Good morning from Retail Media Age HQ,
I’ve written a few times in this newsletter before now about the increased attention being paid to the upper-funnel potential of retail media (as well as the ways in which it still falls down) – along with the richer creative needed to make it a reality.
Tesco has established itself as a player willing to lead the way in this regard, having rolled out premium video ads as part of its retail media proposition earlier this year, something that Tesco Media’s Stephen Edwards shared was the result of extended and careful testing.
Even so, it’s a little surprising to learn, on the back of Tesco’s latest Upfront event last month, that Tesco is set to begin integrating influencer content into its ad offering.
According to research from MTM cited by Tesco, some 40% of shoppers aged under 45 actively follow influencers for their suggestions on brands and products (the figures break down to 40% of 13-24-year-olds and 42% of 25-44-year-olds). Whether that means they want to see those influencers on their shopping app – or in the store, with Tesco promising that the “approved creator content” will display on in-store screens alongside the app and Tesco.com – is another question, though.
It’s not the first time that retail players have experimented with bringing creator content and retail media together. Albertson’s Media Collective, the retail media arm of US grocery retailer Albertson’s, formed a partnership with creator agency Linqia and ran a campaign for Lunar New Year 2025 that saw creators producing videos about cooking for the new year – although these ran on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest rather than the retailer’s own channels.
Best Buy has also partnered with comedy group Dude Perfect to showcase brands on its YouTube channel – again, this involves bringing products into the influencer environment rather than the other way around.
So, can Tesco make a success of bringing influencers into the grocery shop? I have some reservations, because I think context matters – people engaging with and being receptive to influencers in a social/video environment doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to do so in a shopping environment.
Even though different mindsets exist during the shopping journey – Tesco has previously said that 2 in 3 Tesco shoppers are open to discovering new brands – I find it hard to imagine taking several minutes during my online shop to watch a video before making a decision about what to buy. (This is a reservation I also had about the video rollout, but some videos can be very short, more like product animations; influencer content, however, implies something more involved). Similarly, I can’t imagine pausing mid-grocery shop to stand around and watch an in-store screen.
I think it is possible to make a success of adding shoppability to social and entertainment content, as seen in the example of TikTok Shop – but the difference is between adding an extra action that consumers can take (or not) once they’re already engaged with something, rather than inserting an experience that demands their attention in an environment where they’re trying to accomplish something else.
Maybe my scepticism is unjustified – there are categories Tesco sells where I think this would be more suitable, like homeware, where shoppers will probably be more keen to draw on recommendations. However, for grocery specifically, I wonder if there’s a limit to how far the funnel can be extended upwards in the retailer dot com environment, and I’ll be interested to see what the results are if Tesco reports any.
If the movements of the creator economy are something that interests you, you’ll be pleased to learn about New Digital Age (RMA’s sibling publication)’s new initiative: Creator Age, a dedicated article hub and newsletter focused on how the creator economy is impacting advertising and marketing. Read more about its launch here or sign up on the NDA website.
Elsewhere, there’s a lot of talk about the DoorDash acquisition of Instacart and what it means for the conjoined retail media proposition – with speculation that the combined might of the two delivery platforms, each with their own ads business (one focused more heavily around food and restaurants and the other on grocery) would stand a greater chance of being competitive with titans Amazon and Walmart.
The additional scale will undoubtedly appeal to advertisers as long as the buying experience remains intuitive. At a price tag of $17 billion, the deal (still subject to regulatory approval) really needs to pay dividends for DoorDash, though it would of course eliminate one of its big competitors in a space that’s already pretty closely-contested. DoorDash naturally insists that customers will continue to have choice, while also making the argument that it will bring subscription prices down, presumably through the need to pay for only one service and not two.
Read more viewpoints from Retail Media Age’s editorial staff and expert commentators in our RMA columns.
