A $130 Billion Retail Media Market – and No Clear Marketplace Leader Yet

01 /The Concept

Looma describes its business as "storytelling and education at the point of decision."

The "point of decision" is a physical store – specifically, the moment when a shopper is standing in front of a shelf and making a final purchase call. To influence that decision, Looma places screens inside stores and plays video content about the products sold there.

But the differentiation isn't the screens, or even the videos. It's what those videos show.

Looma's films aren't traditional ads. They tell stories and educate viewers. The results speak for themselves:

- While a brand's video is running in-store, sales of that brand's products roughly double compared to baseline.

- Sales remain about 25% above baseline for a month after the campaign ends.

- A residual lift of roughly 12% persists for six months post-campaign.

Looma argues that consumer trust in brands has eroded – driven largely by younger generations who grew up skeptical of advertising and developed a reliable instinct for tuning it out.

The company's response is what it calls "returning humanity to retail" – starting with grocery stores, its primary vertical. The most effective videos Looma produces do two things: they establish an emotional connection with the viewer first, then repeat a single, simple differentiating quality of the product. Not a tagline. A truth.

Looma started by producing these films itself. To scale supply, it later built a marketplace connecting brands with studios and freelancers who specialize in this storytelling-and-education format.

Founded in 2015, Looma had placed just 800 screens across 675 stores by 2023. Demand has accelerated sharply – the company now plans to operate 5,000 screens by end of year, a 6x increase in roughly 12 months. To support that growth, Looma just raised $10M, bringing total funding to $21.5M.

02 /Why It Matters

Retail media – advertising that lives at or near the point of sale, both in-store and online – is growing at a speed that makes most market forecasts look conservative.

The speed of this growth is genuinely remarkable. Search advertising took 14 years to grow from $1B to $30B. Social media advertising took 11 years. Retail media did it in 5.

Retail media now claims a share of advertiser budgets comparable to social media – surpassing every other channel.

And it's growing in both directions: online and offline. Online, Amazon earned nearly $47 billion from advertising in 2023 alone – brands and sellers paying to appear more prominently on its marketplace. Instacart, the grocery delivery platform, now derives roughly 30% of total revenue from advertising, with that line growing while delivery revenue stays flat.

Equally significant is the shift in how retail content is being made.

As Looma frames it: "Welcome to the cinema inside the store. Where people have no time for ads. So in our content, authenticity replaces slogans. We tell stories that build a bridge between producers and consumers – focused on the educational moments that help people make informed buying decisions."

In other words, effective retail content today has to stop looking like traditional advertising. That creates an opening for content creators – including influencers – who can move into this format first.

The Desire Company ([related review](/review/tri-sposoba-dlja-masshtabirovanija-na-jetom-novom-rynke)) made a relevant pivot. It had long produced expert-hosted videos designed to educate shoppers, but hosted them on its own site and earned affiliate commissions. It has since repositioned: now producing these videos directly for brands, who then deploy them in-store, on social media, on their own sites, and on the marketplaces where they sell. The company raised a new round in May (undisclosed size) on top of $19.4M raised previously.

03 /Opportunities

The opportunity splits cleanly by who you are. For marketplace builders, retail media is a third revenue model sitting alongside subscriptions and transaction commissions – Instacart's 30% revenue-from-ads figure is the benchmark, and the prerequisite is tooling to sell, place, and measure that advertising. For content creators and influencers monetizing through brand deals, the format has already changed: "show the product and say it's great" has lost its purchase with younger audiences. What works now is emotional connection followed by a single memorable truth about the product, and creators who master that format first have a durable edge over those still producing conventional branded content. For everyone else, there's a marketplace play: brands and retailers need this new type of content, the supply of creators who can deliver it well is limited, and the gap between supply and demand suggests a platform connecting them with performance data to prove quality.

That marketplace play lands directly on a market projected to hit $130 billion. There's serious money circulating here – and even a middleman's share of it is worth pursuing.