Retail media is no longer a minor line item. It is one of the fastest-growing channels in digital advertising, expanding at 17% year on year and expected to hit £8.6 billion in spend by 2030 within the UK alone, according to IAB UK figures. But with that growth comes fragmentation, siloed measurement, and pressure to prove real business outcomes.
Those were the tensions at the heart of a panel discussion at Programmatic Pioneers, where RMA sister title New Digital Age was lead media partner. Moderated by Olivia McCullagh, Retail Media Lead at IAB UK, and joined by Gilbert Kassab, Head of Global Media at Philip Morris International, Scott Bodie, Head of Media UK and Ireland at Kimberly-Clark, and Shardarne Meghie, Media Experience Partner at PHD UK, the panel discussion took in questions of measurement and metrics, how retail media is changing organisations’ ways of working, and the potential unlocked by AI in combination with retail data.
Retail media is reshaping internal collaboration
The first theme to emerge was how retail media has fundamentally changed conversations inside advertiser organisations. Scott Bodie said the channel had broken down walls he had not expected to fall.
“It’s opened up collaboration with the teams. I had a commercial team coming to me and asking what are we doing per retailer, which is something that would never have happened in the past,” he said.
That kind of cross-functional interest is a signal of how seriously the commercial case for retail media is now being taken, but it also brings pressure. Bodie said commercial teams increasingly expect media investment to feed directly into their own performance models, which he said is not always the right way to assess effectiveness.
From an agency standpoint, Meghie said the ability to connect media spend to actual purchase behaviour has been transformational.
“Being able to understand the way through to purchase and the conversion point allows growth to be exponential, because we track that user all the way through to conversion,” he said.
The measurement challenge
Despite the growth story, measurement was identified by all three panellists as the channel’s most significant obstacle. Kassab said the core challenge is that advertisers operate across multiple retailers with incompatible measurement frameworks.
“It is difficult to cross-measure across different retailers on performance-based outcomes, so it is still pretty siloed in how you measure,” he said. He added that retailers are not always supplying the granularity of data required to make confident optimisation decisions. “Retailers are not sharing the regularity of data that we are looking for,” he said.
Meghie bemoaned the industry’s tendency to obsess over the metrics that are easiest to track rather than the ones that tell the fullest story.
“We are obsessed with what we can measure, but we know that sometimes that is not the full story. We can be comfortable not knowing every proxy metric, trusting that it is leading to the outcome we are looking for,” he said. He said the gap between how consumers actually perceive a brand and what the numbers show is one of the hardest things to communicate to senior leadership.
Bodie said the long-term framing of success is too often crowded out by short-term pressure. “There is still a push to always have that short-term view of what happened this quarter, and we really should be talking about what is going to happen further forward and how it threads through,” he said.
The panel agreed that standardisation across retail networks is the unlock the industry needs most urgently. Meghie said the lack of unified measurement is making it harder to manage frequency and prove incrementality across campaigns that span multiple retail environments. Bodie said audience validation is equally inconsistent. “Standardisation would be a key unlock. There is also work to be done around audience validation from retailers and how it is being done differently by different retailers,” he said.
AI and the connected commerce opportunity
Looking ahead, the panel was optimistic about what first-party retail data combined with AI could enable. Kassab said the opportunity lies in using behavioural signals from retail to build predictive audience models.
“If we are able to use our first-party data and combine it with second-party data from retail media, and then use AI to help us define who those high-value audiences are and who is most likely to convert, we can put every dollar to its best use,” he said.
Meghie said programmatic capabilities within digital OOH and in-store environments will increasingly merge with retail media strategies, pointing to programmatic digital out of home (pDOOH) as an area to watch.
McCullagh closed the session by saying, “Retail media continues to grow, and the conversation has shifted from pure performance into a 360 omnichannel ecosystem. There is now a real imperative to reduce duplication, improve measurement, and build greater collaboration.”
