By Adam Skinner, Adam Skinner, CEO, OneScreen
If your retail media P&L is built on onsite monetisation, you have a problem arriving faster than your roadmap.
Agentic traffic is already degrading onsite session volumes, by as much as 40% in some categories. An agent doesn’t browse. It doesn’t linger on a PDP or notice a sponsored listing. It queries, compares and checks out. Every impression your network sells depends on a human arriving at a page, and the humans are increasingly sending a proxy.
That’s not a distant scenario. It’s a revenue line. So what does a retail media network sell when the shopper stops visiting?
The ceiling was always there
Every capability retail media built – identity, closed-loop measurement, clean rooms, intent timing – was built to work inside the retailer’s estate. The store. The app. The site. The logged-in session. The basket. All of it is extraordinary. All of it is bounded by four walls and a domain name.
Which is the problem.
Most consumer spending still happens in physical stores, while the overwhelming majority of retail media advertising is online. We built a $184 billion global industry on a thin slice of where commerce occurs, then spent a decade optimising the slice.
The ceiling has always been the shoppers who come through the door – which is why the conversation turned to endemic saturation, and why agentic traffic is so dangerous. Same constraint, different clothes.
Because the decision about which retailer a shopper walks into was never made inside anyone’s estate.
The journey nobody owns
It’s made on the commute. In the car park. On the high street. Outside a competitor’s front door.
And here is what the category still models badly: the shopper journey isn’t a funnel, and never was. Someone sees a thing on the sofa, half-remembers it on the commute, price-checks it in an aisle in front of a competitor’s version, abandons the basket, then buys it days later at 11pm on another device.
The funnel is a reporting convention. The journey is a mess.
The one constant across every loop is that the shopper is somewhere physical while it happens. Which makes out-of-home the journey channel, not an awareness channel.
The best evidence is being built by Tesco’s SmartScreen network, underpinned by dunnhumby and JCDecaux, passed 500 stores late last year and reaches more than six million shoppers a fortnight. Retailer first-party data driving screens at the moment of decision, at national scale.
The US is behind on this, and in an instructive way. Walmart Connect, Kroger Precision Marketing and Roundel have all built offsite extensions. But offsite has come to mean following the shopper onto more digital surfaces – CTV, social, the open web. More screens. Never more streets.
Now notice where all of it stops. At the store entrance, or at the edge of a device.
Tesco proves retailer data can make physical media smarter inside the estate. The larger opportunity is using that same intelligence beyond the estate, across commuter routes, trade areas and competitive locations, to influence who arrives in the first place.
Out-of-home is also the only channel an agent can’t get in front of. An agent can filter a search result, skip a pre-roll and check out without the shopper ever seeing the campaign you spent six months making. It cannot do that to a billboard on the ring road or a screen in a station concourse. Agents don’t drive. They don’t queue.
No agent has ever been stuck in traffic.
When every other surface is mediated by software, the unmediated one becomes the scarcest asset in the building.
The lesson retail media already learned
Retail media didn’t win because shoppers fell in love with sponsored listings. It won because someone did the boring work in the right order: fragmented inventory became buyable in one place, impressions became comparable, and only then did outcomes become provable enough to move budget.
Attribution came last. It was the reward. It was never the entry fee.
Out-of-home has spent a decade attempting that sequence in reverse, which is why performance budgets keep it at arm’s length. It isn’t demand: OAAA and Winterberry found in March that 98% of marketers already use out-of-home in purchase-driven initiatives, and 86% expect to increase it – citing measurement, programmatic access and addressability. Not creative. Not locations. Plumbing.
I should be honest about the limit, because this is where my industry has overclaimed. There is no logged-in shopper in front of a billboard, and anyone promising a closed loop on a roadside screen is selling you something, usually a dashboard. What is arriving is location signal resolved against an identity graph and joined to a retailer’s transaction file in a clean room. Real, population-level, not deterministic.
Out-of-home can borrow retail media’s sequence. It cannot borrow its answer.
The prize
For retailers, DOOH is the largest unsized opportunity in the category. Today you sell access to your own shoppers, in your own environments, at your own moments – a supply base capped by footfall and sessions. Digital screens on the routes into your trade areas are a different asset entirely: addressable against your own first-party audiences, and available in the hours before a shopper has chosen anywhere to go.
It reaches your shoppers before a competitor does. It reaches lapsed shoppers who haven’t visited in six weeks. It reaches a competitor’s shoppers on the road outside their front door, which is either an enormous opportunity or a slightly uncomfortable one, depending which side of the road you’re standing on.
The networks best placed to move first are the ones already operating beyond a single estate. Unlimitail (the joint venture between Carrefour and Publicis) has aggregated retailers into a single buyable layer across Europe. Tesco Media, Nectar360 and Currys have each built measurement credibility their brand partners genuinely trust.
The US networks have the harder assets, Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, and Kroger Precision Marketing hold first-party data at a scale nobody in Europe can match but they have spent that advantage extending across screens rather than across the physical world. The capability is built. It’s pointed the wrong way. Extending into the journey channel is a much smaller step for any of them than building an onsite network was.
Retail media has been living in a mansion with rooms it has barely entered. The journey isn’t another room.
Out-of-home is on the street the mansion sits on. And it’s the only inventory retailers can sell that grows your addressable audience rather than re-monetising the one you already have.
