The retail media industry evolves at pace. A year ago it was very much about aligning retail media as part of the marketing mix for brands and, for many retailers, was still something of an on-going experiment. A year later and we find retail media looking at how to better leverage first-party data, as other verticals start to encroach.
As the agenda at the Retail Media X event in London next month attests, retailers are very much looking at how to make even better use of their data to make their retail media offerings more compelling than the raft of Q-commerce and commerce media plays that are starting to hit the market.
Today, creativity has become a key market driver and a key differentiator for many. As reported this week, The Very Group has launched its own creative studio for its brand advertisers, with HelloStudio already generating data driven creative for key brand advertisers that use The Very Group’s retail media network – with such brand luminaries as Adidas, Apple, Levi’s, Ray-Ban Meta and SharkNinja all seeing a jump in sales as a result.
The Very Group’s Tom Goulden will be speaking about this at RetailMediaX on 13 May, detailing just why creativity is important. But this theme is echoed by a raft of sessions at the show. While there are sessions that lead on how to leverage retail media at scale from Criteo, the events main sponsor, and how to stand out from the crowd from our own Colin Lewis – not to mention the RetailX Retail Media Landscape Report 2025 launch that outlines where the sector is at – the themes of creativity and collaboration shine through as just what the sector is majoring in right now.
Rob Yule from NECTAR360 will focus on the role of creative in crafting compelling campaigns for brands that want to leverage Sainsbury’s customer data, while his colleague Tom Priestman, looks at how that can be achieved through collaboration between brands, agencies and retail media networks. Jayesh Raydev from ITV, Paul Wright from Uber Advertising, Elton Ollerhad from Asos and Jean-Vincent Chardon and Phil Raby from Mediarithmics will be taking this further, debating just how to link creative with data to offer the right message, with the right personalisation at the right moment.
This very complexity is why the other thread of the story, collaboration, is equally important. Following on from a morning of data-driven creative, Dean Harris, Head of Co-op Media Network, will explore the strategies needed to supercharge growth. Retail media’s evolution demands new ways of collaboration between brands and retailers, shifting from traditional supplier-customer dynamics to partnerships that are both suppliers and customers of each other.
The nuts and bolts of how to make collaboration and creative work together is also drilled into by Paul Stafford from Superdrug, Greg Deacon at Snappy Shopper, David Wijland from Hellofresh and Troy Townsend from Zitcha in what promises to be a fascinating session to tie these twin trends together.
And it is with good reason that creativity and collaboration are the drivers of retail media development today. The sector has taken off with great speed. The soon-to-be-published RetailX Retail Media Landscape 2025 report – set to be launched at the event in May, though you can sign up to get it here – finds that the sector is growing at 8% a year globally (more like 40% in Brazil incidentally) and that it continues to account for some 20% of overall digital marketing budgets.
However, there are many more players chasing that brand marketing spend. Telcos, which have a raft of first party data, including people’s location let’s not forget, are set to take a chunk of this budget – and you can find out how at the event from Andy Lewis from Virgin Media O2, Mohamed Ali from Zeotap and Ian Turner from PM Dragonfly. This encroachment from other consumer-facing players into the brand marketing world is an interesting development. Part threat – everyone chasing the same pie? – part opportunity, one this is certain, such competition validates the investment being made in retail media – it is becoming an ideal way to reach consumers.
But it has to be done right. Which brings us back to where we started. Creative is the way to make ads standout, but that creative is now part and parcel of the data play. It seems anathema, but creative in retail media is now something that is driven by the data, rather than just, well, creativity. No, this doesn’t mean ads designed by AI, what it means is clever ads and content curated specifically for the people the data ‘knows’. This is a fascinating shift, not just for retail media, but also for the creatives in marketing. It is the next stage in digital advertising and, as the panels and speakers at Retail Media X will show, it is where the industry has to head.
