Retail Media Grew Up Fast. Here's What Breaks Next.

Something makes me smile every time I hear retail media described as new.

It isn't new. In fact, I've watched it grow for nearly 15 years.

When I started, nobody called it retail media. We were media services, or media partnerships. I spent 11 years in that world, across Morrisons Media Services, and ASDA Media Partnerships on behalf of Result CC, Triad Retail Media, and GIG Retail. The job was to connect brands with shoppers from sofa to store via the website, the magazine, social, radio, out-of-home, and the store itself. Aisle fins, shelf barkers, floor stickers, the lot.

There's a belief that all of this ran on trade budgets. It didn't, or not mostly. We worked with shopper marketing budgets, and with brand budgets where we could win them. Trade spend bought the space. Our job was to make sure shoppers knew it was there. We were the activation engine, not the negotiation.

It was a good business. What it wasn't, yet, was a media channel.

What changed that was data. Retail media became what it is when the industry recognised what retailers' first-party data was actually worth, and the money followed quickly: IAB UK put UK retail media spend at £3.8bn in 2025, up 18% year on year.

Which is why I hold a line that some people find inconvenient. If there's no supporting data, it shouldn't be called retail media. A screen loop with a play count is not measurement. A gondola end sold at rate card because that's roughly what it went for last year isn't retail media at all, it's space brokering with better branding. I sold plenty of it, and it often worked, but it worked the way shopper marketing works, on judgement and relationships. Media budgets ask what the audience was, how many of them saw it, and what happened next, and they move to whoever can answer.

That test is hardest on the part of the business I've spent the last four years in. In-store carries most of the transactions and the least of the proof.

Brands wanted to know how their in-store campaign performed, and too often the only answer we had was sales. Sales alone won't tell you much. Did the shopper see it? Did they pick the product up and put it back down again? Did it change what they considered, even if they bought weeks later? We couldn't answer any of that.

Which is why measurement has to be the foundation rather than a reporting afterthought, and why it's the work I've done with retailers like Iceland and the Kingfisher Group. It is slow, unglamorous, and the single thing that decides whether in-store gets treated as media at all.

That's the first thing that breaks as a network scales. The second is quieter, and I'd argue more urgent.

The Problem Nobody Puts in the Deck

Almost every retail media network (RMN) starts the same way. A spreadsheet for inventory. Then one for bookings. Then delivery reports. Then category performance. Then a second platform, a third partner, and a reporting process that only one person in the building fully understands.

None of it was a bad decision at the time. Each one solved the problem in front of you that week. Collectively, they cap how big the business can get, because every new advertiser, channel, or market lands on infrastructure that was never designed to carry it.

The cost rarely appears as a line item, which is why it goes unchallenged. It shows up as launches that slip a week because approvals live in three places, as reporting that's hard to defend when an advertiser queries it, and as key-person risk, because whoever understands how the numbers tie together is usually the person you can least afford to lose.

I've watched capable teams spend more time reconciling numbers than selling against them. That is a slow, expensive way to run a growth business, and yet it never gets named as the reason growth slowed.

Two Questions Worth Asking Your Own Network

Both problems come from the same place. Retail media's commercial success outran its operational maturity, and the parts that don't show up in a revenue line got left for later.

So, two questions. When two reports disagree, is there a source of truth, or is there a meeting? And if you doubled your advertiser count next year, what breaks first? If the honest answer is a hiring plan rather than an infrastructure one, you're buying time, not capacity.

Retailers earlier in the journey have the real advantage here, because they can build the foundation properly from the beginning.

That is the problem I find most interesting in this industry right now, and the reason I joined Vantage. Not just generating more demand, but helping retailers operationalise and scale the demand they already have.

I've watched retail media grow up. This is the part where it has to get organised.