Good morning from Retail Media Age HQ,
As I’m sure my readers know (potentially due to being on the ground there!), POSSIBLE has been taking place in Miami this week. If you’re a follower of the NDA newsletter, you may also know that my colleagues at NDA have been there in the middle of the action.
I’m not in Miami (so don’t worry, this is not Yet Another POSSIBLE Take), but that doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been plenty to do back here in London.
Earlier this week, I went along to InfoSummit London, where I enjoyed a fantastically in-depth panel discussion with senior leaders from Trainline, Tesco Media, the Telegraph, and WPP Media giving their perspectives on retail/commerce media and how they are handling data, infrastructure, internal organisation and more.
It’s really rewarding when I can attend a session that feels like it underscores everything I’ve been noting and thinking about in different areas of my job while also adding to that understanding.
I was particularly intrigued to hear Tesco Media’s Stephen Edwards talk about Tesco’s launch of video, something I’ve written about for RMA (and opined on in this newsletter), and specifically how “extensive” the testing programme was to ensure that customers would respond well to the change. Edwards recalled that there was one element of the testing roadmap that had the potential to deliver very well, but customers responded to it negatively and so Tesco killed it off. As he worded it, anything that disrupts the customer experience is “dead in the water”.
It was similarly fascinating to hear Trainline’s Sam Eads talk about the company’s approach to commerce media as a travel organisation and the journey the business has been on since they kicked off their commerce media proposition (we had a great feature about this last November featuring Sonal Kalra, Revenue Director at Trainline), as well as hearing Camilla Child at The Telegraph talk about the publication’s various forays into ecommerce and the data that comes with them.
The latest AA/WARC Ad Expenditure Report this week has also brought the news that retail media (along with social media) has been broken out as a stand-alone channel for the first time, and it’s not hard to see why. Retail media expenditure in the UK grew by double digits across 2025, recording a 17.5% increase year-over-year to be precise, which put it in third place for growth behind addressable TV (37.0% increase) and social media (21.0% increase).
Even more remarkable are the growth figures recorded for Q4 2025 alone, where retail media investment rose by a whopping 30.5% – this time ahead of both addressable TV and social media.
While retail media won’t necessarily be a growth story forever, the figures are still consequential and tell a clear tale of the shifts happening in spend, reflecting how the ad ecosystem is evolving. It feels like a very safe bet to predict that there will continue to be plenty to comment on and analyse in the pages of Retail Media Age!
Read more from Retail Media Age’s editorial staff and expert commentators in our RMA columns.
