Written by Mike Florence, Chief Media Strategy & Planning Officer, dentsu
Retail media promised to make marketing simpler.
Better data. Better targeting. Better measurement. A cleaner line between media spend and commercial impact.
But for many brands, the reality has been the opposite: more platforms, more partners, more KPIs and a whole lot more complexity.
As retail media moves into its next stage of maturity, the challenge has shifted. Access is no longer the barrier, integration is.
And the brands that master that integration won’t just reduce complexity, they’ll build a smarter, more connected growth engine that puts them ahead of the market.
Retail media’s reach has grown across organisations
Retail media isn’t a niche discipline sitting neatly inside shopper marketing anymore. It now cuts across paid social, search, ecommerce, CRM, in-store media, audience strategy and measurement. In many organisations, this is exposing structural tensions that have existed for years, from siloed teams and disconnected KPIs to fragmented budgets and competing definitions of success.
Of course, retail media did not create those problems, but it has brought them sharply into focus, reflecting a broader shift happening across the industry. Media is no longer purely a distribution channel. It acts as the connective layer between intelligence, commerce, creativity and customer experience, helping brands influence decisions in the moments that matter most.
Brands just have to make sure it’s embedded in the right way to unlock these effects.
The integration challenge
With a background of fragmentation, one of the biggest questions currently being asked by retailers and retail media networks is how to secure a bigger share of media investment. At the same time, brands are asking a different question entirely – how to make limited budgets work harder without adding more channels, more platforms and more complexity.
The opportunity is undeniable. Retail media offers brands the ability to connect audience data, commerce signals and media activation much more closely to real purchasing behaviour. This means more precise targeting, more meaningful measurement and stronger links between media exposure and business outcomes.
However, unlocking that value is not straightforward. Many brands are still trying to work out where retail media sits organisationally. Is it a brand budget? A shopper budget? A performance investment? A commerce initiative? A CRM play? In reality, it is often all of the above, and that creates complexity very quickly.
For example, offsite retail media may involve using retailer first-party data to improve paid social targeting. But if the media sits within one team, the retailer relationship sits within another, and measurement sits somewhere else entirely, proving incremental value becomes far harder than it should be.
In a world where budgets are not expanding, every investment decision faces greater scrutiny. Brands need confidence that retail media is not simply adding operational friction but is genuinely improving the effectiveness of their wider media ecosystem.
Consumers are telling us context matters more than ever
Our UK Retail Consumer Navigator research highlights an important shift in how consumers experience advertising across different environments.
Retailer websites, apps and marketplaces were significantly more likely to be perceived as having the “right amount” of advertising, while social platforms were more likely to be seen as saturated.
That does not diminish the power of social media as a discovery, entertainment and influence channel. In fact, our research shows that social platforms remain hugely important for reach, culture, creators and demand generation. But the findings do reinforce an important truth for modern marketers: context matters.
In retail environments, audiences are often already in active decision-making mode. Advertising can therefore feel more useful, timely and relevant, particularly when it helps simplify choice rather than interrupt attention. This is one of the clearest signals that the future value of media will depend not simply on reach, but on matching someone’s mindset and intent.
The consumer journey itself is also becoming increasingly compressed. Discovery, consideration and purchase are happening closer together, often within the same environment and sometimes within the same session. Retail media can sit directly inside that decision-making space, maintaining impact even as the funnel warps.
Retail media has a language problem
Another challenge for brands is that the retail media market itself has become noisy.
There are now hundreds of retail media networks globally, all competing for investment, all promoting slightly different capabilities and using different terminology to describe them, be it retail media, commerce media, connected commerce, full-funnel commerce, commerce activation… I could go on.
The industry has created a confusing ecosystem where existing marketing activities are sometimes simply being relabelled under the retail media banner because that is where investment and attention currently sit. It’s essential that we resolve that confusion, because retail media should not be approached as a standalone silo or a one-size-fits-all channel.
The most effective strategies focus less on the label itself and more on the individual capabilities retailers can unlock: audiences, proximity to purchase, transaction data, contextual relevance, closed-loop measurement and commerce signals.
The future of retail media is horizontal planning
For years, many marketing organisations have planned vertically – channel by channel, team by team, budget by budget.
Retail media challenges that model because it naturally cuts across all of them, and that is where its real value lies. Retail media is increasingly becoming connective infrastructure between different parts of the customer journey. The opportunity is no longer mere media placement, but the chance for brands to connect retailer audiences to paid social, search, CRM, digital out-of-home and ecommerce environments. They can understand how proximity to store influences behaviour. They can use commerce signals to improve planning decisions across wider campaigns. They can deliver what consumers want when they want it.
In many ways, retail media is becoming a live demonstration of a broader industry shift: the brands creating competitive advantage today are not just optimising channels in isolation. Instead, they are building systems where media informs experience, commerce fuels intelligence, and every interaction improves the next decision.
That is why modern planning models can no longer treat channels as disconnected silos with separate objectives. Different environments now play different roles across discovery, consideration and conversion. Brands need to connect those moments more intelligently to see a real difference
At dentsu, this sits at the heart of our approach. We treat media as something far more powerful than distribution. The question should not simply come down to how much retail media a brand should buy. Rather, it should be framed in terms of how to use retailer intelligence, audiences and environments to create a connective growth engine that makes broader media strategy more effective – a very different planning conversation.
The brands that succeed will align around outcomes
Retail media suffers from a significant friction problem.
Retail media networks want to maximise advertising revenue. Platforms want adoption. Agencies are balancing operational complexity and efficiency. Brands want commercial growth. Different stakeholders bring different KPIs. That all creates fragmentation and slows progress.
The brands that succeed will be the ones that align every stakeholder around a shared commercial outcome rather than channel-specific objectives. We must move beyond siloed optimisation and focus instead on driving measurable business growth.
Retail media works best when it is not treated as a separate ecosystem, but as part of a broader connected planning model where data, media, commerce and creativity work together toward the same outcome.
No single retailer, platform or specialist provider has a complete view of the retail media ecosystem. The opportunity for brands increasingly lies in working with partners who can connect the dots across audiences, media, commerce, technology and measurement, rather than approaching retail media from a single perspective.
Ultimately, the future of retail media will not be defined by how many formats brands buy; it will be defined by how intelligently they connect them.
Ready to simplify retail media and unlock its next phase of growth?
Download Checkout Society, our latest UK Retail Consumer Navigator, to explore how consumer expectations, shopping behaviours and media experiences are changing. And if you’d like to discuss how to connect retail media more effectively across your wider marketing ecosystem, get in touch with our team.
