Retail Media Insights

Why cutting-edge AdServing Tech is key to unlocking the power of Retail Media Networks (RMN) 🛒⚙️📈 By now, marketers are familiar with why RMNs are revolutionizing how brands connect with consumers. But what can turn RMNs into truly powerful marketing engines? The answer lies in cutting-edge adserving tech that not only delivers ads seamlessly but also ensures data-backed decisions and hyper-targeted ad placements, to boost sales and overall performance metrics 🚀 In the last few weeks, I’ve been diving into technologies like Kevel and Moloco. Each offers unique selling propositions and stands as a powerful alternative to Google Ad Manager (GAM), which is the most established player in the field. Here are some critical dimensions to consider when comparing different adserving technologies for RMNs: 1️⃣ Performance Management: Beyond tracking metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversions, adservers should enable real-time performance optimization. This helps identify trends and make data-driven decisions to improve your campaigns. 2️⃣ Business Logics: Setting business rules for ad prioritization, pacing, and capping is vital for maximizing ad revenue. These rules can be based on various metrics such as CPM, CPC, and CAC, allowing for flexible and optimized adserving strategies. 3️⃣ Customization: Experiences are key to engaging your audience. Configuring custom ad units and using creative templates help tailor ad content to match brand and audience preferences, driving ad effectiveness.   4️⃣ Creative Management: Managing creative assets involves producing, uploading, and organizing the visual and text components of ads. Efficient endpoints ensure that you can handle different ad sizes and types that are visually appealing and meet technical specifications. 5️⃣ Inventory Management: Managing the onsite properties (websites, apps, etc.) where ads are displayed involves pre-created inventory options and tools to manage and optimize this inventory effectively. 6️⃣ Scalability: A scalable ad serving infrastructure helps handle high traffic volumes and complex ad operations efficiently, by optimizing server setup, ensuring load balancing, and employing caching strategies to manage large-scale ad requests without compromising performance 7️⃣ API Integrations: The Decision API is crucial for real-time ad decision-making, allowing you to request ads and receive responses based on predefined criteria. The Management API helps you manage campaigns and creatives (CRUD). 8️⃣ Testing and Debugging: Detailed instructions for testing ad requests and responses are often overlooked . This ensures that your ad serving setup works correctly and efficiently. Debugging tips help troubleshoot any issues that arise, ensuring smooth ad operations. What am I missing? Have experience with any of these adserving technologies? How do they support your RMN strategies? Curious to hear thoughts. #advertising #media #tech

A new ad placement looks like growth. It’s usually just more runway. When an airport builds a new runway, airlines gain more flight capacity. That does not increase profit. It increases potential supply. Empty seats still burn fuel. Airlines don’t obsess over runway count. They obsess over yield per seat. Because capacity without profitable demand destroys margin. Retail has the same problem with media. Every new placement promises: • Lower CPMs • Early-mover advantage • Incremental reach But reach is infrastructure. Profit comes from yield. If the signal inside that placement is weak: • Traffic converts below blended average • Discounts increase to compensate • Contribution erodes quietly • CAC drifts away from LTV Cheap attention with poor signal is the equivalent of flying half-full planes. It looks active. It looks expanded. It looks like scale. But yield tells the truth. Strong retail teams don’t chase new surfaces. They ask: • Is the intent commercially useful? • Does this improve contribution per order? • Does it expand profitable demand or dilute it? • Can our measurement model actually read the impact? Platforms measure inventory growth. Retailers must measure margin growth. New placements are runway. Signal quality determines yield. And yield determines profit. #retailmarketing #ecommerce #performancemarketing #growthstrategy #decisionmaking #digitalmaturity #retailstrategy

Retail media Is booming and changing the shopper journey heavily - but are FMCG giants ready to play it properly, yet? After hundreds of store visits across Saudi modern trade, I’m witnessing a retail media revolution. The infrastructure at Othaim Markets, Panda, Danube, and Tamimi Markets Jeddah is impressive - entry bows, category headers, integrated brand experiences transforming the shopper journey. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: most FMCG brands aren’t ready to play this game properly. In the store I just visited, take Nescafe RTD. They have budget, distribution, and brand power. But their assets don’t match the retail media hardware in the store. Side note: Besides that example, Nescafe did a fantastic job in the relaunch of their RTDC portfolio in the region. Why Retail Media Fails for Most Brands Retail media on its own will have a negative ROI. Let me be clear about that. But if you build a story around it, it can make all the sense in the world. The 4 Critical Steps That Actually Work: 1) You Need a Powerful Test Budget (And It’s Super High) Entry bows, category headers, custom gondolas require serious investment. Most brands underestimate this by 50-70% and wonder why execution looks cheap. 2) Align With the Retailer Get sell-out data (not just sell-in), secure your core shelf space, plus a separate gondola. Without retailer partnership on data and space, you’re flying blind and cannibalizing your base business. 3) Get the Specs and Adapt Your Latest TVC Get exact specifications from Faden, Saudi Signs, or whoever provides the hardware. Then push internally to adapt your newest TV commercial content to those specs. Not “close enough.” Not “global assets.” This is where corporate bureaucracy kills speed - and why you see situations like what I just observed. 4) Make an In-Store Video and Use It Strategically Film your execution in-store (Friday mornings in Saudi when it’s quieter). Interview the retailer. Then use this content in Joint Business Planning sessions to demonstrate capabilities and secure better terms. This transforms retail media from tactical spend to strategic investment. The Real Question Retail media is booming in Saudi. The hardware is world-class. The shopper journey is being transformed. But are FMCG giants ready to commit the budget, build true retailer partnerships, move fast on assets, and tell the complete story? Right now, most aren’t. And smaller, faster regional brands are capturing attention while the giants wait for approvals. Retail is detail. And retail media without the full story is just expensive wallpaper. Who’s doing this right in Saudi? I’d love to hear examples of brands building the complete retail media story, not just buying placements.

Most food brands still say retail media is “important.” But the 2026 data says something else: If you’re still treating retail media like a test budget, you’re already behind. We just released our 2026 Global Retail Media Budget Allocation Benchmarks report, based on inputs from 305 digital commerce, retail media, and marketing executives across 41 global brands. And the Food & Beverage numbers jumped out immediately: 📍Retail media now accounts for 8% to 26% of total ad spend in Food & Beverage, with an average of 17% in 2026. That’s up sharply from 12% in 2025. 📍As a % of net revenue, allocation now ranges from 0.7% to 6.8%, with an average of 3.2%, up from 3.0% last year. 📍The U.S. is still playing a different game: highest observed levels hit 26% of total ad spend and 6.8% of net revenue. 💥 Meanwhile, the low end of Europe sits at 8% of ad spend and 0.7% of net revenue. That gap is not just a benchmark difference. - It is a capability gap. - A mindset gap. - And in many companies, a leadership gap. Retail media is no longer a sideline item owned by one team with a dashboard and a prayer. It is becoming one of the clearest signals of whether a food brand actually understands how modern commerce works. A few blunt takeaways for FMCG leaders: 1. Search-only retail media is not a strategy. If you’re not building full-funnel plans across onsite, offsite, display, video, and seasonal moments, you’re underplaying the channel. 2. ROAS is not enough anymore. The next budget unlock comes from proving incrementality, not just harvesting demand that already exists. 3. One global playbook is lazy. Market maturity, retailer capability, and shopper behavior vary too much. Your investment model should, too. 4. Retail media is now a commercial growth lever, not a media experiment. The brands winning here are not just spending more. They’re operating better. Download link for the full report in comments. 👇 𝗧𝗼 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄 ecommert® 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗷𝗼𝗶𝗻 𝟭𝟵,𝟯𝟬𝟬+ 𝗖𝗣𝗚, 𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗹, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵 𝗲𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝘀𝘂𝗯𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘁® : 𝗖𝗣𝗚 𝗗𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘁𝗵 𝗻𝗲𝘄𝘀𝗹𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿. PepsiCo The Coca-Cola Company Mondelēz International Danone Ferrero Mars Nestlé Procter & Gamble Unilever Kraft Heinz General Mills Post Consumer Brands The Hain Celestial Group Kellanova Kellogg Company JDE Peet's Starbucks Chobani The Hershey Company Coca-Cola Europacific Partners Coca-Cola FEMSA pladis Global Lindt & Sprüngli Ghirardelli Chocolate Company Russell Stover Chocolates Bimbo Bakeries USA Tyson Foods

A year ago, I thought I knew what 2025 would look like. I was wrong about the biggest thing—I didn't see myself leaving Amazon Ads and joining Skai. In my 20+ years in this space, I've learned one truth: the industry will always evolve in ways we can't see yet. The question isn't whether you'll be surprised, it's whether you can adapt when you are. So here are my three predictions for retail media in 2026, with full acknowledgment that the most important developments will be the ones I'm not yet seeing: 1. Off-site retail media reaches its inflection point The competitive advantage shifts from optimizing channels in isolation to connecting them. Retail media networks that stay walled in won't achieve the scale brands need. The winners will be those who crack cross-channel orchestration. 2. Orchestration over fragmentation Most CPG brands are already managing 4+ RMNs—each with different taxonomies, measurement frameworks, and reporting structures. The next wave of growth won't come from adding more networks. It'll come from unified planning and smarter orchestration across the ones you're already running. 3. The human-AI partnership becomes the battleground Brands need two concurrent strategies: one for implementing AI tools, and one for competing in a world where AI is rapidly changing consumer behavior. The gap between these two strategies will separate leaders from everyone else. I will be diving into these more once the clock turns and the new year begins. For now, I hope you, like me, are getting some time to recharge before it starts!

Retail Media Networks? More like Retail Media Nightmares. Us marketers all bought into the same promise: High intent shoppers. Closed loop measurement. Better signal in a post cookie world. Then reality set in. Most RMNs ended up as isolated tech stacks with limited reach, uneven execution, and measurement that only made sense if you squinted. Finance teams started asking questions marketers couldn’t confidently answer. Was this incremental or just expensive retargeting? Did it scale or did it cap out fast? Why did performance fall apart the moment spend increased? Retailers mistook building an ad platform for owning leverage. Their real asset was never the platform itself, it was first party purchase data and demand signals. Trying to turn every retailer into a mini walled garden was always going to fragment budgets and slow outcomes. The smarter path is already showing itself. Instead of forcing brands to learn yet another buying system, retailers route their signal and inventory into platforms (Google and Meta being the obvious ones) that already have scale, liquidity, and world class optimization. When this works, everyone wins. - Brands get scale and efficiency without operational drag. - Retailers monetize data without becoming software companies. - Media dollars move faster to where performance compounds instead of stalling. Over the next few years, I don’t think the winners are the RMNs trying to out platform the platforms. The winners are the retailers who accept that distribution beats duplication and partner aggressively. This is all about gravity. Money flows to systems that learn, scale, and prove impact. Everything else becomes a line item under review.

The marketing returns of Retail Media are grossly misattributed. It’s great to have a further element of addressability for the communications mix of FMCG / CPG brands. And its great that the potential ability to extend performance marketing capabilities through integrating retail data with brand data is becoming apparent for more brands. However, there is only ever a small percentage of in-market customers. Most FMCG sales are still made in real life and most in-store displays are managed through JBPs with retailers and sales teams. Most online retail media is in support of promotions, which are the sales drivers and should take most of the credit for the incremental sale, not the estore display. And marketers spent many years moving from ROAS as a stand alone metric or treating as anything but hygiene, only to re-adopt it as it was convenient for Retail Media. There has been a gold rush to Retail Media. Followed by some Wild West behaviour. Some of this is testing, which is totally appropriate once the campaign attribution and measurement are right. But, most is money invested because we can, not necessarily because we should. Meaning it’s likely being spent on the double, duplicating other marketing spend but taking its credit. Audience first brands with the measured balance of investment across brand and performance (for want of better badges) are more likely to be getting their spend in this channel right. Retail Media is set to evolve, eventually moving beyond retail to become Commerce based media. Where the audience data is valued higher than to nudge to sales. In the meantime, brands must ensure that they are not duplicating their efforts on the short-term market where some customer were likely to buy the brand anyway. And, to do this, brands need to get their measurement right and not accept the convenient metric. #marketing #advertisingandmarketing #digitalmarketing #branding #retailmedia Graph is from WARC

The most valuable ad slot in retail might not be on a shelf, but inside a chatbot. OpenAI just forecast $102B in ad revenue by 2030. Some retailer media networks might see that as a threat, but the smart ones see opportunity Great to have the chance to kick off the IAB Australia's new 'Perspectives on Retail Media' series with a piece on why AI is retail media's next growth engine. The core argument: AI isn't coming for retail media. It's coming to supercharge it. But only for the retailers and advertisers who move now. A few numbers worth sitting with: 🛒 OpenAI's ad revenue is forecast to jump from $2.4B this year to $102B by 2030. Halfway there still makes ChatGPT a top-five global ad platform. 🛒 Google says some brands using its AI ad tools are seeing up to 80% sales lifts. 🛒 WARC puts agentic commerce at $136B this year, heading to $1.7T by 2030. Most of that AI ad spend will likely be incremental or come out of search, not retail media directly. But there's a second-order effect. If shoppers start product discovery inside ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, or Perplexity instead of on a retailer's site, retail media's growth ceiling quietly drops. Budgets don't shrink overnight. They just stop compounding. Here's where Australia is already getting interesting. Woolworths Supermarkets launched Olive (powered by Google's Gemini) earlier this year. Bunnings followed weeks later with Buddy, an agentic assistant that builds your deck project from a photo. Both are live. Both are being marketed as better shopping experiences. They're also the most brand-safe, first-party, high-intent ad environments in the country. The strategic question stops being "does our AI assistant improve CX?" and starts being "how do we monetise it without breaking the trust that makes it work?" The infrastructure is already forming. Criteo is building the bridge between retailer chat experiences and sponsored product surfacing. Thrad has launched a product specifically to help retailers monetise their AI assistants. Retailers who define the rules of in-chat advertising on their own terms will own this. The ones who wait will inherit whatever Amazon, Alphabet Inc. and OpenAI decide is fair. For advertisers, the shift is smaller but just as urgent. Product content needs to answer questions, not just match keywords. And last-click attribution will undercount everything AI touches, because conversational discovery sits earlier in the funnel than the attribution models were built for. Push for incrementality. The early-mover window is open. It won't stay open forever. Thanks to Gai Le Roy, Lachlan Brahe and the IAB Australia Retail Media Council for letting me share my thoughts. Full piece linked in the comments 👇 #RetailMedia #CommerceMedia #Advertising #RMN #Retail Woolworths Group Wesfarmers Wesfarmers OneDigital ChatGPT Claude Anthropic

𝐀𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐚'𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐥 𝐦𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐚 𝐠𝐨𝐥𝐝𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐝.... It's hard not to notice that the US retail media market hit $60B+ in 2024, Australia's retail media networks are still in early innings - presenting a massive opportunity for forward-thinking retailers. 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑨𝒖𝒔𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝒂𝒅𝒗𝒂𝒏𝒕𝒂𝒈𝒆: • Concentrated retail market with dominant players (Coles, Woolworths, JB Hi-Fi, Harvey Norman) • High digital adoption rates across demographics • Strong first-party data collection through loyalty programs • Privacy-conscious consumers creating demand for ethical data use CDP's are an important tool in this and can be utilised for: 🎯 𝐀𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐞 - Transform loyalty data into premium advertising inventory. Your CDP becomes the engine that creates targetable, privacy-compliant audience segments for brand partners. 📊 𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐝-𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐩 𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 - Connect advertising exposure to actual purchase behaviour in real-time. CDPs enable an attribution capability proving that Campaign X drove Sale Y. 🔄 𝐂𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐬-𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐥 𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 - Activate the same customer intelligence across in-store displays, mobile apps, email, and digital advertising - creating consistent experiences that drive results. ⚡ 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥-𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐨𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧  - Use CDP insights to adjust campaigns mid-flight based on actual shopping behaviour, not just clicks and impressions. Australian retailers sitting on treasure troves of first-party data could be generating significant new revenue streams. Albeit, as I've mentioned before quantity does not trump quality. A well-implemented CDP doesn't just organise customer data, it transforms it into a media business. Early movers like Coles, Chemist Warehouse and Woolworths are already leading the way, but there's room for retailers across categories to build their own media networks. The question isn't whether retail media will take off in Australia, it's which retailers will see the opportunity and build the infrastructure to capitalise on it. Is your CDP strategy considering the retail media opportunity? #RetailMedia #CDP #CustomerData #AustralianRetail #FirstPartyData #RetailTech #AdTech

If I were running a brand heading into 2026, I wouldn’t be looking for “new hacks”. I’d be redesigning the system. Most brands don’t struggle because they lack effort, they struggle because their operations, marketing, and data aren’t working together. Here’s what I’d focus on. 1. Start where demand is created, not where it’s reported Your site, PDPs, and merchandising should do more than look good. Bundles, variants, and product hierarchy should make buying obvious and profitable. If customers have to think, you’ve already lost margin. 2. Let machines do the analysis, humans do the judgement Creative analysis, performance review, and pattern recognition should no longer be manual. AI should be surfacing what’s working, what’s fatiguing, and where demand is forming daily, not monthly. 3. Build a real creative engine, not one-off assets Scaling brands don’t “make ads”, they run a pipeline. Static, video, UGC, AI-generated, founder-led, all fuelled by data. Speed from concept to testing matters more than polish. 4. Treat affiliates and partnerships like a growth channel, not an afterthought Clean them up, remove value leaks, and focus on partners that actually extend reach, publishers, loyalty portals, credible creators. Half-managed programmes quietly destroy margin. 5. Stop thinking in channels, start thinking in exposure Pinterest, retail media, video feeds, podcasts, TV, social, the question isn’t where you advertise, it’s who is seeing your product and how often. Media should be unified, not siloed. 6. Prepare for how people discover brands now Customers don’t just search — they ask. Making sure your products are understood by AI systems and answer engines is no longer optional. Discovery is shifting upstream. 7. Use proof that money can’t fake Clinical validation, expert endorsement, credible testing, authentic customer voice. These don’t just lift conversion — they reshape demand and pricing power. 8. Design for how people actually shop Thumb-friendly UX. Clear CTAs. Fewer decisions. Faster paths to purchase. Optimisation isn’t clever, it’s considerate. 9. Build simple AI agents early Not because it’s trendy, but because learning how to automate small decisions compounds fast. Teams that experiment now won’t be catching up later. Above all: optimise the system, not the tactic...