Retail Media: Tech or Strategy First? What Retailers Need to Get Right
Retail media is attracting serious investment across Europe and globally.
Retailers are building media networks, hiring dedicated leads and assembling technology platforms to monetise their physical and digital assets. The opportunity is genuine: retailers hold a powerful combination of first-party shopper data, physical presence and long-standing brand relationships that most media owners can only envy.
But as momentum builds, a familiar question keeps surfacing:
Where and how do we start?
Too often, the answer becomes technology.
A tech stack gets assembled, a team gets hired and everyone waits for the revenue to follow. But the uncomfortable truth is this: technology does not create a retail media business. Strategy does.
The Temptation of Technology
Technology is exciting. As someone who has spent a career building products and platforms, I understand the appeal. Vendors offer compelling visions of end-to-end retail media stacks that can manage everything from ad buying to measurement and the demos are always impressive! A line (often attributed to Sun Tzu) comes to mind in this context: “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”.
Technology is ultimately only a tool. It works when it serves a clearly defined commercial strategy and it often exposes the absence of one when it doesn't.
Retail media success is not determined by the sophistication of the platform you deploy. It is determined by how clearly you can answer a much simpler question:
What problem are we solving for brands and shoppers?
Without a clear answer, even the most capable platform becomes expensive infrastructure with no commercial engine behind it.
Retailers already possess the core ingredients: store environments with high shopper attention, access to purchase behaviour and first-party insights, trusted brand relationships and physical touchpoints across the entire shopper journey.
The challenge is not whether those ingredients exist. It's whether they've been structured into a compelling, differentiated media proposition.
Before technology enters the conversation, retailers need honest answers to questions like:
What media opportunities are we uniquely positioned to offer?
What genuine problems do those opportunities solve for advertisers?
How will we know when this is working?
If those answers aren't clear, the technology stack will simply mirror the confusion.
The Retail Media Maturity Journey
In our experience working with retailers, retail media networks follow a maturity pathway we call GROW (Ground + Refine + Optimise = Win) and technology and strategy are very different at each stage.
Ground
At this stage, retailers are proving the opportunity. Simple media products are offered across stores, digital channels or owned assets to establish commercial proof. Retailers learn which formats brands respond to, which placements deliver measurable value and how campaigns can be executed reliably.
One retailer we worked with launched their first in-store media programme using nothing more than standardised formats and a manual booking process. Within six months they had waiting lists from brands and a clear picture of what to build next.
Technology at this stage should be lightweight and offer obvious value in terms of productivity.
Refine
Once demand is proven, the focus shifts to formalising the offering. Media products get defined more precisely, formats standardised, and processes built around planning, execution and reporting. Retail media stops being ad hoc and becomes a structured business unit.
Technology becomes more important here, but still in service of operational efficiency and consistent service delivery, not sophistication for its own sake.
Optimise
Only once strategy, process and commercial demand are established does sophisticated technology genuinely unlock scale. Streamlined bookings, campaign optimisation, data integration and advanced measurement all create real value at this point.
But the technology works because the strategy already works. Retailers that skip the earlier stages often find that technology alone cannot manufacture demand.
The Trap of Tech-first Thinking
Many retailers today are being encouraged to build a full retail media stack immediately. The intention is understandable: no one wants to feel behind. But the risk is real.
Without strategic clarity first, retailers can end up with platforms that don't reflect their actual media assets, deliver complex workflows for simple campaigns and result in teams focused on managing systems rather than serving advertisers.
The right relationship between strategy and technology isn't complicated: strategy creates value, technology scales it. When that order is respected, the technology decisions become far more obvious; what to automate, what to integrate, what to leave until later.
Getting the Order Right
Retail media represents one of the most significant commercial opportunities available to retailers right now. But success won't come from buying the right platform.
It will come from clarity of strategy, understanding your media assets, defining your value proposition to brands, and building commercially viable offerings that brands actually want to buy.
Only then does technology investment become a strategic decision rather than a speculative one.