Retail media is now a multi-billion-dollar market and it’s growing faster than any other digital channel. With more investment comes higher expectations for measurable ROI. And with Cyber 5 right around the corner, brands face more pressure than ever to maximize performance across every Retail Media Network (RMN).
As we saw during Prime Day 2025, shoppers are exploring options across multiple retailers rather than sticking with one platform. This behavior underscores why omnichannel retail media strategies are no longer optional. They’re now essential for capturing incremental growth, new audiences, and full-funnel visibility across every stage of the customer journey.
Winning Cyber 5 means acting faster across every retailer. Pacvue is the only fully integrated Commerce Operating System that allows you to connect retail media, commerce, and measurement so you can act in real time across retailers and stay ahead for Cyber 5.
In this article, we will cover how to win Cyber 5 by optimizing campaigns beyond Amazon, including:
- Pro Tips for Walmart Connect, Target Roundel and Instacart Ads.
- Agility strategies and how to act on cross-channel insights, mid-flight.
- Real life examples from brands who’ve played and won in multichannel retailing.
Cyber 5 Is No Longer Just About Amazon
As you’d expect, Amazon owns the lion’s share of retail media spend during Cyber 5. However, as most retailers now have their own sophisticated retail media networks—and often at a lower cost of entry—advertisers are experimenting with the options. Cyber 5 is now an omnichannel competition that goes beyond Amazon.
This year, retail sales are predicted to grow 11% from Black Friday through Cyber Monday 2025 vs. 2024 across all channels, according to a report by Bain & Company.
With consumer wallets tighter than ever, deal-seekers are likely to shop around. They’re likely to spread purchases across retailers, prioritizing price, availability and convenience over brand loyalty. By the same token, the potential to capture new-to-brand customers is huge, as shoppers move seamlessly from one channel to the next.
To grow share and protect margins, your brand must maintain a consistent, connected presence everywhere shoppers are discovering, comparing, and purchasing products.
Why an Omnichannel Strategy Is Your Competitive Edge for 2025 Holiday Commerce
Shoppers move seamlessly between social media, search engines, and retailer sites. To reach them, your product must be visible, available, and optimized across all these touchpoints.
A multi-retailer approach gives brands flexibility when things don’t go to plan, whether that’s a CPC surge, a competitor’s promotion, or out-of-stock issues. Diversifying across retail media networks lets you rebalance budgets mid-flight to sustain profitability and maximize reach.
The Challenges of Managing Ad Campaigns Across Multiple Retail Media Networks
During high-velocity events like Cyber 5, speed is everything:
- How quickly can you see and compare poor performance or emerging opportunities across channels?
- Can you shift ad resources from one channel to another fast enough to protect margins and grow share?
Siloed data and disconnected retail-media budgets make optimization reactive and inefficient. When each retailer reports differently and teams work in isolation during high-velocity events like Cyber 5, the lack of standardization makes optimization reactive and costly.
That’s where Pacvue’s Commerce Operating System comes in. Pacvue connects 100+ retailers and thousands of commerce signals, giving brands a single command center to manage media, measurement, and profitability across every channel.
With advertising automation, cross-retailer dashboards, and AI-powered budget pacing, Pacvue helps you act faster; reallocating spend where performance peaks and pausing what’s underperforming before it costs you.
Unlike point solutions limited to ad buying, Pacvue integrates inventory, profitability, and digital shelf signals into one command center to help enable your team to optimize toward conversion, not just clicks.
What Your Teams Can Achieve with Unified, Cross-Retailer Data and Automations
AI-powered omnichannel marketing tools not only offer cross-retailer insights, they give teams a level of agility that makes an omnichannel or multichannel approach to Cyber 5 profitable.
- Marketing
Automated dayparting and share-of-voice optimization assures marketing teams that budgets will be reallocated automatically when certain factors change; for example, when inventory levels drop, category competition increases, or demand surges. During the year’s busiest event, you know you can stay visible where it matters most and when shoppers are ready to buy.
- Analysts
Unified and customizable dashboards replace fragmented Excel workflows. This allows analysts to focus less on manual reconciliation and more on forecasting, trend analysis, and uncovering what’s driving incremental sales across retailers.
- Sales
With integrated iROAS and profitability reporting, you can link ad spend directly to total ROI. Sales leaders gain a full view of performance, margins, and opportunities across every retailer, ensuring investments align with revenue growth.
Real-World Proof: Brands Winning Omnichannel Cyber 5
Instant Pot Centralizes Retail Media and Achieves +260% Sales Growth
Instant Pot Brands brought its retail-media operations in-house using Pacvue, gaining real-time visibility and control across Amazon, Walmart and Target. With data integration, automated workflows and unified campaign management, the brand achieved a 260% increase in ad-attributed sales, a 22% lift in conversion rate, a 54% improvement in ROAS, and a 102% rise in share of voice.
Fashion Brand Boosts Ad-Attributed Sales by 20% on Walmart Connect
A fashion advertiser partnered with Kinesso and Pacvue to test dynamic bidding within its automatic Sponsored Products campaign on Walmart Connect. Over a 21-day test, the optimized bidding strategy delivered a +20% increase in ad-attributed sales, a +12% rise in orders, and a +5% lift in conversion rate.
Beverage Brand Drives 31% Revenue Growth with Dynamic Dayparting
A leading beverage manufacturer automated hourly ad bids using Pacvue’s dynamic dayparting integrated with Amazon Marketing Stream data. The strategy increased bids during peak-conversion hours and lowered them during low-performance periods. As a result, the brand achieved a 31% increase in revenue, 26% rise in ROAS, and 7% lift in conversion rate across campaigns.
Where to Play: Retail Media Pro Tips for Walmart, Target, and Instacart
Drawing on insights from Pacvue’s Q3 2025 US Retail Media Benchmark Report. Here are our top tips for success during Cyber 5 2025 on three of the top retail media networks.
Walmart Connect
During Q3 2025, CPC decreased -20% QoQ on Walmart Connect, while ROAS rose +21%. Efficiency improved after Walmart lowered minimum bids for Sponsored Brands campaigns.
Advertiser spend grew +26% YoY for Sponsored Brands and +20% YoY for Sponsored Products, showing that brands are prioritizing share growth during key Q3 events like Walmart Deals Days.
Walmart’s omnichannel ad ecosystem spans Search, Onsite Display, and in-store integration. It’s currently one of the most efficient performance channels heading into Cyber 5. Explore Walmart & Pacvue’s capabilities.
Target Roundel
CPCs increased +12.9% QoQ, while CTR jumped +14.2% QoQ. This signals strong audience engagement despite higher auction costs.
Average daily spend grew +5.9% QoQ, suggesting renewed investment momentum ahead of the holiday season.
Roundel’s premium inventory continues to attract brand marketers focused on upper- and mid-funnel impact, with audience-based targeting and creative-led activations driving brand lift and awareness during Cyber 5. Explore Roundel and Pacvue’s integration.
Instacart Ads
Importantly, Instacart has expanded beyond grocery, including retailers such as Petco, Sephora, Ulta Beauty, Best Buy, Staples, and Walgreens, turning it into a multi-vertical retail media powerhouse.
CPC rose +4.9% QoQ on Instacart Ads, while Sponsored Products spend increased +13% QoQ. This underscores advertisers’ focus on lower-funnel, high-intent campaigns.
ROAS for Shoppable Display declined -7% QoQ, but overall click-through rates remained steady, reflecting stable performance despite rising competition.
Instacart offers unmatched conversion potential across both every day and specialty categories, making it ideal for fast-turn, inventory-led campaigns. Explore opportunities with Instacart and Pacvue’s integration.
Measure What Matters: From ROAS to iROAS Across Retail Media Networks
Most advertisers rely on last-click ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) to understand performance. While this metric captures the revenue generated in relation to ad spend, it doesn’t distinguish between purchases influenced by advertising and those that would have happened anyway.
An incremental ROAS (iROAS) framework takes the next step by estimating the additional sales directly attributable to your campaigns. This method provides a more accurate view of how effectively advertising drives growth and helps identify where spend is creating real impact versus where it’s duplicating organic demand.
What is Incrementality and Why Does it Matter in Cyber 5 Retail Campaigns?
Incrementality reflects the additional revenue created by your campaigns, excluding sales that would have happened without advertising. During high-traffic periods like Cyber 5, understanding this difference is critical.
Without measuring incrementality, advertisers often waste spend on customers who would have purchased anyway. iROAS helps direct budget toward new-to-brand and high-value shoppers, maximizing the return on every dollar spent.
In a competitive Cyber 5 environment, measuring incrementality ensures your campaigns drive real growth, not just attributed sales.
Pacvue’s Incrementality Console combines cross-retailer data and predictive modeling to deliver the industry’s most advanced iROAS framework, validated across 100+ retail media networks, so marketers can:
- Improve spend efficiency across multiple retail media networks
- Validate the true business impact of their campaigns
- Build a unified measurement framework that goes beyond last-click ROAS
How Panasonic achieved a 33% lift in iROAS with Pacvue and Channel Bakers
Panasonic partnered with Channel Bakers and Pacvue to harness shelf-intelligence via Profitero+ Signals. The integration triggered automated bid adjustments in response to competitor pricing, promotions and stock changes. The results: a +99% increase in total sales, +83% growth in new-to-brand customers, +66% rise in ROAS and a +33% lift in incremental ROAS (iROAS).
3 Actionable Steps to Win Cyber 5 Across Retail Media Networks
1. Plan Your Omnichannel Strategy Holistically: Allocate Budgets by Audience Overlap and Retailer Momentum
Budgets are tighter, and shoppers are no longer loyal to one retailer. Pacvue’s Q3 2025 data shows Walmart (+26% YoY ad spend) and Instacart (+13% QoQ) are both gaining momentum as customers increasingly shop across multiple retailers. Your Cyber 5 plan should reflect where growth is actually happening, not just where you’ve always invested. Use the 2025 Cyber 5 Prep Checklist to identify where demand is accelerating.
- Map your winning SKUs across each retailer, then align spend to the channels where your category is growing fastest.
- Test creative sequencing: build awareness on one platform (e.g. Target Roundel) and drive conversion on another (Amazon or Walmart).
- Rebalance your spend: even shifting 10–15% of ad budget from one retailer to another can improve reach efficiency and deliver measurable, incremental sales lift.
- Use Pacvue’s AI automation to rebalance budgets mid-flight across networks and prevent wasted spend. During Cyber 5, even short-term out-of-stock events or budget pauses can derail momentum. Automation keeps campaigns live where shoppers are ready to buy.
2. Automate Intelligently for Cyber 5: Optimize in Real Time, Don’t “Set and Forget”
In Q3, CPC volatility surged across networks. Target (+12.9% QoQ) and Instacart (+4.9% QoQ) shows that manual management can’t keep pace with dynamic auctions. Explore Pacvue’s advertising automation tools to pre-schedule bid adjustments and dynamically reallocate budgets.
- Pre-schedule bid adjustments around peak shopping windows. Early mornings and evenings during Cyber 5 historically drive +20–30% higher CVRs (based on Pacvue performance data).
- Keep automation simple: one rule for pacing, one for SOV maintenance, one for budget rebalancing.
- Set alerts for budget exhaustion or stockouts so you can pause underperforming ASINs or shift spend mid-flight.
3. Measure Incrementally: Focus on Lift, Not Just ROAS
Most advertisers rely on traditional ROAS to measure efficiency, but that metric alone only tells part of the story. Standard ROAS shows revenue tied to ad spend, not the revenue caused by advertising efforts.
Incremental ROAS (iROAS) changes that. It measures net new revenue generated directly from your campaigns, filtering out sales that would have happened organically. During high-velocity periods like Cyber 5, this distinction is critical: when every dollar counts, marketers need to know which impressions truly drove incremental demand. 71% of advertisers now consider incrementality the top KPI for retail media investment, but most still measure in silos.
Incrementality Console delivers this clarity. As the industry’s most advanced iROAS measurement model, it connects campaign performance across 100+ retail media networks and isolates true business impact. With Pacvue’s Incrementality Console, you can:
- Measure incremental ROAS and capture additional revenue generated by advertising, not recycled or organic conversions. Use Pacvue’s Incrementality Console to measure incremental ROAS and capture the additional revenue generated by advertising, not recycled or organic conversionsCompare iROAS across retailers to optimize cross-retailer budgets. For example, Walmart’s ROAS rose +21% QoQ, while Instacart’s Display ROAS fell -7% QoQ. These are clear signals showing where to scale vs. pull back.
- Unify measurement across retailers, replacing last-click views with a consistent, predictive model of incrementality.
- After Cyber 5, reallocate the next week’s budgets based on incremental gains, not total spend or impressions.
Gaining a Cyber 5 Advantage Beyond Amazon
Winning Cyber 5 in 2025 means mastering agility, not just scale. Amazon will remain central, but the brands outperforming peers are those treating retail media as an ecosystem. With customers hopping between retailer more than ever, success depends on how fast you can act, automate, and measure across every retailer that matters.
A unified, data-driven approach lets you shift spend where performance peaks, capture new-to-brand audiences, and protect margins when competition surges. The brands leading this charge,from Mars to Panasonic,already use Pacvue to connect media, commerce, and measurement in one platform.
Plan your holiday retail strategy now with our Winter Workshop for Commerce Holiday Success and the 2025 Cyber 5 Prep Checklist to turn every impression into incremental growth.
