparate systems before larger platform players build equivalent functionality in-house.
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