RMA Editor-in-Chief Justin Pearse sits down with Rob Edwards, Head of Media & Digital at Arla Foods and one of the industry’s leading voices to discuss his highlights of 2025 in retail media.
We discuss the potential threat of non-endemic brands pushing up prices, the huge advances in creative potential of the space, the evolution of measurement and more.
What first put retail media on your radar as an important space for brands?
I remember three and a half years ago sitting with my VP, talking about the future and what we thought might shape our work. Around the same time I went to the ISBA senior media leaders review, where everyone was asked to name the one thing brands should focus on the following year.
A few of us said retail media. Back then it felt like something bubbling away in the background, something that would eventually grow into a space everyone needed to understand.
Twelve months later I sat in the same room, with broadly the same group, and someone said they were not interested in retail media. My response was it should be on your radar because the data and the understanding of consumer and shopper behavior are valuable to every brand.
You do not need to live in the world of Tesco or Sainsbury’s for it to matter. Retail media gives us access to real behavioural data at scale, not a proxy based on a small panel, and that is a huge shift for planning.
You said before that loyalty cards are powerful data sources, but you also have a view on loyalty itself. Can you explain that?
I think we are living in a time of loyaltyless consumers. I have four loyalty cards on my phone, and lots of people shop across multiple retailers. So while loyalty card data is valuable, it does not mean people are loyal in the traditional sense. Need state, proximity, convenience, and life patterns all shape behaviour.
So yes, the data is important, but we should not kid ourselves that consumers behave in fixed patterns. That is why brands need access to as many relevant data sources as possible, not just the one that aligns to a specific retailer.
How would you summarise what 2025 looked like for retail media, and what stood out for you?
It has been genuinely exciting. The supply chain is fragmented, but retail media has the potential to simplify it because of data and because of MAP, meaning mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships. Through 2025 we saw MAP accelerate, whether through agencies, brands, or media owners forming new partnerships with retailers.
For brands this could simplify activation because you have clearer pathways from planning to execution. We are bombarded by media platforms claiming to be the answer to everything, and while there is innovation everywhere, MAP has the potential to bring simplicity.
It can help brands create assets more easily, build a sofa to store activation plan, and develop the connected experience we talk about a lot internally.
My other headline from the year is that it is just media. We have an amazing ability in this industry to overcomplicate things, but retail media sits alongside everything else. The job is still to place your brand where it offers the most relevance and value to the consumer.
How has the role of creative changed across retail media this year?
People talk a lot about the explosion of creative opportunity in retail media and they are right. With consumers facing tens of thousands of messages a day, creative is becoming even more important. The theatre of retail environments, whether in store or online, is growing quickly.
But we need to keep the shopper at the centre. People often go into stores with a plan, a route they always walk, and a list. They are spending less time in a milk aisle than in a toilet roll aisle, for instance. So while theatre is exciting, it can also be missed.
Sometimes people just want to know the price and where to find the product. The same principle applies across digital formats. Asset opportunities are expanding, but brands need to build experiences that reflect how people actually behave.
We are seeing more long form digital content and more brand storytelling on ecommerce sites, which is interesting. I would love to truly audit that space to understand how people are engaging with it. But overall, creative is accelerating, and the potential is huge, provided brands balance inspiration with functionality.
You mentioned non endemics entering retail media. How do you view that trend?
It proves the value of retail media. If a giant electronics brand, for example, is willing to pay a much higher CPM to be in a category environment, it shows that the audience and data are worth it.
But it can create risk for brands with lower margins. If someone else is happy to pay ten times more for the same space, it becomes difficult to justify always on activity.
So the question becomes how retailers manage and police that inventory to ensure relevance and fairness. It will be a big topic over the next year.
How is the tension between shopper marketing, retail media, and ecommerce budgets playing out?
Every brand faces this. There are legacy structures internally and legacy processes with retailers. We are pushing towards one brief, one budget, because that supports a connected experience. But in reality budgets still sit across marketing and sales and that brings complexity.
Retail media is also influenced by the retailer’s P&L structures, where commercial and media P&Ls can be misaligned with how brands want to invest. Our budgets are not growing, and they have to do more than ever, which makes measurement absolutely critical.
We will invest where we see value and where we can prove performance, and if we cannot, we will move spend elsewhere.
How has measurement evolved and what do you want to see next?
Measurement challenges have been here since day one. Retailers marking their own homework is not useful to brands, so we are building a holistic measurement framework that covers campaign KPIs and ladders up to both short and long term ROI.
ISBA’s supply chain work has been incredibly helpful because it starts to standardise the process and provide a shared view of how retail media works in reality.
The second phase, which looks at working spend actually seen by consumers, will be critical. I expect some disparity between providers, and that will shape how brands invest.
What is your view on the rapid growth of in-store screens and the creative opportunities there?
It is a huge opportunity, but we are still early in understanding how to use it properly. Creative needs to land in a second or two, and the industry needs better tools around time of day, day of week, footfall, and demographic alignment.
Technology like facial recognition and eyetracking will advance this. It will help us understand what people are actually looking at and how long they engage.
But contextual alignment is still essential. I once saw a beer ad sitting above a pet food aisle. It highlights how important it is to match message to location.
Finally, where does CTV fit into your retail media strategy?
We have accelerated our investment in CTV because the audience data and the evolution of AV consumption make it incredibly interesting. But we are cautious, and we test and learn. Measurement remains the challenge because not all data is available from retailers, and marrying above the line and below the line data is difficult.
We are pushing our econometrics partner to evolve their models to include these new signals. It will take time, but the potential connection from sofa to store is powerful. CTV will play a growing role in that journey as long as measurement keeps pace.
