Retail media is booming, but the win is in the buy that surrounds it
The headline number, and the more useful one beneath it
UK retail media is forecast to reach £7.88bn in 2026, up from £3.8bn last year, with three quarters (74%) of IAB UK members expecting it to take even more spend in the months ahead. Retail media has now grown for six straight years, from £1.32bn in 2019 to nearly £8bn this year, and is one of the engines pushing total UK ad spend past £45bn.
That headline is enough to put retail media on every marketing director’s agenda. But the more useful number sits one layer down. Online retail media alone accounted for £1.5bn in the first half of 2025, with industry sentiment driven by something simpler than novelty. Budgets are flowing towards channels that can prove three things in the same breath: trust, intent and outcome.
Retail media wins on all three. So does the wider buy that should sit around it.
Three things retail media is genuinely good at
When you strip away the hype, retail media’s pull comes down to a clean set of advantages.
Closed loop measurement. Brands can see the round trip from impression to till, often in the same week, often inside the same data environment. That’s a level of accountability that programmatic open exchange has been quietly chasing for a decade.
High intent audiences. A shopper inside a Tesco app, on a Sainsbury’s page or walking the Boots beauty aisle is meaningfully closer to a purchase decision than the same person scrolling a social feed.
Point of purchase context. Bauer Media’s supermarket DOOH network alone now spans 1,500 screens across Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons, delivering a 20% fortnightly reach of UK adults. Add Bauer’s new Morrison’s contract for 300 in-store screens and you have a network that meets shoppers physically inches from the shelf.
So far, so attractive. The risk, though, is that brands treat retail media as a self-contained tactic, when the audience treats it as the final scene in a much longer story.
In-retail and proximity: better together
We’ve seen this play out for our clients across both sides of the moment.
In-retail campaigns convert the high intent shopper already inside the store or app, where the decision is being made.
Proximity campaigns, on commuter routes, supermarket forecourts, transport hubs, the high street, warm the shopper on the way in, so that in-store impression isn’t the first they’ve seen. It acts as a final decision catalyst rather than a cold introduction.
Run together, the lift is meaningfully bigger than running either in isolation. Both act as brand preference amplifiers, each priming the other.
For brands to get this right, there shouldn’t be a retail media line item simply added to the wider plan. As with other channels, it needs to be treated as one of the shelves in a much wider shop.
What this means for media planning in 2026
Three planning questions are worth bringing to the next quarterly review.
Is your retail media buy connected to the journey that precedes it? If it sits in isolation, you’re paying for the easiest part of the conversion and missing the part that earns it. Consumers need to havethat built in preference before encountering the brand physically.
Is your buy thought through for the right share of moments? In-retail and proximity each do a different job. The strongest plans give both a clear role rather than overweighting either.
Is your creative earning the environment? A DOOH frame on the route to Sainsbury’s, a press feature ahead of a category launch and a national newspaper spread before a peak season are all “point of purchase” in their own way, but only if the creative respects the moment.
How Hurst Media Agency plans retail media
At Hurst Media Agency we help clients place their brands in the right environments so that they can be the preferred choice of consumers, whether the shopper is in-store, in-app or on their journey.
We plan retail alongside print, digital, out of home, radio and TV in a single brief. That way each channel earns the moment only it can: print and national news for credibility, digital for retargeting and reach, OOH and proximity for path-to-purchase, retail media for closing the loop.
If retail media is on your 2026 plan, or about to be, we’d love to help you map it against the wider buy.
Book a free planning consultation with the Hurst Media Agency team
Drop us an email to buying@hurstmediaagency.com or call us at 020 3478 6017.
