By Mike Shaw, Director, EMEA Ad Sales, Roku
Retail media is the rising star of digital advertising.
According to IAB UK, ad spend on retail media in the UK is projected to exceed £1 billion this year, and Amazon’s recent 2Q results showed 22% annual growth to over $15bn globally. This reflects both market enthusiasm and these networks’ proven performance. For retailers and their brand partners, retail media offers high-margin revenue streams, detailed customer data, and measurable outcomes. Yet, most of this investment has historically been concentrated in online and mobile, often social video, environments.
While these platforms have driven retail media’s growth so far, the most untapped and transformative opportunity lies elsewhere: TV. As the largest and most engaging screen in the home, the television is uniquely positioned to drive retail media’s continued acceleration.
The big screen’s missed potential?
Television has always been a powerful marketing tool. It commands attention, builds emotional connections, and shapes culture. But historically, TV was a one-way channel, excellent for awareness but limited for direct response. This created a divide in advertising strategies: brand building lived on TV, while performance marketing moved to digital.
Streaming has fundamentally changed that equation. Today’s connected TV (CTV) environment enables advertisers to deliver relevant messaging to specific households, measures performance, and even makes ads directly shoppable. It’s a powerful evolution and one that means marketers no longer have to choose between scale and precision.
Streaming: a retail media powerhouse
Streaming platforms bring the best of both worlds. With more than 20 million UK households accessing at least one streaming service, and the exponential growth of ad-supported tiers across platforms like Netflix and Disney+, streaming offers scale that rivals traditional broadcast. But unlike traditional live linear, streaming also offers granular targeting, campaign optimisation and measurable results.
For retailers, this means the ability to reach viewers with high-intent viewers, in a relaxed and immersive environment. And it provides brands with a new way to reach audiences through contextually relevant, dynamic advertising delivered on the most impactful screen in the home.
Levelling the playing field for smaller brands
One of the most exciting aspects of streaming-based retail media is its accessibility. Traditional TV advertising has often been out of reach for smaller and mid-sized brands due to high production and placement costs. Streaming turns that on its head.
With more flexible pricing models and self-serve ad platforms, streaming enables smaller brands to run highly targeted campaigns without blockbuster budgets. They can reach specific audience segments based on location, interests, viewing habits and even past shopping behaviour. In practice, this means a regional food brand can appear alongside a national supermarket campaign or a new direct-to-consumer product can launch on TV with the same level of targeting precision as a paid social campaign.
At Roku, we’re seeing increasing numbers of emerging brands embrace this shift. Whether the objective is to raise awareness, drive traffic to retail stores, or boost digital sales, streaming offers a measurable, scalable solution, all without requiring businesses to compromise on creativity or cost.
Balancing brand and performance
As retail media continues to evolve, one challenge is becoming clear: how to balance short-term performance with long-term brand building. The temptation to prioritise lower-funnel metrics like click-through rates and conversions is understandable, particularly in times of economic pressure. But over-reliance on performance can come at the expense of brand equity, which remains essential for sustainable growth.
Streaming TV provides a natural environment to strike that balance. It allows advertisers to tell compelling stories and connect emotionally with consumers, while also tracking impact and driving action. Campaigns can be optimised in real time based on viewer engagement, geographic location, or sales uplift, helping marketers understand what works and why.
Retail media is still relatively nascent. As more retailers launch their own media networks and as streaming becomes even more embedded in consumers’ daily lives, the opportunity to unify brand and performance in a single channel will become a true competitive differentiator.
Shoppable ads on streaming platforms adds another layer of interactivity. By turning the remote into a tool for instant action, consumers can respond to an ad in real time, whether by learning more, adding to a basket, or making a purchase. It makes one-click buying a reality.
The next phase of retail media isn’t just about better data or broader reach. It’s about meeting consumers where they are and offering a seamless path from attention to action. Streaming is not just part of the retail media mix. It is the next frontier, and one that retailers and brands should be jumping on.
