Written by Nick Fokes, Chief Client Officer, Tag EMEA
Retail media has grown up fast, evolving into one of the most sophisticated and fastest-growing ecosystems in modern marketing. It spans digital shelves, in-store screens, commerce media networks and everything in between.
Despite this, there’s still a missing piece to the puzzle. The conversation around retail media has become almost entirely about targeting, data and inventory. Who you can reach, where you can reach them, and how much it costs. While reaching people in the right place at the right time is a priority, creative has usually been an afterthought and brands are paying the price at the moments that matter most.
The creative gap is a performance gap
Precision targeting (with consented data) can put your brand in front of the right shopper at exactly the right moment. But if the creative they see is generic, inconsistent or contextually irrelevant, that moment is wasted. Data gets the brand to the door. Creative is what gets the shopper through it.
The real production challenge here isn’t simply adapting a TV or OOH creative master for retail. It’s the fragmentation across Retail Media Networks (RMNs) — each operating with its own specifications, standards and requirements. Brands are effectively producing near-bespoke creative variations at enormous scale, across dozens of RMNs simultaneously, with no standardised framework to govern quality or consistency. That is the problem production has to solve.
Rather than producing entirely bespoke assets for every retailer — which is neither economical nor scalable — the answer is building a modular creative architecture: a master brand system with components that can be assembled, adapted and personalised by retailer, format, promotional moment and market without starting from scratch each time. Increasingly, AI-powered production systems, including proprietary capabilities that we use within Tag and dentsu, are making this possible by automating the complexity of variant production at scale, reducing time and cost while freeing teams to focus on the strategic and creative decisions that actually move the dial.
In digital retail media specifically, static assets are increasingly insufficient. Templates that respond to live signals like stock availability, pricing, promotional windows, or audience segment, mean the creative stays relevant without requiring a new production brief every time something changes.
Personalisation means more than putting a name on it
Context-aware creative goes beyond audience segmentation. It's about understanding where the shopper is in their journey (browsing versus buying, in-store versus online) and serving creative that’s built for that specific moment.
A shopper scrolling a retailer’s app during their lunch break needs a different creative treatment to one standing in an aisle with a product in their hand. Digital and physical retail environments demand fundamentally different creative approaches, yet most brands are still serving the same assets across both.
The brands getting this right are building dynamic, modular creative systems — templates that respond to retailer context, promotional moment, audience signal and channel format simultaneously. This is where retail media moves beyond media activation and into experience delivery.
The planning cycle problem nobody talks about
There’s a structural issue sitting beneath all of this that the industry hasn’t adequately addressed. Trade, ecommerce and media budgets, and planning cycles rarely align, and that misalignment is a root cause of the disconnect between in-store and digital retail media execution. When budgets sit in separate teams with separate timelines, creative coherence is the casualty.
Digital retail media moves fast. Campaigns can be live within days, optimised in real time, and refreshed weekly. In-store activation operates on longer lead times, with physical production, logistics and retailer approval processes that can stretch to months. When these are planned separately, they’re almost always briefed separately too. This means different teams, different timelines, and different creative territories.
The result is a fragmented shopper experience precisely where it should be most consistent.
Brands winning in this space are establishing a single creative platform with a defined visual language, messaging hierarchy and set of brand signals that are designed to work across both environments before either brief is written. Living, adaptive brand guidelines that travel with every asset, across every market and every RMN, are what make that possible at scale.
Measuring what actually matters
Solving the production and creative challenge is only half the equation. The other half is knowing whether it’s working. Too often, measurement in retail media stops at media metrics: impressions, click-through, ROAS. But the question creative and production teams should be asking is whether better, more contextually relevant creative is actually driving better outcomes: more conversions, larger basket size, higher brand equity, increased retailer share.
The brands making progress here are connecting creative performance data back into their production decisions. They're using signals from what’s converting in digital retail media to inform in-store creative, and vice versa. That feedback loop, built into the production process from the start, is what separates a creative system that gets smarter over time from one that simply produces more.
The opportunity is there for the taking
Retail media has matured into a serious growth ecosystem. The brands that will win aren’t those with the biggest media budgets or the most sophisticated targeting. They’re the ones who recognise that solving the creative and production challenge is what frees teams to focus on better strategy, smarter planning and stronger brand experiences — creating more value for customers and growing their share with retailers.
Getting the right media to the right shopper at the right moment is the bare minimum. What separates the brands that convert from those that don’t is whether the creative was built for that moment — conceived for the retailer, the RMN, the journey stage, and the physical or digital environment it will appear in. That requires a fundamental shift from treating production as a downstream execution function to embedding it as a strategic capability from the very start of campaign planning. The infrastructure, the modular systems, the dynamic templates and the unified creative platforms are the difference between a retail media strategy that looks good on paper and one that actually performs in market.
