When Retail Brands Become DSPs: Lessons from Shipt + Yahoo

Retailers are no longer just merchants — they are turning into full-scale ad platforms. With growing access to first-party data and billions of shopper interactions, retail media has become one of the fastest-expanding frontiers in digital advertising. The question is no longer if retailers should participate in ad tech — it’s how efficiently they can do it.

The appeal is clear. Retailers have what most advertisers crave: deterministic data, verified purchase intent, and a direct relationship with customers. As cookies fade and third-party identifiers vanish, these data-rich ecosystems are becoming the new currency of targeting precision. But as the industry has seen before, control over technology often decides who truly benefits from innovation — and who ends up depending on someone else’s platform.

Retail media growth visual: retailers transforming products into audience platforms in the fastest-growing segment of digital advertising.

Why Retail Media Is Exploding

The surge in retail media spend isn’t just a marketing trend — it’s a structural shift in how digital budgets flow. Global brands are reallocating their investments toward platforms that can prove direct influence on sales and store traffic. With that, major retailers are embracing programmatic advertising as an extension of commerce itself.

This transformation has been accelerated by the need for more measurable outcomes. Every impression now carries the weight of proving its impact on the bottom line. For retailers, owning their own DSP means not just selling inventory, but managing the entire customer journey — from discovery to checkout — inside a closed, accountable loop. It’s the kind of control that traditional media owners never had, and marketers are eager to leverage it.

However, control doesn’t come without complexity. Building or operating a DSP is not the same as running a marketplace. It requires deep programmatic expertise, constant optimization, and a clear commitment to transparency. That’s where partnerships — like the one between Shipt and Yahoo — enter the story.

Shipt + Yahoo: A Case Study in DSP Delegation

When Shipt, Target’s same-day delivery service, partnered with Yahoo as its demand-side platform, it signaled a growing trend in retail media: collaboration between retailers and established ad tech providers. Yahoo’s DSP offered Shipt the infrastructure to activate and monetize its valuable first-party audience data without building a full ad stack from scratch. The partnership made perfect sense on paper — rapid market entry, proven technology, and instant demand connectivity.

Yet, the move also revealed the strategic dilemma facing retail media networks today. By outsourcing the DSP layer, Shipt effectively traded technological independence for time-to-market advantage. While Yahoo handled the technical heavy lifting, Shipt’s brand equity and shopper data became tightly intertwined with a third-party ecosystem. This model provides efficiency but also introduces risk: the loss of operational control, data portability, and long-term pricing power.

In an era where every impression and data point contributes to competitive differentiation, that dependency can become expensive. For retailers aiming to build sustainable, high-margin advertising ecosystems, full-stack ownership — or at least transparent programmatic independence — is rapidly becoming the smarter path.

Shipt + Yahoo partnership trade-off — balancing speed via third-party DSP and strategic independence through data control.

The Hidden Risk: Platform Dependency

Partnering with established ad tech players offers speed, but it can quietly erode a retailer’s strategic advantage. When technology sits outside your control, you also lose visibility into how impressions are traded, priced, and optimized. The more your retail media network relies on third-party DSPs, the harder it becomes to prove performance independently.

Platform dependency isn’t just a technology issue — it’s a data sovereignty problem. Retailers that rent their infrastructure end up sharing not only their traffic but also behavioral and purchase data with intermediaries. This undermines the very value proposition that made retail media powerful in the first place: the ability to connect advertising directly to verified sales outcomes.

In practice, retailers risk becoming data providers for someone else’s ecosystem, instead of building their own. The result is a loop of diminishing returns: lower control, lower margins, and weaker negotiating leverage. In a market driven by transparency, those who control their pipes — their DSPs, their measurement, their creative delivery — will control their future.

Diagram showing why retailers don’t need extra ad-tech layers — highlighting clarity, performance, and data control in retail DSP models.

Screencore’s Perspective: Empowering Independence

At Screencore, we believe retailers don’t need another middle layer between their data and their revenue. They need clarity, performance, and control — and that’s exactly what our programmatic infrastructure delivers.

Our platform allows brands and retailers to operate as both supply and demand — connecting directly with premium publishers and buyers through an omnichannel, transparent environment.

With Screencore, retailers can activate their first-party data, deliver high-impact immersive ads, and manage campaigns in real time without handing over control to external DSPs.

What makes this possible is our infrastructure. Screencore connects more than 300 buyers to over 500,000 publishers globally, processing thousands of real-time transactions every second.

That scale gives retailers the ability to access premium audiences and formats — mobile, CTV, and native — while maintaining complete control over creative, targeting, and performance.

Our approach is simple: empower retail brands to act like DSPs, not depend on them. The goal is to give them the same technical sophistication that ad tech giants possess, without the lock-in. Because in programmatic, independence isn’t just a business advantage — it’s a trust signal.

Curious how major retailers are rewriting the rules of programmatic advertising? Our previous article, “When Big Brands Go Programmatic: Lessons from Best Buy”, explores how a retail giant reimagined its media strategy — owning the audience, data, and campaign stack. Discover how control, transparency, and ambition are shaping the next wave of ad-tech evolution.

Retailers Don’t Need Another Middle Layer. They Need Control.

The rise of retail media proves one thing: brands are ready to own their digital destiny. But ownership starts with infrastructure. By partnering with Screencore, retailers can build future-proof advertising systems that deliver transparency, measurable performance, and true independence.

Control your data. Control your ads. Control your outcomes.

Contact our team to see how Screencore empowers retail brands to become their own DSP — and scale with confidence.