Amazon’s Macy’s Ad Deal Is a Go-To-Market Signal Worth Reading

The Amazon Macy’s advertising deal is a commercial arrangement that lets Macy’s tap Amazon’s advertising infrastructure to reach shoppers across Amazon’s owned properties and publisher network. On the surface it looks like a media buy. Look closer and it tells you something more interesting about where retail go-to-market strategy is heading.

For senior marketers, the deal raises a question worth sitting with: when two companies that compete for the same wallet share enter an advertising partnership, what does that signal about the economics of attention and the limits of building proprietary audience infrastructure from scratch?

What the Deal Actually Involves

The specifics matter here. Macy’s is using Amazon’s demand-side platform and advertising technology to run campaigns that reach Amazon shoppers. This gives Macy’s access to Amazon’s first-party purchase data, which is among the richest intent signals available in retail advertising. Amazon, in turn, generates revenue from a competitor’s media budget and strengthens the case for its ad network as a cross-retailer infrastructure play.

It is worth being precise about what this is and what it is not. Macy’s is not selling products on Amazon. It is not integrating its inventory into Amazon’s marketplace. It is using Amazon as a media channel, in the same way a brand might use Google Display or a programmatic DSP. The distinction matters because it changes how you should think about the competitive dynamics at play.

That said, the fact that Macy’s is paying Amazon for access to Amazon’s shoppers, some of whom are also Macy’s shoppers, is not a neutral arrangement. It has implications for margin, for data ownership, and for the longer-term balance of power between retailers and the platforms that sit above them in the attention stack.

Why Retail Media Networks Changed the Go-To-Market Calculus

When I was running agency teams managing significant retail media budgets, the question we kept returning to was not which platform had the best creative tools. It was which platform had the most accurate signal between ad exposure and purchase. Amazon’s answer to that question has always been straightforward: we have the transaction data. You don’t.

That closed-loop attribution, real exposure connected to real purchase, is what makes Amazon’s network structurally different from most other programmatic options. It is also what makes the Macy’s deal commercially logical, even if it feels counterintuitive on the surface. Macy’s is not paying for impressions. It is paying for proximity to demonstrated purchase intent, in a category where its own data assets are strong but its reach outside its existing customer base is limited.

This is the core tension in retail go-to-market right now. Reaching new audiences costs money. Building the infrastructure to reach them yourself costs more. And the platforms that have already built that infrastructure are willing to sell access to it, including to your competitors. If you want to think through how this fits into a broader growth framework, the articles on go-to-market and growth strategy at The Marketing Juice cover the structural decisions that sit behind deals like this one.

The Lower-Funnel Trap and Why Macy’s Needed to Escape It

Earlier in my career I overvalued lower-funnel performance. I was not alone in that. Most agency P&Ls in the 2010s were built on the back of performance media that looked efficient because it was capturing demand that already existed. The problem is that demand capture is not demand creation. At some point the pool of people who already know you and are ready to buy stops growing, and your cost-per-acquisition starts climbing regardless of how well you optimise the campaign.

Macy’s has a version of this problem. It has a large, loyal customer base. It has strong brand recognition among older demographics. What it has struggled with is reaching younger shoppers who have never formed a Macy’s habit, shoppers who are browsing Amazon, buying on Instagram, and discovering brands through channels that Macy’s does not own or control.

Using Amazon’s network is, in part, a bet that Amazon’s audience data can surface Macy’s to shoppers who are in-market for apparel and home goods but have not considered Macy’s as an option. That is an upper-to-mid funnel play dressed in performance media clothing. The attribution will look like lower-funnel efficiency. The actual strategic value is in the new audience exposure.

There is a useful analogy here. Someone who tries on a jacket in a store is far more likely to buy it than someone who walks past the window. The challenge for Macy’s is getting people into the fitting room in the first place. Amazon’s data can help identify who is likely to try something on. That is worth paying for, even if the attribution model does not capture the full picture of what is actually happening.

For a grounded look at how market penetration strategy actually works in practice, Semrush has a solid breakdown of the mechanics involved.

What This Signals About Platform Concentration

The deal is also a signal about where power is concentrating in the advertising ecosystem. Amazon has built something that Google and Meta have not: a direct, unambiguous link between advertising exposure and retail transaction. It knows what people bought before they saw your ad and what they bought after. That is a fundamentally different dataset from search intent or social engagement.

When a major department store decides it is worth paying a direct competitor for access to that dataset, it tells you how valuable the signal has become. It also tells you something about the structural position Macy’s finds itself in. It does not have equivalent first-party data at scale outside its own customer base. Its loyalty programme gives it depth on existing customers. It does not give it reach into new ones.

This is a pattern I have seen play out across industries, not just retail. Businesses that built their go-to-market strategy around owned channels and organic reach in the 2010s are now finding that the cost of maintaining that reach has increased substantially, while the platforms that aggregated attention are offering to sell it back at a price. The negotiating position shifts over time, and it shifts in favour of the platform.

For brands thinking about how to avoid that trap, growth strategy case studies can be instructive. The patterns that worked for challenger brands in previous cycles often involved building audience relationships that platforms could not easily intermediate. That is harder now, but the principle still holds.

The Co-opetition Question Every Marketer Should Be Asking

There is a word that gets used in strategy circles that I have always found more useful than it sounds: co-opetition. The idea that companies can simultaneously compete and cooperate, depending on where in the value chain the interaction sits. The Amazon Macy’s deal is a clean example of it in practice.

At the product level, Amazon and Macy’s compete. Both sell apparel. Both want the same customer’s spending. At the infrastructure level, they are now in a supplier-customer relationship, with Amazon supplying audience access and Macy’s buying it. The question for Macy’s strategists is whether that relationship is sustainable on acceptable terms over a five-year horizon, or whether it is a short-term tactical move that creates a longer-term dependency.

I have sat in enough agency boardrooms to know that these questions often get deferred. The deal looks good on a quarterly media plan. The implications for data ownership and platform leverage tend to surface later, when the contract is up for renewal and the platform knows how much you need it.

BCG has written usefully about the structural dynamics of go-to-market pricing strategy in complex markets, and some of the same logic applies here. When you are buying a capability rather than building it, the pricing power sits with the seller. That is fine in the short term. It becomes a strategic constraint if you never invest in the alternative.

What Brands Should Take from This, Not Just Retailers

The Macy’s deal is a retail story, but the strategic lessons are not retail-specific. Any brand that relies on a small number of platforms for the majority of its audience reach is in a version of the same position. The platform has the data. The platform has the distribution. The brand has the product and the budget.

That is not a catastrophic position to be in. Most brands will always need to buy audience access from platforms that have built better infrastructure than they could justify building themselves. But it does mean that the brands with the most durable go-to-market positions are the ones that are building something proprietary alongside their platform spend, whether that is first-party data, a loyalty programme with genuine behavioural depth, a creator ecosystem that drives organic reach, or a community that exists outside the algorithm.

Creator-led go-to-market is one area where brands have found genuine leverage outside the platform dependency cycle. Later’s work on creator-driven go-to-market campaigns is worth reviewing if you are thinking about how to build reach that does not route entirely through Amazon or Meta’s infrastructure.

The other thing worth noting is that the Macy’s deal will generate data. Macy’s will learn something about which Amazon audiences convert, which product categories resonate with new-to-brand shoppers, and which creative approaches work in Amazon’s environment. That learning has value beyond the immediate campaign. The question is whether Macy’s is building the internal capability to act on it, or whether it is outsourcing the interpretation along with the execution.

When I grew an agency from 20 to 100 people, the capability question was always more important than the contract question. You can buy access to almost anything. Building the internal muscle to use it well is the harder and more valuable work.

The Measurement Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

There is a measurement issue embedded in this deal that deserves honest attention. Amazon’s attribution model will show Macy’s the results that Amazon’s attribution model is designed to show. That is not a criticism of Amazon specifically. It is a structural reality of buying media from a platform that also controls the measurement layer.

I spent time judging the Effie Awards, which is one of the few places in the industry where marketing effectiveness is evaluated against actual business outcomes rather than platform metrics. The gap between what campaigns claim in their platform dashboards and what they can demonstrate in terms of genuine incremental growth is often significant. Not because marketers are dishonest, but because the measurement infrastructure is built to show the platform in the best possible light.

Macy’s will need to run its own incrementality testing alongside whatever Amazon’s platform reports. That means holding out groups, measuring baseline sales velocity against exposed audiences, and being willing to accept that some of what Amazon’s dashboard claims as conversions would have happened anyway. That is uncomfortable work. It is also the only way to know whether the deal is actually generating growth or just capturing it.

Vidyard’s research on untapped pipeline potential for go-to-market teams touches on a related theme: the gap between what teams think their go-to-market activity is generating and what is actually incremental. The retail context is different, but the measurement discipline is the same.

For a broader view of how go-to-market strategy connects to measurable business outcomes, the full collection of growth strategy thinking at The Marketing Juice covers the frameworks and commercial logic that sit behind decisions like this one.

The Bigger Picture for Go-To-Market Strategy

Step back from the specific deal and the pattern becomes clearer. The advertising infrastructure layer of the economy is consolidating around a small number of players with proprietary data and distribution. Those players are increasingly willing to sell access to that infrastructure to anyone with a budget, including competitors. That creates short-term efficiency for buyers and long-term leverage for sellers.

For marketers building go-to-market strategies, the implication is not that you should avoid Amazon’s network or any other platform with similar characteristics. The implication is that you should be building something alongside your platform spend that does not depend on the platform’s continued cooperation. First-party data. Owned channels. Audience relationships that survive a platform policy change or a price increase.

BCG’s work on scaling agile organisations is relevant here in a non-obvious way. The companies that adapt best to shifts in platform power are the ones that have built internal capability alongside external spend. They can pivot when the terms change because they are not entirely dependent on the platform to execute.

The Amazon Macy’s deal is commercially logical. It is probably the right short-term move for Macy’s given its audience reach challenges. But the brands that will look back on this period of retail media consolidation with the most satisfaction will be the ones that used their platform spend to buy time while they built something that the platform cannot take away.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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