What GameStop Taught Me About Retail Media Before It Had a Name

Before retail media networks had a name — before Kroger Precision Marketing and Walmart Connect and Amazon Ads became billion-dollar businesses — a version of the same model was running at GameStop.

I know because I helped build it.

The setup

GameStop had three assets that, in hindsight, were a retail media network waiting to happen:

1. PowerUp Rewards — a loyalty program with over 65 million members generating transaction-level data across every store and online purchase
2. Game Informer — the largest gaming publication in the world, with millions of subscribers consuming content every month
3. Owned channels — email, in-store, web, and direct mail reaching the most engaged gaming audience on the planet

Publishers and game developers didn't call it "retail media." They called it co-op marketing, trade marketing, and content partnerships. But the mechanics were the same: brands paying to reach a retailer's audience, using the retailer's data, through the retailer's channels.

What we got right

The audience was the product. We didn't sell impressions in the abstract. We sold access to specific segments of the loyalty database — new console owners, lapsed members, high-frequency buyers, genre enthusiasts. The targeting was built on actual purchase behavior, not surveys or modeled data.

Content was the delivery mechanism. Game Informer wasn't just a magazine — it was an engagement platform that kept the audience connected between purchases. That attention created inventory. Brands could reach a customer through editorial content, email campaigns, and in-store activations, all informed by the same loyalty data.

Measurement was built in. Because we owned the loyalty data and the point of sale, we could close the loop. Did a customer who saw a campaign actually buy the product? We could answer that question with transactional data, not click proxies.

What we got wrong

The systems weren't connected enough. Loyalty, content, and marketing operations ran on separate platforms with manual handoffs. Building an audience segment, activating it across channels, and measuring the result required coordination across multiple teams and tools. Every campaign was a project, not a system.

We didn't compound. Each campaign started from scratch. The insights from one activation didn't automatically inform the next one. There was no AI layer learning from every interaction and improving targeting over time. The data was there — the feedback loop wasn't.

Why this matters now

What we built at GameStop with PowerUp Rewards and Game Informer is now the playbook for every major retailer. But the playbook has evolved. The retailers that will dominate the next phase aren't just building media networks — they're building connected systems where loyalty data, media delivery, and AI-driven personalization operate as one flywheel.

The pieces we had — massive first-party data, owned content, brand partnerships, and closed-loop measurement — are exactly the pieces every retailer is assembling today. The difference is that today's technology can connect them in ways we couldn't a decade ago.

The lesson from GameStop isn't about gaming retail. It's about what happens when a retailer takes its loyalty data seriously as a media asset. Every retailer with a meaningful loyalty program is sitting on the same opportunity. The question is whether they'll connect the pieces.