Retail media now rivals TV for ad spend, yet much of its most valuable inventory contains little more than a logo, product and price. Stefan Kerridge, chief strategy officer at MurphyCobb, argues that better creative briefs, distinctive assets and smarter production could unlock the channel’s full commercial potential
Retail media is now measured against television. WARC puts global investment at $200.4bn in 2026, past the combined total of linear and connected television. The online component is substantial on its own. IAB Europe’s AdEx Benchmark records European retail media at €13.3bn in 2025, up 16.7% and crossing 10% of all European digital adspend for the first time. That measurement excludes in store and offsite, so it counts only what retailers sell on their own sites and apps. IAB figures put UK online retail media at £3.8bn in 2025, up 18% and 9.4% of UK digital adspend.
The channel is built. The question I keep coming back to is what goes into it?
Retail media occupies the position closest to the purchase decision and I do not think that is properly valued yet. Online it means the product page. Contentsquare’s benchmark of 99 billion sessions across 6,500 sites finds one in three visits now begins on a product detail page, and that product pages carry around 40% of all page views.
In store, SMG’s dataset of more than 12,500 evaluations covering some £1.3bn of media spend records sales lift rising steadily by zone, from 17% out of store to 30.4% at the fixture, with sampling the highest performing format of all at 95.2%.
What is currently filling the space
Of that €13.3bn of European onsite retail media, €10bn is retail search and €3.3bn is display. Three quarters of the measured market is sponsored products, and search is growing at roughly twice the rate of display. Sponsored products are a product image, a price and a template.
I am not the first to notice. Dentsu’s head of retail media solutions described the starting point for the Co-op’s network in 2023 as follows: “Co-Op ads have historically been a logo soup of item and price creative”.
There is also a profile and status question, and I would rather say it plainly. Retail media is not, on the whole, where creative ambition currently goes. That has consequences, because the channel is expanding into the moments where brand and behaviour meet, and no independent audit of retail media creative output has been published in a category this size.
Distinctiveness matters more in this environment, not less
Byron Sharp’s argument is that brands grow through mental and physical availability, mental availability being, in the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s own phrasing, “being easily thought of in buying situations”. Sharp is explicit that building it “requires distinctiveness and clear branding”, and he separates distinctiveness, a brand looking like itself, from differentiation, a reason to buy.
Retail media is where physical and mental availability meet, which is why I think the attention maths matters here more than anywhere. Online, Contentsquare records 61% of product detail page visits bouncing, with engagement rates down 10% year on year and time on site down 7%. In store, Co-op research cited by IAB UK gives shoppers roughly one second to notice a message and 0.4 seconds inside an aisle. Lumen and Brand Metrics, analysing 9,089 campaigns, found around 2.5 seconds of aggregate attention is needed to drive significant outcomes.
Distinctive branding closes some of that gap. VCCP Media, with Amplified Intelligence, tested 72 digital video ads with and without their distinctive brand assets across more than 20,000 views. Well deployed distinctive assets drove outcomes at 1.5 seconds, below the general threshold, and well branded assets were around 2.5 times more effective than weakly branded ones in limited view time. Ipsos and Jones Knowles Ritchie, testing across more than 26,000 respondents, found only 15% of brand assets reached their gold standard for distinctiveness.
A pack shot and a price is weak on both counts. It carries little emotional signal, and without distinctive branding it often carries less rational information than the shopper needs.
Different assets do different jobs
Retail media is not a single format but a set of tasks, and the evidence on which asset does which is better than our use of it suggests. On product pages, Salsify’s analysis with Kenshoo and Profitero found products with top rated content converting at a substantial multiple of poorly rated ones, and moving from five images to ten lifting conversion by 48%. The Spiegel Research Center at Northwestern found purchase likelihood 270% higher for a product with five reviews than none, peaking between 4.0 and 4.7 stars.
Video and interactive formats are where the evidence thins, and I would rather admit that. Criteo reports strong results for onsite video, but its figures compare multi format bundles against single format baselines rather than testing video against static like for like, and no independent version of that test appears to have been published. So, brief by job rather than by format: static to identify and reassure, video to demonstrate and explain, interactive to answer the questions that stop a purchase.
The constraint is production, not media
This is the part I spend most of my time on, and where I think the real constraint sits. Underneath the format debate is a supply problem. The WFA’s research with 50 global brands found production investment has fallen to 19% of marketing budgets, from 24% before the pandemic, while asset requirements have gone the other way. Adobe’s survey of more than 1,600 marketers found 71% expecting content demand to grow more than fivefold by 2027.
Sainsbury’s Nectar360 checks more than 130 items on a single asset across work from over 900 clients and agencies, which manually meant one to three weeks each. Working with DEPT it now runs in roughly 90 seconds. That is compliance automation rather than creative automation, and it removes the queue that delays good work.
The decision that matters most, though, is taken earlier, at the brief. A master built as a single finished execution creates a production job for every network, market and format. A master built as components, with story, product, price furniture and call to action held separately, creates versions, flexibility and efficiency instead. It is a briefing and architecture decision rather than a technology one, and in most content budgets I look at it is the largest available saving.
The IAB found 86% of buyers using or planning to use generative AI for video creative, with the three most cited applications all versioning and adaptation rather than origination. The adaptation layer is already automated. Whether the thing being adapted is worth adapting is the more important question, and it is the one nobody is asking.
Where this goes next
If I were running a retail media network, four things would be on my list. Sell the space you actually own, since sampling, sound, dwell and packaging are under bought largely because they are under sold. Publish a creative standard rather than a specification sheet per placement. Automate compliance before expanding inventory. And report performance back at asset level, because retailers hold the only complete record linking what an asset looked like to whether it sold anything.
Retail media’s next phase will be decided less by how much inventory exists than by what fills it, and that is a question of how content is briefed, produced and versioned. It sits with brands and retailers together, and the evidence is already on the table.
You are in: Home » Retail Media » GUEST COMMENT Why the best ad space is being wasted on a logo, an item and a price
GUEST COMMENT Why the best ad space is being wasted on a logo, an item and a price
Stefan Kerrridge
Retail media now rivals TV for ad spend, yet much of its most valuable inventory contains little more than a logo, product and price. Stefan Kerridge, chief strategy officer at MurphyCobb, argues that better creative briefs, distinctive assets and smarter production could unlock the channel’s full commercial potential
Retail media is now measured against television. WARC puts global investment at $200.4bn in 2026, past the combined total of linear and connected television. The online component is substantial on its own. IAB Europe’s AdEx Benchmark records European retail media at €13.3bn in 2025, up 16.7% and crossing 10% of all European digital adspend for the first time. That measurement excludes in store and offsite, so it counts only what retailers sell on their own sites and apps. IAB figures put UK online retail media at £3.8bn in 2025, up 18% and 9.4% of UK digital adspend.
The channel is built. The question I keep coming back to is what goes into it?
Retail media occupies the position closest to the purchase decision and I do not think that is properly valued yet. Online it means the product page. Contentsquare’s benchmark of 99 billion sessions across 6,500 sites finds one in three visits now begins on a product detail page, and that product pages carry around 40% of all page views.
In store, SMG’s dataset of more than 12,500 evaluations covering some £1.3bn of media spend records sales lift rising steadily by zone, from 17% out of store to 30.4% at the fixture, with sampling the highest performing format of all at 95.2%.
What is currently filling the space
Of that €13.3bn of European onsite retail media, €10bn is retail search and €3.3bn is display. Three quarters of the measured market is sponsored products, and search is growing at roughly twice the rate of display. Sponsored products are a product image, a price and a template.
I am not the first to notice. Dentsu’s head of retail media solutions described the starting point for the Co-op’s network in 2023 as follows: “Co-Op ads have historically been a logo soup of item and price creative”.
There is also a profile and status question, and I would rather say it plainly. Retail media is not, on the whole, where creative ambition currently goes. That has consequences, because the channel is expanding into the moments where brand and behaviour meet, and no independent audit of retail media creative output has been published in a category this size.
Distinctiveness matters more in this environment, not less
Byron Sharp’s argument is that brands grow through mental and physical availability, mental availability being, in the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s own phrasing, “being easily thought of in buying situations”. Sharp is explicit that building it “requires distinctiveness and clear branding”, and he separates distinctiveness, a brand looking like itself, from differentiation, a reason to buy.
Retail media is where physical and mental availability meet, which is why I think the attention maths matters here more than anywhere. Online, Contentsquare records 61% of product detail page visits bouncing, with engagement rates down 10% year on year and time on site down 7%. In store, Co-op research cited by IAB UK gives shoppers roughly one second to notice a message and 0.4 seconds inside an aisle. Lumen and Brand Metrics, analysing 9,089 campaigns, found around 2.5 seconds of aggregate attention is needed to drive significant outcomes.
Distinctive branding closes some of that gap. VCCP Media, with Amplified Intelligence, tested 72 digital video ads with and without their distinctive brand assets across more than 20,000 views. Well deployed distinctive assets drove outcomes at 1.5 seconds, below the general threshold, and well branded assets were around 2.5 times more effective than weakly branded ones in limited view time. Ipsos and Jones Knowles Ritchie, testing across more than 26,000 respondents, found only 15% of brand assets reached their gold standard for distinctiveness.
A pack shot and a price is weak on both counts. It carries little emotional signal, and without distinctive branding it often carries less rational information than the shopper needs.
Different assets do different jobs
Retail media is not a single format but a set of tasks, and the evidence on which asset does which is better than our use of it suggests. On product pages, Salsify’s analysis with Kenshoo and Profitero found products with top rated content converting at a substantial multiple of poorly rated ones, and moving from five images to ten lifting conversion by 48%. The Spiegel Research Center at Northwestern found purchase likelihood 270% higher for a product with five reviews than none, peaking between 4.0 and 4.7 stars.
Video and interactive formats are where the evidence thins, and I would rather admit that. Criteo reports strong results for onsite video, but its figures compare multi format bundles against single format baselines rather than testing video against static like for like, and no independent version of that test appears to have been published. So, brief by job rather than by format: static to identify and reassure, video to demonstrate and explain, interactive to answer the questions that stop a purchase.
The constraint is production, not media
This is the part I spend most of my time on, and where I think the real constraint sits. Underneath the format debate is a supply problem. The WFA’s research with 50 global brands found production investment has fallen to 19% of marketing budgets, from 24% before the pandemic, while asset requirements have gone the other way. Adobe’s survey of more than 1,600 marketers found 71% expecting content demand to grow more than fivefold by 2027.
Sainsbury’s Nectar360 checks more than 130 items on a single asset across work from over 900 clients and agencies, which manually meant one to three weeks each. Working with DEPT it now runs in roughly 90 seconds. That is compliance automation rather than creative automation, and it removes the queue that delays good work.
The decision that matters most, though, is taken earlier, at the brief. A master built as a single finished execution creates a production job for every network, market and format. A master built as components, with story, product, price furniture and call to action held separately, creates versions, flexibility and efficiency instead. It is a briefing and architecture decision rather than a technology one, and in most content budgets I look at it is the largest available saving.
The IAB found 86% of buyers using or planning to use generative AI for video creative, with the three most cited applications all versioning and adaptation rather than origination. The adaptation layer is already automated. Whether the thing being adapted is worth adapting is the more important question, and it is the one nobody is asking.
Where this goes next
If I were running a retail media network, four things would be on my list. Sell the space you actually own, since sampling, sound, dwell and packaging are under bought largely because they are under sold. Publish a creative standard rather than a specification sheet per placement. Automate compliance before expanding inventory. And report performance back at asset level, because retailers hold the only complete record linking what an asset looked like to whether it sold anything.
Retail media’s next phase will be decided less by how much inventory exists than by what fills it, and that is a question of how content is briefed, produced and versioned. It sits with brands and retailers together, and the evidence is already on the table.
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