By Steve Gray, Director at SG-retail
2024 was a great year for Retail Media. New networks emerged, and existing ones were rebadged.
There was continued innovation and investment in-store, particularly with digital screens and branded bays.
Onsite ads continued to grow, and new adtech challengers like Zitcha, Koddi and Mirakl entered the market to challenge the Criteo & Citrus onsite duopoly.
Marketplace retailers saw huge growth in retail media income driven by advanced self-serve platforms.
Big media agencies started to engage much more rigorously with the major retail media networks (RMNs), and all supermarkets upped their loyalty programme game in order to generate more first-party data to inform audience targeting.
Measurement and ROI (or its absence) continued to generate furious debate between media sellers and buyers.
CPGs began to question whether they are organised to win and what they should try to do themselves in-house, and what they should outsource.
Meanwhile, Shopper Marketing managers began to be rebranded, and retail media managers started to proliferate.
Media column inches grew and grew, as did the number of dedicated conferences.
So what should we expect in 2025?
On the one hand, more of the same :
- There are still some major retailers yet to launch a RMN and others are sub-scale.
- There will be more in-store screens with the agency money going to those that are geared up for automated buying.
- Competition between the onsite adtech players will continue to intensify, with AI and demand integration separating the winners.
- Measurement methodologies will still be contested until brands start to focus on what really matters to drive growth.
- CPGs will start to combine in-store and e-commerce teams, retail media manager numbers will grow, shopper marketing numbers will reduce.
On the other, we can anticipate :
- More automation and self-serve (people are expensive and made even more so by the budget).
- The emergence of super networks (low-scale retailers teaming up with bigger ones to create bigger audiences that are of more interest to ad agencies) and more brand partnering.
- Continued adtech consolidation and innovation (ad optimisation, personalisation, demand integration, self-serve).
- Content innovation as advanced RMNs engage more directly with brand creative teams who start to get it.
- Audience innovation as advanced RMNs make it easier for media agencies to self-serve to the audiences they want to reach.
- Better understanding from brands on what really drives growth (clue: understand first purchasers).
- Significant organisation change within CPGs (some media agencies will take control of JBP spend, others will be taken out in favour of tech-enabled in-house teams).
- The pressure of raised expectations on RMN management teams from under pressure retail shareholders.
- (Good) people continuing to make the difference.
