In this Marketing Un:Learned conversation, retail media specialist Alex Knapman explores what happens when “free money” ad revenue collides with the realities of customer experience, brand identity and measurement. Drawing on hands‑on work with grocers, discounters and Halfords, Alex shows how retail media forces marketers to unlearn old distinctions between online and in‑store, between segments and audiences, and between short‑term monetisation and long‑term brand health.
What you’ll learn / relearn
- Unlearn the idea that retail media is simply a high‑margin bolt‑on and relearn how to start from first principles: are you optimising for monetisation, customer experience, incremental sales, or a deliberate mix of the three?
- Unlearn the reflex that “ads ruin CX” and relearn how relevant placements and funded content can actually outperform your “organic” merchandising and education
- Unlearn channel‑first rollout plans and relearn identity‑first design: what does your brand stand for and what kind of ad experience coheres with that
- Unlearn the online/in‑store divide and relearn how loyalty data, sensors and gaze mapping can make physical space more measurable and responsive than many marketers realise
- Unlearn flat segmentation and relearn “audiences” as portable, privacy‑safe assets you can activate across TV, CTV and social
- Unlearn simplistic, siloed metrics and relearn stitched‑together measurement that links in‑aisle attention, loyalty IDs and off‑site performance.
Some ideas in this podcast…
1. From “free money” to first‑principles
- Alex argues you have to start with the fundamental question: are you launching retail media to monetise, to improve customer experience, to drive RSV (retail sales value), or some intentional combination of all three.
- That answer determines everything from how you design campaigns and products, to how you reinvest margin – whether in subsidised prices or new tech that improves the customer experience at a macro level.
2. Unlearning “ads ruin CX”
- Consumers rarely say “more ads” when asked what will improve their shopping experience, so retail media teams can start from a defensive crouch.
- Alex distinguishes between intrusive, cluttered formats that get in the way and seamless placements that simply feel like better merchandising.
- He shares examples where the ad algorithm, powered by loyalty data, surfaces more relevant products (such as coffee pods rather than beans for a capsule‑machine user) than the standard merchandising rules.
- He also points to supplier‑funded educational content – such as Halfords’ how‑to videos on fitting wiper blades or changing oil – where funding improves production quality while still leaving choice firmly with the consumer.
3. Identity‑first: ads that fit who you are
- Not all retailers should approach retail media in the same way; your identity dictates what’s acceptable in CX terms
- A super‑luxury brand must be extremely careful with ad formats and placements because anything that feels “ad‑y” or cluttered is jarring and off‑brand
- By contrast, a budget airline or value retailer may credibly offer a proposition like “see an ad, save £5 on your flight,” and some customers will gladly trade a bit of clunkiness for lower prices
- The unlearning here is to stop treating retail media as a generic toolkit and instead design an ad experience that expresses your brand, not undermines it.
4. Online vs in‑store: unlearning the divide
- Historically, on‑site ecommerce was seen as hyper‑addressable and measurable, while in‑store activity was stuck with coarse measures like linear shelf centimetres and raw footfall
- Alex reframes this: stores are still one‑to‑many environments, but increasingly equipped with digital inventory such as screens that can be day‑parted and weather‑responsive – breakfast missions in the morning, heat‑wave ice cream creative in summer
- Loyalty programmes (Alex cites Tesco’s Clubcard penetration) close much of the gap by linking in‑store transactions back to identifiable shoppers
- Combined with footfall analytics and anonymised gaze mapping that turns CCTV into stick‑figure attention data, retailers can now see who walked an aisle, who looked at a message, and who then bought – even if the individual remains privacy‑protected.
5. From “segments” to portable “audiences”
- Retailers have long used segments to help with ranging, merchandising and store stocking – inward‑facing decisions about their own business
- The growth of retail media allows those segments to become audiences that can be activated in third‑party environments, from Channel 4 or ITVX to social platforms like TikTok and Instagram
- Examples include audiences of “bought product X in the last 90 days,” “lapsed from category Y,” or “cat owners,” all created in hashed, encrypted, GDPR‑compliant ways
- For a category like cat food, the value of targeting verified cat‑owning households is obvious, whereas for Mars bars or Heinz Beans the addressable universe is much broader; the economic value of the audience shifts with the category.
6. Rethinking measurement across channels
- Ian contrasts pixel‑level online attribution with the messier world of in‑store and off‑site media, where intention and attention are harder to infer
- Alex’s answer is to “stitch” data sources rather than chase a single magic metric: loyalty IDs, footfall, gaze data and off‑site campaign performance all play a part
- This lets teams move beyond simple “how many walked down the aisle” measures into understanding which fixtures, formats and audiences genuinely drove incremental sales and deserve more investment.
- It also forces marketers to unlearn the pursuit of perfect control and accept probabilistic, multi‑source truth as the working standard.
Quotes
- “As a retailer, what’s your motivation in launching a retail media business – to monetise, to develop the customer experience, to drive incremental sales volume, or a combination of all three?”
- “The ads that stick out in our minds are the really intrusive ones… there are probably very seamless ads where, because it’s so seamless, it doesn’t feel as intrusive as it could do.”
- “There were examples of the ad algorithm surfacing more relevant content than the organic algorithm on the ecommerce website.”
- “If you’re a super‑luxury brand, anything that detracts from that customer experience is extremely jarring for the customer. It doesn’t feel right.”
- “With the growth of retail media we can now use those segments as audiences that we can plumb into third‑party platforms.”
Guest bio
Alex Knapman is a consultant at boutique firm ST Retail, specialising in retail media, loyalty and data. Through ST Retail he has been seconded into leading retailers including Asda, Ocado, Aldi and Halfords, giving him a rare end‑to‑end view of how retail media plays out from nappies and Jaffa Cakes to windscreens and wiper blades. His work spans building retail media propositions, defining audience strategies and helping teams navigate the trade‑offs between monetisation, customer experience and sales.
Resources & Links
- Alex Knapman on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/knapman/
- Ian Jindal on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianjindal
- Epsilon on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/epsilon-emea-marketing-agency/
From the episode
- Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science – evidence-based marketing research centre whose work underpins the “mental and physical availability” discussion: https://marketingscience.info
- Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know – foundational book on brand growth and availability referenced in the episode: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-brands-grow-9780195573565
- Ehrenberg-Bass scientific findings overview – concise summary of key empirical findings on how brands grow, useful background for this conversation: https://marketingscience.info/the-ehrenberg-bass-institutes-scientific-marketing-findings/
- RetailX Retail MediaX / Commerce Media festival 2026 – Europe’s leading retail media and commerce media gathering in London: https://retailx.events/retail-mediax/rmx-london-2026
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About Marketing Un:Learned
Marketing Un:Learned explores the challenges that leading-edge digital marketing poses to established and received wisdom. All new initiatives face scrutiny — the “what-abouts,” statements of inertia, and deprioritising questions. In this series, we take those challenges head-on and learn how exemplars deliver persuasively, perhaps changing our thinking along the way. In partnership with Epsilon, we focus on innovation in retail media, digital advertising, CRM and personalisation, speaking with expert practitioners who have moved beyond optimised, well-known processes., speaking with expert practitioners who have moved beyond optimised, well-known processes.
