As retail media expands to cover the entire shopping journey, Colin Lewis delves into the world of apps, aggregators and deals.
Most retail media conversation centres on three things:
- The retailers, their first-party transaction data, and retail media inventory around it.
- The brand advertisers – what they spend and how they apply retail media into their marketing campaigns.
- The retail media AdTech ecosystem – the vendors selling to retail media networks or enabling the wider retail media world.
This framing of retail media does not account for a whole world of innovation that is happening as retail media expands to cover the full shopper journey. Arguably, the most valuable part of that journey — the moment when a consumer decides what to buy and where — happens before most retailers ever touch them.
This pre-purchase planning window is owned by a different type of platform entirely: multi-retailer shopper apps, digital leaflet aggregators, shopping list tools, deals and circular platforms.
These apps and aggregators are not retailers is the sense that we normally think about ‘retailers’: they have no stores, no checkout, no transaction data of their own.
However, they do have something that is harder to create: reach and intent signals captured before any retailer even knows the shopper has started their mission.
This opens up a whole new world of audience reach and shopper intent that brand advertisers have not been able to buy, or personalise at scale – to date.
How apps and aggregators capture shopper intent
Let’s start with the basics – how does it all work? When a shopper opens a multi-retailer app, a digital leaflet aggregator or a deals platform, searches and finds a product, they are showing intent – often signalling a specific purchase mission. They are planning a specific purchase at a specific store within a short time period – the intent is demonstrated, not inferred. This generates a data point about a category, brand or retailer that can be used to build a targetable audience segment. The signals are aggregated and modelled into specific audience segments — category buyers, brand switchers, high-frequency shoppers, retailer-specific shoppers.
Those audience segments can then be used to reach people outside the apps with personalised advertising on social platforms, video and CTV. This is called retail media off-site activation.
Case studies of using intent to deliver personalisation at scale
Three platforms — one Polish, one Scandinavian and one North American – show how this model works in practice.
Flipp aggregates weekly circulars and promotional content from major US and Canadian retailers, reaching over 100 million shoppers. In September 2024, Flipp merged with MEDIA Central Group, creating a combined platform reaching over 400 million shoppers across 27 markets — a signal of what “app and aggregator” platforms are becoming: an intent data and media layer that sits above individual retailers and spans the planning behaviour of grocery and FMCG shoppers across multiple continents. Flipp claims its platform is powered by more than 400 billion shopping signals and delivers +103% average lift in purchase intent and 4:1 average incremental ROAS.
Blix, Poland’s leading multi-retail shopping app, reaches over 10 million users annually. Shoppers come to plan: browsing digital leaflets from all major Polish retail chains, comparing promotions, and building shopping lists before choosing where to shop. Over 1.1 billion e-leaflets are viewed on the platform each year. More than 140 million products are added to shopping lists. The average monthly engagement is 35 to 40 minutes — the highest of any drive-to-store app in Poland.
Blix works with over 330 brands across global FMCG, retail, and local categories across a range of on-platform formats. Brand advertisers use Blix’s high-intent shopper data to deliver 30–40% lower CPC and 80–90% higher CTR in performance campaigns, and 70–90% higher video completion rates in awareness campaigns, compared to standard targeting benchmarks.
Tjek is a Scandinavian retail media and digital shopping company that claims to be Scandinavia’s most downloaded shopping app. Their apps – eTilbudsavis, eReklamblad and Mattilbud – reach more than 2,000,000 people. eTilbudsavis is the most popular app within marketplaces in the app stores in Denmark and it ranks #24 of all apps in Denmark. Tjek combines media with data and technology: retailers can transform static PDF leaflets into dynamic, shoppable digital catalogues with video, live offers and store-level availability. Tjek, like the top retail media networks, also have an insights platform for retailers and FMCG brands to track search behaviour, promotional performance and category trends across markets. Tjek claim that 59% of their app users visit a store once they have read a relevant digital offer.
Brands can grow with aggregated data
Retailers have strong incentives to keep first-party data inside their own walls. For brands with distribution across multiple retail chains — which describes most major FMCG companies — a closed single-retailer ecosystem only ever shows part of the picture.
Multi-retailer platforms such as apps and aggregators “see” across the full range of retailers and shopper journeys. A brand selling through six Polish retail chains can identify shopping behaviour patterns that none of those six retailers can see individually. Aggregating data across multiple retail chains gives brands a view of shopper behaviour that no individual retailer can provide. For FMCG brands with broad distribution, activating against that cross-retailer signal — in off-site campaigns, across the full funnel — is the difference between retail media that performs and retail media that merely spends.
