Retail-Media Underwear Wars: How Amazon, Walmart, and Target Could Be Inflating Your Sales Numbers

Retail media is fast becoming the heartbeat of lingerie marketing budgets, with Amazon projected to capture over $69 billion in ad revenue this year alone. Meanwhile, retail giants Walmart and Target continue to aggressively expand their own retail media platforms, turning every search and product page into competitive real estate for underwear brands.

At first glance, retail media seems like a marketer's dream, promising visibility precisely when customers are ready to buy. But behind these appealing promises lies a crucial challenge—fragmented attribution. This raises a critical question for marketers at lingerie and intimates brands like Adore Me: Are retail media networks truly creating new customer demand, or are they inadvertently double-counting existing shoppers?

Why Retail Media Dominates Underwear Marketing

Retail media’s appeal is straightforward: ads appear precisely where and when consumers are already in shopping mode. Lingerie and intimates shoppers are increasingly buying from marketplaces like Amazon and mass retailers such as Walmart and Target, making these channels essential battlegrounds for brands seeking both visibility and sales.

But as retail media scales up, marketers are finding that each platform—Amazon Advertising, Walmart Connect, Target’s Roundel—operates as its own walled garden, independently attributing sales within their respective ecosystems. The problem? When a customer interacts with multiple ads across these platforms, each one frequently takes credit for the same conversion, artificially inflating ROI metrics and obscuring the true effectiveness of each marketing dollar.

The Costly Blind Spots in Current Attribution Models

Lingerie consumers often explore multiple channels before purchasing—searching for products on Google, discovering deals via Instagram or TikTok, and eventually buying through a retailer or marketplace. Unfortunately, this multi-channel journey is poorly captured by retailer-native attribution tools, which typically credit only the last click within their own platforms.

This fragmented attribution poses significant risks for marketers, especially when considering budgets and future investment decisions. Brands risk over-allocating spend to lower-funnel retail media, inadvertently underfunding upper-funnel activities that drive long-term brand growth and incremental customer acquisition.

The Shortcomings of Platform-Native Analytics

Each retailer naturally promotes its own ecosystem, optimizing its analytics and attribution models to present maximum impact. Consequently, marketers relying solely on platform-native tools often see inflated results that don’t accurately represent real-world consumer behaviors or incremental sales.

For underwear brands like Adore Me, understanding the genuine impact of multi-channel strategies is critical for sustainable growth. Yet traditional attribution approaches are increasingly inadequate in providing clear answers, leaving many brands unknowingly flying blind.

Independent Measurement: The Smarter Way Forward

Leading brands are shifting away from reliance on platform-native metrics, adopting advanced measurement techniques like Media Mix Modeling (MMM), incrementality testing, and blended attribution frameworks. These methods provide an impartial view of marketing performance, effectively capturing the interplay between upper-funnel brand efforts and lower-funnel retail media results.

Not only do these approaches deliver clarity on true marketing effectiveness, but they also align seamlessly with evolving privacy requirements, ensuring brands remain compliant and insightful despite tightening data regulations.

How Top Underwear Brands Are Navigating This Challenge

Forward-thinking lingerie and intimates marketers have already started embracing independent measurement tools to recalibrate their attribution strategies. By combining third-party attribution with incrementality testing, they're identifying genuine sources of growth and adjusting budgets more effectively.

These proactive marketers understand the value in clearly seeing how each dollar contributes to growth—rather than just taking at face value the metrics each platform reports.

Your Next Steps as a Marketer

Retail media will continue to expand, and its impact on lingerie brands will only deepen. But to capture its true value, brands must address the hidden issue of fragmented attribution head-on. Those that adopt unbiased, cross-channel measurement today will hold a decisive advantage in their market tomorrow.

Before confirming your next quarter’s media spend, consider reevaluating your attribution models. In the new retail-media landscape, seeing clearly isn't just beneficial—it's essential.