Feasibility and proposition work for retailers: what audience you can credibly sell, what it is worth, what inventory to launch with, and what the operating model and team need to look like.
Service
Retail Media & Commerce Media
Build a retail media network, or get straight answers from the ones you buy: audience foundations, activation, clean rooms and closed-loop measurement.
Retail Media & Commerce Media
Retail media is the fastest-growing line in digital advertising, and the reason is simple: retailers and marketplaces sit on purchase data nobody else has, at exactly the moment a decision is being made. The hard part was never the inventory. It is everything underneath: the identity spine, the audience definitions, the ad serving, and above all a measurement story an advertiser will believe when it says their spend drove incremental sales.
We work both sides of this market. For retailers, marketplaces and any business with a transacting audience, we build the data foundation a media network needs and help you get to a sellable, measurable proposition. For brands buying retail media, we help you interrogate what the networks report, standardise measurement across half a dozen retailers who each define a conversion differently, and connect it back to your own data so you can compare it honestly against every other channel.
Commerce media extends the same logic past traditional retail: marketplaces, travel and hospitality booking platforms, financial services with card-level visibility, telcos, delivery platforms and publishers with transactional data. If you know what your customers actually buy, you have something advertisers want. The question is whether you can package, activate and measure it without giving away data you should be keeping.
This sits exactly where our martech and adtech work meets. A media network is only as good as the identity resolution and event collection under it, which is the same foundation we build in our CDP and implementation work, so we are not learning your stack on your budget. And because we do not buy media or take network commission, our read on what a network is delivering is not one we have any incentive to flatter.
How We Help
Retail and commerce media engagements typically cover:
The audience and identity foundation: resolving loyalty, account, transaction and web behaviour into segments that are stable enough to sell against and to report on afterwards.
Onsite activation: sponsored products, category and search placements, and the personalisation and product discovery layer around them.
Offsite activation: securely extending retailer audiences into Meta, Google, DSPs and CTV, with the consent and data-sharing controls that keep legal comfortable.
Clean rooms and data collaboration: matching brand and retailer data without either side handing over raw customer records.
Closed-loop measurement: incrementality testing, holdouts and attribution that stands up to an advertiser challenging it, rather than last-touch numbers that flatter the network.
For brands buying: auditing network-reported performance, normalising metrics across retailers, and pulling it into your own reporting alongside every other channel.
We are a retailer thinking about launching a media network. Where do we start?
Almost always with an honest feasibility view rather than technology. The questions that decide it are whether your addressable audience is large and well-resolved enough to sell against, whether you have the traffic to deliver campaigns, and whether you can measure incrementality convincingly. Plenty of retailers should not launch one, and finding that out in a short piece of work is far cheaper than discovering it after building an ad server.
