Walmart Connect did $4.4 billion in advertising revenue in fiscal 2024. Amazon's advertising line crossed $50 billion the same year. The number that should worry South African brands is not those headline figures. It is the rate of growth and the proportion of total marketing investment those revenues now represent. Retail media has become, by eMarketer's accounting, the third pillar of digital advertising after search and social.
The South African analogue is being built right now. Pick n Pay's Smart Shopper programme has the kind of basket-level data that retail-media networks are valued on overseas. Shoprite's Xtra Savings sits on the largest shopper graph in the country. Takealot is the obvious operator on the digital-pure-play side. The networks are early but the data is not. The brands buying it now will own the category vocabulary by 2027.
Why retail media is structurally different
It has one feature search and social do not. It sees the conversion. Not a modelled conversion. The actual basket. That solves the attribution debate that has eaten advertising for fifteen years.
Sponsored placements on a retailer's site or app are bid against keywords that map directly to SKU-level demand. Off-site retail media uses the retailer's first-party purchase data to target users on open-web inventory. Either way the retailer becomes the data partner instead of the buying platform.
- Closed-loop attribution from impression to till
- First-party purchase data not subject to cookie deprecation
- Audience access at the granularity of SKU and basket pattern
- Trade-marketing dollars routed into the same workflow as paid media
What is hard about it
The work is not trivial. Each retailer's platform looks slightly different, the bidding logic is opaque, the attribution windows vary and creative requirements are stricter than open-web inventory. Brands trying to manage three or four retail-media networks in parallel tend to under-invest in the smaller ones because the operational cost is too high.
The second issue is brand. Retail media is by design lower-funnel. It works because the user is already on a buying surface. Trying to run brand campaigns on retail media usually disappoints. Boston Consulting Group's analysis of retail-media maturity makes the same point. The channel pays for performance, not awareness.
“When the retailer becomes the data partner, the agency that wins is the one that can negotiate creative, bidding and category strategy in the same breath.”
What good looks like
Brands getting it right share three operational habits. They appoint a single retail-media lead with cross-functional authority. They consolidate retailer relationships in a small team rather than spreading them across geo-markets. They build a measurement layer that joins retail-media data back to the brand's own first-party CRM, so the channel does not stay siloed.
Done well, retail media moves a meaningful share of trade marketing into a measurable channel. Done badly, it adds a fourth dashboard to look at on Monday morning.
Where this is going
The next twelve months belong to AI-driven product-feed optimisation, dynamic creative against shopper segments, and automated bidding integrated with the brand's own demand signal rather than the retailer's. The agencies positioned for that work already have the audience-data plumbing in place. The ones still building it will be twelve months behind by the time they finish.