For much of the past five years, retail media has been digital advertising’s fastest-growing success story. Retailers have discovered that their first-party customer data is enormously valuable, brands have embraced advertising closer to the point of purchase, and agencies have followed budgets into an entirely new channel.
Yet success has created a problem. The retail media industry now finds itself facing the same challenge that confronted digital advertising before it: fragmentation. Hundreds of retail media networks, each with their own interfaces, datasets, reporting structures, attribution models and buying processes, have created a marketplace rich in opportunity but increasingly difficult to navigate.
All very accepted problems, yet two recent developments in the UK retail media market suggest the industry may finally be entering its next phase. Not a phase defined by the launch of yet more retail media networks, but by the emergence of platforms designed to bring them together.
The launch of SMG’s RMX exchange platform and the continued rollout of Nectar360’s Pollen platform may appear to be very different initiatives – one aiming to connect multiple retail media environments through a shared infrastructure layer, the other bringing audience insights, activation, optimisation and measurement together within Nectar360’s own ecosystem – yet both are responding to the same underlying market force: complexity.
In many ways, retail media is becoming a victim of its own success. The channel has grown at remarkable speed. Global retail media spending is expected to approach $180bn this year, according to industry estimates, placing it among the fastest-growing areas of advertising.
However, growth has created a landscape that increasingly resembles a patchwork of walled gardens. Agencies and brands often find themselves logging into multiple platforms, interpreting different metrics and attempting to compare results generated through entirely different methodologies.
That challenge is becoming harder rather than easier. There are now more than 250 retail media networks operating globally, spanning retailers, marketplaces, grocery chains, travel companies, delivery services and increasingly non-retail businesses entering the commerce media space.
For brands, particularly large FMCG advertisers, the appeal of retail media has never been stronger. But the operational burden of managing campaigns across dozens of networks is becoming significant. The question increasingly being asked is not whether retail media works, but whether it can scale efficiently.
And it is precisely this challenge that both RMX and Pollen are trying to address.
A tale of two platforms
SMG’s RMX platform tackles the issue from an ecosystem perspective. Rather than replacing existing retail media networks, it aims to act as an interoperability layer, allowing agencies and brands to access multiple retail media opportunities through a single entry point, while retailers maintain ownership of their inventory, pricing and commercial relationships. The ambition is clear: make retail media easier to buy.
This is not unlike the role that demand-side platforms played in the development of programmatic advertising. Before DSPs emerged, advertisers were forced to buy inventory directly from individual publishers. Programmatic changed that by creating common infrastructure and workflows. RMX appears to be attempting something similar for retail media.
Meanwhile Nectar360’s Pollen platform focuses on another long-standing pain point: disconnected planning and measurement.
The platform combines audience insight, media planning, activation, optimisation and attribution within a single environment, allowing brands to manage campaigns across in-store, online and offsite channels from one place.
According to Nectar360, brands running omnichannel campaigns through Pollen have generated more than 2.5 times higher incremental sales than less connected approaches, while targeted campaigns have achieved conversion rates up to ten times higher.
Whether those specific performance figures can be replicated elsewhere is less important than what they reveal about industry priorities. Increasingly, the value proposition is no longer just access to inventory, it is access to simplicity. This reflects a broader shift taking place across retail media.
Measure for measure
For years, retailers competed primarily on audience scale and first-party data. Today, many are beginning to compete on usability, interoperability and measurement.
Measurement, in particular, has emerged as the industry’s biggest headache.As spending increases, marketers are demanding better proof of effectiveness. Yet many retail media networks still measure success differently. Some focus on return on ad spend, others on sales lift, others on audience engagement or category growth. The result is a measurement landscape that remains frustratingly inconsistent.
Industry bodies are responding, with both the IAB and IAB Europe introducing retail media measurement standards and frameworks designed to create common definitions and reporting methodologies across the sector.
The fact that SMG explicitly references collaboration with the IAB around taxonomy and measurement standardisation is telling. Standardisation is no longer a side issue. It is becoming a prerequisite for growth.
Brands are increasingly unwilling to accept dozens of incompatible reporting systems and agencies are equally vocal. Many now find themselves managing retail media budgets across multiple retailers while simultaneously trying to deliver unified reporting back to clients.
Indeed, much of what is happening in retail media today feels remarkably similar to the evolution of digital advertising a decade ago. Initially, every publisher built its own ad products and reporting tools. Eventually, market growth demanded standardisation, automation and interoperability. Programmatic infrastructure emerged. Measurement standards followed. Scale became easier. Retail media appears to be heading down a comparable path.
Realising retail media’s full potential
However, that does not mean retail media networks will disappear or lose their individuality. Retailers will continue to differentiate themselves through customer data, audience quality, store estates, loyalty programmes and proprietary insights. But the mechanisms through which advertisers access those assets are likely to become increasingly unified.
The winners may not necessarily be the retailers with the biggest audiences, but rather the retailers that are easiest to buy.
This is especially important as retail media expands beyond onsite search into a genuinely omnichannel proposition encompassing in-store screens, offsite advertising, social media, connected TV and increasingly AI-powered commerce environments. As channels proliferate, fragmentation multiplies and no advertiser wants separate planning systems for onsite search, in-store media, digital screens, CTV and offsite display.
The commercial logic points in the opposite direction. Unified platforms offer economies of scale, they reduce training costs, they simplify campaign management, they improve reporting consistency and they make retail media more accessible to smaller brands that may lack dedicated commerce media teams.
Most importantly, though, they help retail media compete more effectively against established digital advertising giants.
Google, Meta and Amazon have spent years refining self-service advertising ecosystems that are simple to use, highly automated and supported by standardised measurement frameworks. Retail media cannot continue growing indefinitely if every network requires a different buying process and different interpretation of success.
That reality may explain why so much innovation is now focused on infrastructure rather than inventory. The next stage of retail media growth may not be driven by the launch of another network, but rather it may be driven by the creation of connective tissue between them.
Platforms such as RMX and Pollen represent different approaches to solving the same problem, but they point towards a common destination: a retail media market that is easier to access, easier to measure and easier to scale. And for brands, agencies and retailers alike, that could be the development that finally unlocks retail media’s full potential.
