By Sam Drake, Executive Director, Project5 Media
Retail media has moved from experiment to expectation fast.
What started as a test budget is now one of the most scrutinised lines in FMCG plans, largely because it offers something many channels don’t – visible, attributable impact at the point of sale.
That clarity is both powerful and disruptive.
Retail media doesn’t just perform well. It highlights how loosely defined – and lightly planned – other parts of the mix have become. When one channel can clearly link investment to sales, it becomes much harder to ignore the rest.
The appeal is obvious. Retail media uses first-party data, reaches known shoppers, and delivers results that stand up in a commercial review. In a grocery environment where every pound is interrogated against margin, volume and share, that level of proof carries weight.
But clarity has a side effect: it invites comparison.
FMCG growth has always depended on a balance between building demand and converting it efficiently. Retail media leans hard into conversion, and that isn’t the issue. The risk comes when conversion becomes the only lens through which effectiveness is judged, simply because it’s the clearest.
We’ve seen this before. When paid search scaled, budgets followed what was easiest to measure. Brand investment didn’t disappear, but its role became harder to articulate and easier to defend by habit than by evidence. Growth didn’t stop; it became more brittle.
Retail media risks pulling budgets in the same direction. Over-optimising for short-term sales while under-investing in future demand is rarely visible at first – until growth starts to plateau and margins come under pressure.
In grocery, the dynamics make this even more complex. Retailers sell both distribution and exposure, with growth and margin found in the latter. In that environment, the line between investment and obligation can blur quickly.
The issue is rarely intent – it’s timing.
Brand plans are set early and become the anchor for distribution, range reviews and joint business plans. Shopper budgets then follow to support those commitments. Retail media often arrives late – not as part of a joined-up growth plan, but as one of the few levers left once the deal is already done.
On the surface, it looks aligned. In practice, it rarely is.
The problem isn’t ambition or capability. It’s that retail media is still relatively new, and most organisations haven’t yet built the planning discipline to use it properly. Decisions are made without shared definitions, consistent objectives or agreed measures of success.
The simplest way to bring clarity is to separate three roles:
- Retail media — activity designed to influence shoppers within retailer environments, in-store and online
- Commerce media — using retail data and signals to reach grocery audiences beyond the retailer
- Brand media — broader, audience-led investment designed to create future demand
When those roles blur, budgets become defensive rather than purposeful. Media is used to meet short-term commitments, not long-term growth.
This matters because brand channels have evolved too. TV, outdoor and audio are no longer blunt reach tools. With better data and more precise delivery, they can be planned with far greater commercial intent – but only if they’re held to the same standard now applied to retail media.
The issue isn’t a lack of tools. It’s a lack of coherence.
The brands responding best aren’t chasing the highest retail ROAS. They’re using retail media as a reference point – a source of discipline – and applying that thinking across the entire plan to bring clarity on how media investment drives growth.
That tends to show up in three ways:
First, they plan media as one system – not three disconnected budgets. Retail, commerce and brand activity are treated as different jobs within the same growth framework. Trade-offs are made early, before commitments become hard to unwind.
Second, they define success before money moves. Sales are the outcome, not the strategy. Strong teams align on the signals that genuinely predict growth and use them to guide investment – not just justify it after the event.
Third, they use context deliberately. Brand thinking doesn’t stop at the retailer site, and promotional messaging doesn’t have to live only at the bottom of the funnel. Different messages do different jobs across the journey – by design, not by default.
Retail media isn’t the answer. It’s the test. It exposes where planning has been thin, where definitions are loose, and where decisions have gone unchallenged for too long.
The brands that win won’t be the ones that simply invest more in retail media – they’ll be the ones who step back, join the dots properly, and plan it as part of a system designed for growth, not just deal delivery.
