Retail media has spent the last few years as advertising’s fastest-growing channel – but that era of explosive, uncontested growth is over, according to Alexia Nakad, General Manager, EMEA West at AppsFlyer, who sat down for a fireside chat with Retail Media Age at MAD//Fest London to map out where the channel goes next.
“It’s probably grown 40% year on year for a really long time,” Nakad said, “but if you take a look at the growth trajectory now, it’s dropping down to some of the lower single-digit figures.” That’s not a signal of trouble, she argued, but of a market growing up.
The conversation is shifting away from grabbing market share at any cost and towards proving real value comparability, measurement, and trust are becoming the new currency.
Fragmentation is the enemy
Much of that shift, Nakad said, comes down to solving fragmentation both within retail media as its own channel, and in how it sits alongside the rest of a brand’s marketing mix. Brands, she said, are often working across five to nine different retail media networks at once, each with its own data, reporting and rules.
It’s a familiar growing pain: programmatic and mobile advertising went through exactly the same phase before consolidating around common standards.
On the question of AI-driven agentic commerce. the idea that AI agents will soon do the shopping on consumers’ behalf, Nakad was sceptical.
Pointing to younger consumers’ revival of Polaroids and film cameras as evidence of a broader pull towards simplicity and tangibility, she suggested the industry may be getting ahead of itself. “I’m not convinced we’re going to go all the way as consumers” to fully agentic buying, she said.
Where retail media has actually matured
Retail media’s maturity, Nakad explained, is uneven across its different layers. Inventory has come a long way retailers have expanded from on-site placements into off-site and in-store media, with audience-based targeting maturing alongside it.
Measurement, however, remains the weak link, and she cautioned against building AI capability on top of foundations that aren’t yet solid.
That measurement gap dominated much of the discussion. Nakad argued that the industry’s growing discomfort with ROAS as a catch-all metric is justified, but warned against losing sight of the fuller picture, incrementality, marketing mix modelling, and full-funnel views that connect channels like CTV with retail media rather than treating them in isolation.
The pressure to fix this, she said, comes overwhelmingly from the demand side: brands and the agencies acting on their behalf, who are left juggling inconsistent frameworks across every retailer they work with.
Clean rooms: the technology was never the hard part
Drawing on years working across major clean room platforms, Nakad offered a blunt assessment: the technology was always the easy part. The real barrier to data collaboration at scale has been commercial and organisational particularly for CPG brands that lack direct-to-consumer data of their own and must lean heavily on retailer data instead.
The partnerships that work, she said, are the ones where both sides come to the table, agree what value means, and share the risk equally. “I think we lost our way with clean rooms,” she said, treating the room itself as the goal, rather than as one enabler among many.
Looking further out, Nakad wants to see media planning organised less around individual channels and more around the holistic customer journey recognising that the same consumer moves fluidly between retail, CTV and social.
She sees early signs of this in the technology investments major agency groups are making, though she was candid that significant organisational change, and a breakdown of internal silos, will be needed to make it real.
Three predictions for the year ahead
Asked to look twelve months forward, Nakad named standardised measurement as the trend she expects to dominate conversation, calling for a neutral party to help bridge retailers and brands on shared frameworks.
She predicted that today’s hype around fully agentic commerce would need to cool, calling it further off than many assume.
And the shift she thinks is flying under the radar: retail media teams often built as standalone functions when the channel first took off are increasingly being pulled back into core brand marketing and consolidated under the CMO.
It’s a sign, she said, of a channel finally growing up.
Read more of Retail Media Age’s coverage from Madfest London 2026.
