LONDON — Retail media is evolving from a transaction-focused performance channel toward brand building as companies leverage data and signals to shape customer connections across multiple touchpoints.
“Companies can actually use the data in two ways. One is obviously the transaction that will always be there, will remain strong, but also brand building,” Luis Martinez, managing partner for Commerce at WPP Media, told Beet.TV contributor Robert Andrews at the Beet.TV and WPP Media Leadership Summit. “Retail media really enables that like no other sort of media today.”
The shift represents maturity beyond COVID-accelerated e-commerce growth that catapulted initial retail media investment focused primarily on sales conversion.
Amazon dominates fragmented landscape
The UK retail media market generates approximately £7 billion annually (roughly $9 billion), with Amazon capturing £5 billion while the remainder fragments across emerging networks including Tesco, John Lewis, and category-specific platforms from financial services, banking, transport, and automotive industries.
“Amazon will remain very strong,” Martinez said. “Then you mentioned a little bit about fragmentation. The rest is up for grabs. The ones that will come strong are the ones that have a strong ad tech offering, measurement, and basically can really tell a story about how customers interact end to end.”
Non-endemic brands including Barclays and American Express use Amazon to understand purchasing behavior for loan offers and credit card upsells, while other retailers create proprietary networks or leverage top platforms.
Performance and brand merge
Retail media maintains performance strength through first-party, high-intent audiences while evolving toward brand building, requiring organizational change management as marketing and shopper budgets converge.
“It will always be a performance opportunity because you have a first party, high intent, high signal audiences. But it’s also brand building. And I think that’s the evolution where we’re going with this,” Martinez said. “On our side, as an industry, we need to also understand that Amazon data, Tesco data, retail media network data does not just equal performance.”
Retail readiness evolves with AI
Creative strategy within retail media environments progresses from basic retail readiness — proper review quantities, messaging, imagery — toward agentic AI that shapes content for optimal consumer engagement at conversion moments.
“The more you basically leverage those signals, the more you shape the content to create that connection, the more you will drive a transaction,” Martinez said. “The more your ad engages a consumer, the most likely that person will convert.”
Gradual agent adoption expected
Martinez predicts 2026 will bring evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes as human behavior adaptation occurs gradually, with maturity around task automation freeing time for insights and customer understanding.
“I don’t think we’ll see massive changes when it comes to AI, in terms of replacing humans. What you will see is more maturity in the offer, especially around tasks that can be automated,” Martinez said.
Low-consideration purchases like grocery shopping may see automated agentic cycles, while high-ticket items and experiential purchases will maintain human interaction requirements for trust and engagement.
Retailer hesitation
Some retailers resist third-party agent applications from concerns about brand disintermediation and AI hallucinations producing nonsensical content, though Martinez expects faster advancement given two years of progress equivalent to typical decade-long technology cycles.
“The beauty of it is that if you think where we were two years ago, where we are today, it’s just we have accomplished what usually takes a decade, so I can only expect that to go faster,” Martinez said. “I think it can allow us to really spend more time driving insights, really understanding better connections and letting the machine do the manual work.”
You’re watching coverage from Beet.TV’s Global Leadership Summit with WPP Media, filmed in London, presented by Criteo, Index Exchange, Seedtag & The Trade Desk. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
