Three ways to supercharge retail media in 2025

Retail media continues to deliver phenomenal growth – a testament to the power of first party insights and outcomes. It’s an excellent success story of what can happen when commercial considerations, valuable audience data and consumer trends come together.

However, to achieve its true potential, retail media needs to expand beyond being a point of sale play and extend to a wider view of the customer.

Here we take a look at three key areas retailers can focus on this year to supercharge their success. 

Context: building a bigger picture

Consumers are not one dimensional, but right now, retail media risks treating each customer only as the contents of their online basket.

In its current form, retail media is driven by past purchases, point of sale engagement and anticipated next action, as well as a limited base of context from a single – even if very sizable – retailer’s experience.

But this can only ever provide a small part of the audience picture. Most people are much more than simply how, where and what they shop.

Building out from the purchase as the primary data point will lack context for why that purchase is being made. This will limit retail media’s long-term strategic view.

The discipline needs to connect advertisers to audience preferences, research and consideration stages and activity beyond simple purchase intent. 

Connections: joining the dots for the industry

Considering partnerships is key to enhancing retail media, as teaming up with other companies can enable firms to connect unique data sets. 

There has been huge progress to simplify the technologies facilitating the clunky one-to-one data matching of old, and shift to data lakes.

From these, businesses can harness the power of AI tools to model first party audiences and create compliant scaled, high performance, outcome-driven audiences to expand retailer data sets.

There are various types of partnerships that could work well for the retail sector, publishing being one.

The US market has already seen a proliferation of retail and publishers partnering, from Hearst and Target with dedicated editorial, to BestBuy syndication of Cnet product reviews, which we’d expect to accelerate and extend to the UK markets in 2025.

Pairing with a publishing partner can provide a much broader view – connecting to intent, wider customer interests and ‘next option’ insights – increasing effectiveness and relevance for the retailer and the customer.

Publishers provide relatable context and authenticity, broader customer awareness, the ability to tap into wider cultural moments and triggers and build understanding beyond the transaction.

Content: the power of editorial

Though retailers benefit from high customer loyalty from their audiences, by the time many shoppers hit their sites or enter their stores the purchase decisions are largely already made.

Brands need to inform and inspire the discovery phase to reach people earlier and make it onto that shopping list.

As trusted sources of information, publishers are already providing reviews and round-ups to their readers, directly speaking to so many people including competitors’ customers, and promoting products.

Readers already well versed in using search and content publishers to consume upcoming seasonal trends, find the best deals, editorial reviews and recommendations, and shop directly from this editorial.

The next generation of retail media will show the rounded customer view – connecting not only purchase history but signposting wider interests and connection points to help retailers to predict need and become more indispensable.

With this wider view of the customer, retailers are better able to predict and anticipate need.

As retail media continues expanding in 2025, addressing some of its growing pains and interoperating with the wider ecosystem of publishers and platforms will be key to building a sustainable future for the channel, rather than remaining limited to the digital shelf and checkout lane.

Understanding and demonstrating the wider customer context will be one way they can ensure their place in planning – and their contribution to the bottom lines of retailers – for the longer term.