Retail Media Age Editor-in-Chief Justin Pearse sits down with James Trott, Senior Director, Global Addressable Media, The Coca-Cola Company to discuss the state of retail media and Coca-Cola’s role in the ecosystem.
Retail media is evolving fast. What role does Coca-Cola see for itself within this space?
We always try to innovate across all aspects of media and evaluate the value we can derive from each sector, and that very much includes retail media. Coca-Cola reaches an incredibly broad audience, and retail media is a valuable route to better understand and engage those audiences.
We’re currently going through a healthy process of evaluating exactly what percentage of budget makes sense to allocate to retail media, and what value it brings versus other media investments.
It really boils down to three pillars: audiences, environments, and measurement.
Measurement remains a major talking point across retail media. What are the biggest opportunities and limitations from your perspective?
There’s a real benefit in getting a feedback loop on whether your media is actually driving a sale, especially in a category like CPG, which isn’t digitally native. The ability to optimise campaigns in real time based on transactional data is genuinely transformative.
However, there are clear limitations. You’re often working within one retailer’s ecosystem, so if you’re targeting customers through retailer A, but they end up buying your product in retailer B, that data isn’t visible. It’s not the full picture, which means there’s a risk of misattributing campaign performance.
Retail media enables real-time feedback and campaign optimisation, but it’s still only part of the picture.
Do you think we’ll ever reach a point of standardisation or unification across retail media networks?
It’s difficult to imagine. These are siloed ecosystems, similar to the walled gardens of social platforms. Ideally, we’d have a single attribution model across retailers, but because they all operate independently and understandably want to protect their data, it’s unlikely.
If we sold 100% of our stock via coke.com, we could build a complete attribution model, but in reality, our products are bought everywhere, from large retailers, to small independents, and hospitality venues.
So yes, while it’s not a perfect system, it’s still a massive improvement. Retail media allows us to finally do performance media in a category where that wasn’t previously possible.
How do you see creativity evolving in retail media?
The creative side of retail media is still developing. A lot of it now is more functional, think sponsored placements and homepage banners, but the potential is there.
As we evolve, I think we’ll see more shopper-based messaging and innovation around format.
There’s room for creativity, especially when data can inform things like scarcity messaging or tailored promotions.
How valuable is retail media data when activating off-site, across channels like CTV or audio?
That’s a particularly exciting area.
When partnerships or clean rooms allow it, the ability to activate transactional-based audiences in channels like CTV or Spotify is hugely valuable. You can build segments like lapsed buyers or lookalike audiences and bring them into other media plans.
Some retailers are understandably cautious about data sharing, but where it’s possible, it opens up a lot of possibilities. That’s where you can start to truly align performance-based retail media with upper-funnel awareness channels.
What wider consumer trends are influencing your retail media strategy?
The biggest one for me is the rise of loyalty schemes. Walk into any supermarket now and it’s clear how important they’ve become. These schemes are critical because they effectively function as consumer IDs, allowing retailers to build robust data sets and audience segments.
If a customer shops without using their loyalty card, that purchase can’t be attributed to them. So, from a retailer’s point of view, encouraging loyalty card use is vital, and from our point of view, it’s what enables us to target and measure effectively.
How do you use store-level or SKU-level data to shape advertising strategy?
Geo-targeting is hugely underrated. I’d argue that data-driven geographies are just as important as data-driven audiences. For instance, in the bottled water category, you can identify regions with high sales of competing brands but low penetration of your own. That tells you where to invest.
It’s a way of building an omni-channel strategy that doesn’t rely on audience segments, third-party cookies, or privacy workarounds.
You simply identify the most valuable postcodes and then activate media, digital OOH, CTV, audio, in those regions. It’s scalable, privacy-safe, and efficient.
Finally, what’s holding retail media back from becoming the all-encompassing force that many predict it will be?
Confidence in measurement is the biggest hurdle.
Retailers have created something incredibly powerful and audiences will definitely remain a key part of our media plans. But when you’re activating within one retailer’s ecosystem, you’re only seeing a slice of the picture. Consumers shop across multiple touchpoints, supermarkets, independents, restaurants, and we can’t yet track them holistically.
That said, retail media is a huge leap forward for categories like ours. The progress in audiences, performance media, and attribution is real. It’s just that the market is still maturing, and some of these structural limitations will take time to resolve.
