In the ever-evolving landscape of retail media networks, staying ahead of the curve is crucial. This blog dives deep into the future of retail media, exploring the innovative strategies, emerging technologies, and the next big trends set to revolutionise the industry. From harnessing the power of AI and machine learning to leveraging data-driven insights, we’ll uncover how forward-thinking retailers can transform their media networks for maximum impact.
A big thank you to the following contributors for sharing their thoughts:
Maria Kristalinskaya, Head of Retail Media, Kleinanzeigen
Ana Laura Zain, CMO, Pentaleap
Michelle Urwin, EVP Marketing, Skai
Katie Streeter-Hurle, Chief Strategy Officer, SMG
Darren Jacobs, EMEA Sales Director, Zitcha
Dan Sands, EMEA Sales Director, Zitcha
Q. How can retailers stay ahead of the curve when it comes to the development of their media networks?
Maria: “Staying ahead of the technological curve is challenging, if not impossible. The more pertinent question for me is how retailers can stay ahead of customer demands and expectations. I believe this can be achieved through ongoing communication between clients and retailers. One approach is conducting customer interviews and using the insights to develop tailored solutions that address their specific pain points.
From my experience, the core challenges remain consistent: for clients, it’s about maximising ROAS from their investments; for retailers, securing the highest margins. Yet, each retailer has some room to manoeuvre by making strategic choices around placements, formats, customer journey flows, and more.”
Ana Laura: “Retailers can stay ahead by adopting a hybrid approach to their media networks, combining direct sales with partnerships through larger ad tech networks. This balance lets larger retailers maintain control while allowing smaller ones to access broader network demand, which is crucial for scaling efficiently. Simplifying ad management with self-serve tools and SaaS solutions can help retailers manage ads across multiple networks seamlessly, enhancing both reach and relevance.”
Michelle: “Don’t reinvent the wheel. Start with building what I think of as the ‘pyramid of RMN value’ — onsite sponsored products as the base, sponsored brands in the middle of the pyramid, and finally onsite display more broadly across product detail pages (PDPs) and category pages. From there, think about your first-party data strategy as it relates to opening up your upper-funnel offerings for both walled garden media and the open web. And above all else, focus on what is unique about your audience as a differentiator and build value around your unique category, audience segments, demographics, and/or product selection.”
Darren: “To stay ahead in the development of their media networks, retailers must adopt a comprehensive approach that integrates both innovation and collaboration. Embracing omnichannel strategies is essential, as it allows for a seamless blend of online, in-store and off-site media opportunities, ensuring that customer experience is consistent across touchpoints. Shifting towards self-service models is another key factor, empowering brands with more control and flexibility while enabling scalability and easing pressure on internal resources. Additionally, meeting the growing demand for transparency and measurable results through robust attribution is crucial for maintaining strong brand partnerships. By enabling brands to explore more creative and personalised approaches, retailers can drive deeper custom engagement and enhance the overall effectiveness of their media networks.”
Katie: “The first port of call for any Retail Media Network is to understand its unique proposition and its position in the market. The RMN space is now very cluttered and consequently very competitive - to attract advertising spend you have to have something unique to offer brands. This could be the scale you can offer, a clear point of differentiation, a new servicing model - but whatever it is, RMNs need to be clear on how they’ll compete and build their capabilities (media products, data capabilities, servicing models) from that point onwards. It’s not enough any more simply to copy the competition or market leaders.”
Q. In your opinion, what technology is necessary to underpin the development future of RMNs?
Katie: “RMN tech-stacks are becoming very complex and expensive - it’s not unusual to need partnerships with 5-10 key technology partners to offer retail media at scale. My advice in this space would be firstly to ensure that retailers are offering ‘one front door’ to advertisers - it’s really important that they have one point of entry to planning, buying and measurement across the RMN (advertisers simply can’t afford to work with multiple systems and often don’t have the hands-on-keyboard resource required). My second piece of advice would be for retailers to make sure they don’t have dependency on one key tech partner that restricts them from making effective choices in the future - we’ll see a flurry of new technology providers emerge in this space in the next 18 months, being able to adapt and change with the market will be key. “
Michelle: “Here’s my list: An enterprise-grade technology solution that centralises tools and insights to allow RMNs to seamlessly monetise their media assets across channels. Onsite ad-serving technology. A demand-side platform (DSP) for the open web. A clean room strategy. A customer data platform (CDP). Order management.“
Ana Laura: “To make a retail media network future-ready, the tech really needs to be open, adaptable, and flexible. Think platforms that let you build in-house and plug into multiple ad sources without locking you into exclusive deals. This flexibility gives you full control and means the network can scale and change as the industry does, boosting ad revenue and keeping options open.”
Maria: “It’s all about data - make it easier to collect and use. While data is a hot topic that everyone seems to discuss, few truly understand how to leverage it effectively. The technologies behind are very complex, vary significantly across different players, and often require substantial dedicated resources and time to make them work for all parties involved.”
Dan: “The future will be driven by technology that unifies operations across all channels, making a unified retail media platform essential. Such a platform provides a single view for planning, execution, and reporting, which streamlines management and reduces friction between teams like marketing and merchandising. By integrating data—from inventory and business planning to audience-building capabilities—it empowers advertisers with real-time insights to create impactful campaigns and measure performance effectively. This combination enables smarter targeting, optimised campaigns, and stronger engagement, ultimately driving growth and maximising the value of media investments.”
Q. What role does AI play in the future of retail media networks?
Ana Laura: “AI has a big role to play, especially when it comes to making ads more relevant and efficient. How? RMNs can offer deeply personalised ad experiences by analysing first-party data to anticipate customer needs and preferences. AI can also automate a lot of the campaign management, like adjusting bids and ad placements in real time to improve performance with minimal manual input.”
Maria: “AI has the potential to significantly reduce operational workload. My favourite one is there's no longer a need to manually adjust creatives for different formats or even allocate creative resources to that task — AI can handle it. The same applies to operational work around planning and launching ads. Envision AI generates suggestions that experts can then review and approve, cutting down on a considerable amount of time and effort if they did all the manual work themselves.”
Michelle: “On the creative side, GenAI will facilitate the rapid development and expansion of creative assets for scale and efficiency. We’ll also see more GenAI co-pilots as part of ad tech stacks to help marketers better navigate their analyses and management of omnichannel media programs at scale. And although the more traditional machine learning that powers bidding, budgeting, planning, and optimisation may not be considered to be as ‘sexy’ as GPTs these days, those implementations of AI will continue to drive the greatest gains in terms of efficiencies in core media spend for the foreseeable future.”
Darren: “As others have mentioned, AI will unlock the ability to personalise content at scale, seamlessly adapting messaging to individual preferences. But it will go even further, playing a pivotal role in the future of retail media networks by enhancing real-time decision-making and leveraging predictive analytics for smarter targeting and optimisation across channels. This doesn’t just refine audience engagement; it also provides insights into behavioural patterns, allowing for campaigns that are both precise and impactful. Together, these advanced analytics and scalable content creation capabilities will enable more efficient campaigns that truly resonate with audiences across every touchpoint.”
Q. How can retailers leverage their data to ensure their media network is key to buy-side media plans?
Darren: “Retailers can make their media networks essential to buy-side media plans by leveraging their data to offer advertisers closed-loop reporting, which clearly demonstrates the direct impact of ad spend on sales. By using data strategically, retailers can address a range of objectives, such as identifying and re-engaging new-to-brand consumers who may not repurchase or enabling brands to target loyal customers of competitor brands. Data can also enhance media efficiency by ensuring precise audience targeting—like serving ads for lactose-free products specifically to consumers identified as lactose intolerant and excluding those who aren’t. This approach optimises ad spend, enhances relevance, and drives meaningful outcomes.”
Katie: “Retailers have some of the best data out there for advertising purposes - it’s available at huge scale, offers breadth & depth, and it’s refreshed at an astonishing frequency. If you take grocery sector loyalty data, for example, you can understand huge amounts about consumer buying habits across thousands of brands & this data is becoming increasingly addressable. The challenge today is working through the data sharing agreements that make this data available. Clean rooms are making this safer & simpler, but there’s still a huge amount of work to do to make this data available at scale & to make sure it’s used responsibly.”
Ana Laura: “Retailers can turn their media networks into key buy-side assets by leveraging first-party data, such as customer purchase history, browsing habits, and loyalty program insights, to create detailed audience segments. This approach enables advertisers to deliver highly relevant, personalised ads that engage customers based on their specific interests and behaviours.”
Michelle: “The retailers that can most rapidly expose, in a privacy-safe manner, retail insights (organic sales, category and share insights, new-to-brand metrics, etc.) for utilisation alongside extensive media performance data will succeed in this space. Leveraging unique audience segmentation and ensuring that a given retailer’s audiences are safely controlled yet exposed in leading DSPs will allow that retailer’s RMN to maximise the efficient monetisation of their first-party audiences.”
Q. Measurement is a much debated topic, what do you think is coming next in this area? WIll the industry move beyond ROAS?
Katie: “Yes! I am really optimistic that we will move beyond ROAS and I think we’re already starting to see some real progress here. Retail media’s real value is in its ability to drive incremental growth for brands and we know that ROAS doesn’t capture this impact. Using loyalty data, we can now better understand incrementality, the omnichannel effects of campaigns, the customer lifetime value of activations - all of which are incredibly important for brands to understand and for retailers to make available to demonstrate the true role retail media can play in the advertising mix. Equally, we’re also starting to see emerging evidence that retail media can impact mid and upper funnel metrics (like awareness & brand equity) and I’m hopeful more studies like this will emerge over the next year. If we report simply on ROAS, we massively undervalue the contribution retail media is making to building and growing brands.”
Ana Laura: “In my opinion, Andrew Lipsman’s latest article nails it—retail media networks (RMNs) need to look beyond just ROAS. Focusing on incrementality (the true sales lift directly from ads) is the real game-changer for RMNs, showing brands the true added value of their spend. This approach helps isolate whether ads drive fresh sales or just capture what might have happened anyway. By embracing incrementality and metrics like brand lift, RMNs can become core to media plans and offer a deeper, more strategic view into ad impact.”
Maria: “ROAS would stay with us for a while. It’s likely to become even more complicated, especially when it comes to distinguishing between ROAS from incremental customers and returning ones.”
Michelle: “ROAS often misses the bigger picture of customer lifetime value and retention. iROAS is definitely an improvement, but still focuses primarily on short-term gains and immediate campaign performance. As retail media evolves, marketers need a comprehensive approach that includes adopting a mix of incrementality indicators, such as incremental sales, brand lift, and new-to-brand metrics, tailored to their specific business goals. It’s becoming increasingly crucial for brands to develop a bespoke measurement strategy that integrates both traditional and more sophisticated custom metrics.”
Dan: “The future lies in adopting multi-touch attribution models, which will provide a more comprehensive view of how each channel contributes to conversions, rather than attributing success to just the last touchpoint. Cross-channel measurement will also play a key role, allowing retailers to evaluate performance holistically across online, in-store, and offsite media. There will be a greater focus on measuring incrementality, helping retailers and advertisers understand the true value of their campaigns by assessing their impact on net new sales and growth.”
Find out more
IAB Europe’s Retail Media Committee is at the forefront of the Retail Media industry. Members are driving Retail Media growth and shaping the landscape by:
All of the work of the Committee can be found in our Retail Media Hub here.
Find out more about getting involved by contacting Marie-Clare Puffett - puffett@iabeurope.eu.
