The complete retail media playbook

How to turn loyalty card data into sales.

Retail media is set to become a £4+ billion industry in the UK by 2025.[^1] But the thing most people miss? Approximately 73% of that spend goes to Amazon.[^2] The supermarkets you know – Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Waitrose – are all fighting for their piece of the pie with something Amazon can’t match: your weekly shopping basket data.

If you’re a brand trying to win and keep shelf space, understanding how to leverage retail media isn’t optional anymore. It’s the difference between being another failed product statistic (industry research suggests 70-85% of new CPG products fail[^3]) and building a sustainable presence that buyers actually want to protect.

What is retail media?

Let’s start with the basics. Retail media isn’t just ads on a supermarket website, though that is part of it. It’s also data collected through loyalty cards.

Every tap, every purchase, every promotion – they all help you understand who your shoppers really are. Are they buying quick-cook meals, grab and go yogurts and Calpol? They’re probably busy parents. Or are they buying premium wines and steak dinners for two? That’s a different audience entirely.

Your weekly shopping basket is essentially a reflection of you. The retailers know this, and they’ve gotten smart about making this data accessible to brands. This means you can target real shoppers with real purchasing power across multiple channels: social media, Connected TV, in-store activations, and online. It’s not about plastering impressions everywhere, it’s about reaching the right person with the right message at the moment they’re most likely to act on it.

From car park to cart

Understanding how retail media works means following your customer through their shopping journey. Let’s use the example of a busy parent – one of the most valuable audiences for food and household brands.

Step 1: Planting the seed

Your shopper is busy. They’re dropping kids off at school, heading to work, taking the same route every day. This is where awareness begins.

A well-placed out-of-home ad that speaks directly to their pain points can be incredibly powerful. “A quick, healthy dinner the whole family will love” hits differently when you’re a parent who genuinely can’t face making multiple separate meals tonight.

The message is subliminal at this stage. They might not remember your brand name immediately, but they remember the promise. They remember that feeling of relief that there might be an easier solution.

This is top-of-funnel done right – not shouting about your product features, but addressing the real need your customer has.

Step 2: Reinforce the message

Here’s where retail media gets clever.

That loyalty card data that tracks your shopper’s weekly purchases can be matched to social media profiles and Connected TV accounts. Your club card is linked to your email address and phone number, creating a digital marker.

We can take that audience of busy parents and reach them again on Facebook, Instagram, ITVX, or Channel 4 on demand. Same person, different platform, more specific message.

This time the creative is more tailored to the retailer they shop at. It’s more relevant. So, it’s more likely to stick. And because we’re using retailer data rather than broad demographic targeting, we’re not wasting impressions on people who’ll never buy from that supermarket.

The beauty is in the specificity. We’re not targeting “women aged 30-45 with children” based on what they told Facebook years ago. We’re targeting people whose current shopping basket proves they’re actively buying products for families right now, within the past week.

Step 3: Visibility at the moment of purchase

Data indicates that busy families are increasingly shopping online – ordering the same items every week with maybe a few changes. This is your critical moment to be visible.

This is where shopper search becomes essential. If you’re a premium sausage brand, you need to bid on generic terms like “pork” or “sausages” – not your own brand name. Why? Because retailers prioritise their own-label products in search results and you need to cut through that noise.

The economics here are compelling. Unlike onsite display advertising where you’re paying a premium CPM (industry estimates suggest £16-£32 or $20-$40[^4]), with shopper search you only pay for clicks. Based on campaign analysis, the effective CPM can be up to 90% cheaper while driving both visibility and engagement.

For shoppers who prefer going into store, you’ve already built awareness through the previous touchpoints. They’re now primed to look for your product when they see it on shelf. That moment of recognition is what converts browsers into buyers.

Step 4:  Track everything

This is where retail media fundamentally differs from traditional advertising, and why it’s become so valuable so quickly.

The club card that tracked your shopper’s profile and helped you target them? It now tracks their purchase of your product. This creates a closed-loop measurement system that was basically impossible before.

You can see:

• Whether the busy parents you targeted actually bought your product
• Whether they engaged with your message first (clicked an ad, saw it in their feed)
• How many touchpoints they needed before making a purchase
• Whether this was their first time buying your brand or a repeat purchase
• Whether they bought online or came into store
• What else was in their basket at the time

There are no estimations, this is actual sales data that shows exactly which audiences converted, at what rate, and with what return on investment.

You can prove actual business impact with hard sales data. That changes everything about how you justify marketing spend internally and how you negotiate with retailers.

The goldmine most brands ignore

Here’s something that should fundamentally change how you think about retail media budgets – lapsed buyers.

These are shoppers who’ve bought your product before but haven’t purchased recently – typically in the last 12 weeks, though for seasonal products the window might be six months or more.

Think about cranberry sauce. Most people buy it once a year for Christmas dinner. What about your own brand? How many people tried it once, liked it, but then got distracted by a competitor’s promotion?

Getting one additional purchase from someone who already knows and likes your brand is infinitely easier than converting a completely new customer. These people already trust you, they’re not sceptical about whether your product works. They just need a reminder, or perhaps a nudge to overcome whatever barrier stopped them buying again.

A well-targeted campaign to lapsed buyers can deliver serious bottom-line impact with relatively modest spend. You’re not building awareness from zero, you’re reigniting a relationship that already existed.

Research and practitioner experience consistently shows that re-engaging lapsed customers delivers substantially higher returns than new customer acquisition, often achieving double the return on ad spend because the heavy lifting of trial and awareness has already been done.

Every retailer is different

Here’s something that surprises brands new to retail media – each retailer operates independently with different platforms, different capabilities, different measurement standards, and dramatically different scales.

Tesco, backed by Dunnhumby, has the most sophisticated data offering through their Sphere platform. Before you spend a penny, you can access:

• Detailed audience insights and sizing
• Rolling 12-month sales data for your category
• Lapsers audience projections
• Performance benchmarks from similar brands

Tesco reports that brands advertising through their platform achieve an average return on ad spend of £6.60, compared to £3.80 on other channels.[^5] This kind of benchmark underscores the importance of having a sound retail media strategy.

Sainsbury’s is building comparable capabilities through Nectar 360, with a new tool called Poll and AI that helps map shopper journeys and predict when customers will drop off. Industry data shows that Sainsbury’s platform typically delivers ROAS in the range of 300-450%, with conversion rates of 60-70%.[^6] The other retailers are catching up, but at different speeds and with varying degrees of sophistication.

This matters because the results aren’t comparable across retailers. The audience size, purchase cycles, competitive set on shelf and measurement methodology are all different.

A premium ready meal brand will naturally perform better at Waitrose and M&S where their core audience shops, whereas a value-focused product might find substantially larger audiences at Asda. Understanding these nuances before you allocate budget is crucial.

This is also why the “we spent equally across Tesco and Sainsbury’s so the results should be comparable” thinking is flawed. You need someone who’s run enough campaigns across enough retailers to know what ‘good’ looks like for your specific category and brand positioning. Otherwise, you’re flying blind and probably overpaying.

The full funnel

The real power of retail media is that it connects the entire marketing funnel in a way traditional advertising never could.

Top of funnel

Out-of-home and broad-reach digital build awareness with emotionally resonant messages about your brand promise.

Mid funnel

Targeted social media and Connected TV drive consideration with messages tailored to specific audience segments – busy parents see quick meal solutions, premium shoppers see quality credentials.

Bottom of funnel

Shopper search and onsite visibility convert browsers into buyers at the moment of purchase.

Retention

Brand lapsers campaigns and repeat purchase tracking turn one-time buyers into loyal customers.

Every single stage is measurable through loyalty card data. You can see exactly which channels drove new customers, which drove repeat purchases, and calculate your true marketing efficiency ratio across the whole funnel.

This is fundamentally different from the old model where you’d run TV for awareness, digital display for consideration, and PPC for conversion.

With retail media, the club card tap is the thread that connects everything. The same person who saw your OOH ad, engaged with your Instagram post, clicked your onsite search ad, and made a purchase is trackable as one continuous journey.

Metrics that matter

A lot of brands get retail media wrong, they obsess over return on ad spend as if it’s the only metric that matters.

ROAS is useful, but it doesn’t tell you whether you’re actually growing your business or just remarketing to people who were going to buy anyway.

The metrics that matter more are:

• New customer acquisition cost – how much are you spending to recruit someone who’s never bought your brand before? This is your real growth engine.
• Marketing efficiency ratio – what percentage of your total revenue is being spent on marketing to generate it? This contextualises whether your ROAS is actually efficient.
• Repeat purchase rate – of the people who bought once, how many bought again within the halo window (typically 3-6 weeks)? This tells you if you’re recruiting valuable customers or just driving trial that goes nowhere.
• Share of category – are you growing your piece of the pie or is the whole category growing? Retailer data can show you this in near real-time.

Most advertising platforms will optimise for the easiest, quickest sale – which almost always means remarketing to your existing customers. That makes the ROAS look great while doing nothing for actual business growth.

The sophisticated approach is explicitly excluding your existing buyers from most campaigns and focusing on genuine new customer acquisition. Yes, the ROAS will be lower, but you’re actually growing your business rather than just accelerating purchases that were already going to happen.

Theory in practice

Let’s talk about what this looks like in practice, because retail media isn’t all elegant data flows and perfect attribution.

The media teams and buying teams at retailers are still figuring out how to work together. At some retailers they’re merging, at others they’re still separate departments with separate budgets and bonus structures.

This can create awkward situations, for example, a brand might agree to invest significantly in retail media through the media team, only to have their buyer say “wait, that’s my budget allocation.” Or vice versa. This isn’t your problem to solve, but you need to navigate it.

Work around this by bringing both sides of the retailer into the conversation early. Show your buyer that the retail media spend is incremental support for the product. Frame it as “we’re investing in your shoppers specifically to drive velocity on our listing.”

Buyers are increasingly measured on the media spend they can generate from their brands. Show them how retail media fits into your total support picture, and you’ll find doors open more easily.

Walk in with a specialist

Subtle but important, walking into a buyer meeting with a clear retail media strategy adds credibility to everything you’re saying.

It shows that you understand their business and proves you’re not just hoping shelf space will magically work – you’re committing to support it with targeted spend that reaches their specific shoppers.

Brands report that their buyer meetings change completely once they can present a detailed activation plan showing:

• Which audience segments they’ll target (using that retailer’s data)
• Expected reach and frequency
• Projected sales uplift based on category benchmarks
• Measurement approach including halo tracking

That’s the difference between “we’ll do some marketing” and “we’ll invest £50,000 to specifically reach your busy parent shoppers with a 6-week campaign expecting to drive measurable incremental purchases.”

Agencies that specialize in retail media build expertise across multiple retailers and categories, bringing both the technical capabilities and the relationship credibility to the table. More than that, experienced practitioners have years of benchmarking data across categories and brand types. They can tell you within the first conversation whether retail media makes sense for your business, which retailers will deliver the best returns, and what level of investment will have an impact.

Getting started

If you’re a startup or smaller brand, retail media probably isn’t your first priority. But once you’ve got that foundation, retail media becomes the difference between surviving on the shelf and thriving there. It’s how you protect your listing by proving velocity, justify expansion into more stores, and compete with brands who have a significantly larger budget.

Based on practitioner experience, meaningful retail media programs typically start in the range of £30,000-£50,000 annually with a single retailer – focusing on shopper search and one or two targeted audience campaigns. That’s enough to prove the concept, generate meaningful data, and start building the case for more investment.

The brands winning at retail media right now are treating it as infrastructure, not campaign activity.

• Always-on shopper search to maintain visibility.
• Quarterly audience campaigns timed to key sales moments or promotional windows.
• Annual big-bet launches that integrate retail media into a full-funnel approach.

They’re also brutally pragmatic about measurement. They track what truly matters – new customers, repeat rates, efficiency ratios rather that easy to measure statistics like impressions and clicks.

What this means for your brand

If you’re a brand already on shelf wondering why sales are plateauing despite spending on marketing – retail media connects your awareness spend to actual purchase behaviour in a way nothing else can.

If you’re trying to get a listing and preparing for buyer meetings, walking in with a retail media support plan that uses their data to reach their shoppers will differentiate you from the other 50 brands pitching that buyer this month.

If you’re a challenger brand competing against bigger budgets, retail media is the great equaliser. Targeted precision beats reach when you’re trying to recruit your specific audience away from the market leader.

The retailers have built something genuinely powerful here. They’ve created a closed-loop system that connects awareness, consideration, purchase, and repeat behaviour with measurement that actually proves business impact.

The brands that commit to testing and learning and integrate retail media into their total marketing approach rather than treating it as a separate tactic, are those who will still be on shelf in five years.

Don’t be part of the failed statistic. Build a retail media strategy that’s as sophisticated as the data available to power it.

Ready to explore what retail media could do for your brand? The conversation starts with understanding your audience, your category dynamics, and which retailers align best with your growth goals. From there, it’s about building a measurement framework that proves business impact – not just advertising metrics.

Get in touch today to talk retail media.

References

[^1]: eMarketer (2024). “France, Germany, and the UK Retail Media Ad Spending Forecasts 2024.” UK retail media ad spending passed $4 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach £4.8 billion by 2026. Sources: KPMG UK (May 2025), IAB UK, buywith (March 2025).

[^2]: Adtelligent (June 2025). “Retail Media Market Outlook 2025.” In the UK, approximately 73% of retail media spend goes to Amazon, with non-Amazon UK retailers generating £1.3 billion.

[^3]: Multiple industry sources cite product failure rates: Nielsen reports 85% of new CPG products fail; Harvard Business School (Clayton Christensen) reports 80% of new consumer products fail; University of Toronto research (Inez Blackburn) found 70-80% failure rate for grocery sector specifically. Food Navigator (March 2019), Publicity.com (May 2017).

[^4]: McKinsey analysis estimates retail media CPM between $20-50 (approximately £16-40). Source: Brandswap (August 2024), citing McKinsey research. This is consistent with industry estimates for retail media display advertising.

[^5]: Tesco Media & Insight Platform data. Profitero (2023), ExchangeWire (May 2023), Grocery Doppio. “Tesco has reported that advertising on Tesco Media gives brands an average ROAS of £6.60 versus an average ROAS of £3.80 on other channels.”

[^6]: Ecommerce Age (July 2023). “The prospects for Retail Media.” Sainsbury’s Nectar360 platform reports average conversion rates of 60-70% and average ROAS of 300-450% for campaigns.