Gareth Brock.
Retail media may be the shiny new darling of the advertising world, but without rigour, insight and creativity, retail media risks becoming glorified shelf wobblers in a digital wrapper. If brands want more than short-term wins, it’s time to stop treating retail media as a box-ticking exercise and start treating it as a creative, strategic opportunity to influence real-world behaviour, writes Gareth Brock, co-founder and head of strategy at Curious Nation.
Retail media is undoubtedly having its moment in the sun, with predictions that Australian advertising spending will crack $3 billion in the not too distant future. But with all the hype, I can't help but feel that something is being left behind.
For all the shiny new tech, targeting, measurement and programmatic promise, retail media is built on the same principles shopper marketers have been using for decades, but it is these principles that are in danger of being forgotten.
In fact, you could say retail media started long before the digital era, back when retailers enforced strict ‘clean store’ policies that limited branded messaging and displays. While there’s now more flexibility through retail media, what’s often being served is templated, static, and at risk of becoming wallpaper rather than true shopper disruption.
Having spent enough time around shopper marketing teams, I know how good they are at what they do. They’re masters of understanding how people actually behave in retail environments, how they move, where they look, what makes them stop and consider. They know how to connect brand stories with purchase triggers in the real world, and when that is done well, it’s incredibly effective.
But we’re increasingly hearing from marketers across categories that shopper strategy is being skipped. Some don’t have agencies who can even develop a basic messaging hierarchy for in-store, while others say their best campaign is a decade old. A decade. What does that tell you?
The problem is, the rush to retail media, by some brands, often feels like it’s skipping over the basics. There’s a tendency to treat it as just another media channel - plug in a brief, push out an ad, and tick the measurement box. But that approach misses the nuance of what makes people buy, and underestimates the value of context, creativity, and environment working together to drive action.
Because here’s the truth. Retail media, for all its promise, is not a strategy, it's a channel that optimises for short-term gains. Clicks and conversions. It defends shelf space but rarely builds brand space. It doesn’t help people want your product, it just tries to get them to buy it now. And that’s fine up to a point.
It can be a useful tool - a sharp reminder of a new product, or a well-timed nudge to support a price promotion. But those moments only work if the heavy lifting has already been done further up the funnel. If people haven’t heard of your brand, don’t understand it, or haven’t been emotionally engaged, then a programmatic tile in a retailer app won’t change that.
And let’s not forget, it’s expensive. With rising media costs and tight budgets, brands need to be sure they’re investing in activity that actually moves the needle, not just fills a space.
When we prioritise transactions, we’re not building brands. We’re just bidding on attention. If you have a weak message, just putting more media around that with retail media is just amplifying a weak message. The core building blocks of messaging hierarchy, occasion relevance and behavioral triggers are too often being overlooked.
Shopper marketing, now sometimes repackaged as retail marketing, has always been about influencing behaviour at the point of purchase. It requires rigour, insight and creative precision.
Think about Coca-Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’, a campaign that not only drove sales volume but created personal connection and in-store excitement. First launched in Australia in 2011, it’s now coming back, and this time will run in 120 countries around the world. Or Paddle Pop’s phenomenally successful Lick-A-Prize promotion where consumers, mostly kids, had to find a full image of say a plane from fragments of images on the Paddle Pop stick to win a holiday. When the Streets Ice Cream ended the promotion there was even a petition to bring it back. Both examples demonstrate the enduring power of ideas that are grounded in shopper truth and don't rely on fancy algorithms to do the heavy lifting.
Retail media shouldn’t just be efficient, it should be brilliant. It should stop people as they move around in-store, not just show up in the right place at the right time. That means going beyond standard product shots or repurposed social assets, and thinking deeply about how to influence decisions in that final stretch of the customer journey.
And that’s where shopper smarts come in. We need to bring shopper strategists into the planning room, not just the end of the chain. We need creatives who get retail and understand how to make work that sells. And we need to push for better briefs, ones that ask not just what we want people to buy, but how they buy and why.
It’s time to stop treating shopper marketing as an afterthought and put strategy and creativity back where they belong, at the heart of every retail media plan. Brands that invest properly in this are the ones that will ultimately not only drive sales, but help build long-term brand equity and loyalty.