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As retail media continues its rapid growth in Australia, senior industry leaders warn that brands are falling short by failing to integrate it into broader omnichannel strategies.
While investment is up, many marketers are still treating retail media as a standalone channel, leading to missed opportunities in both performance and brand building.
Bench Media CEO Ori Gold said the most common issue is structural.
“Organisational silos. Too many brands still treat trade and marketing as separate activities,” he told AdNews.
“The result? Performance-heavy retail media with no real brand alignment, or worse, it’s left to the sales team with no input from media or marketing.”
Gold pointed to Nestlé as an example of best-in-class integration.
“They’ve integrated retail media into their strategy as a real-time performance engine that informs the rest of their brand and media mix,” he said.
Stefanie Morrison, commerce lead in Melbourne at Kinesso, agreed.
“By treating retail media as merely a tactical tool rather than integrating it with broader marketing strategies, brands are missing a crucial opportunity,” she told AdNews.
John Georgas, co-founder of Retail Media Works, said too many marketers are “trying to work fast instead of working smart".
"The mistake we most commonly see is proper planning,” he said.
“Too often brands aren't aligning their trade and marketing budgets (and objectives) early enough to make the best use of true objective led omnichannel execution, it's often a case of left hand doing X and right hand doing Y.”
Australia’s retail media sector has seen dramatic expansion in both infrastructure and investment.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Australia reports that retail media’s share of media and marketing budgets rose from 26% in 2023 to 37%, underlining the channel’s escalating strategic importance.
Morgan Stanley forecasted that retail media spending on owned and operated platforms in Australia is expected to nearly triple, from around $1 billion in 2022 to $2.8 billion by 2027, reflecting retailer and advertiser confidence in the channel’s potential to engage shoppers.
That confidence is playing out in real terms. Major retailers continue to invest heavily in expanding their media capabilities.
Woolworths’ Cartology and Coles 360 remain dominant forces in the market, but they are now joined by a wave of new entrants, including Bunnings’ Hammer Media, Officeworks, Adore Beauty and Commonwealth Bank’s Connect network.
Bunnings has rolled out over 300 in-store LED screens across 150 stores since launching Hammer Media in early 2025, offering advertisers a blend of in-store digital inventory, eDMs, and off-site media integrations.
Managing director Michael Schneider said the network offers “another channel for suppliers to connect with customers".
Marketing-Interactive and PwC estimate the hardware and home improvement segment alone could be worth $2.8 billion annually, positioning Bunnings as a major new player.
Officeworks is following suit, expanding its in-store digital footprint to 170 locations via a multi-year agreement with oOh!media’s Reo platform.
The digital screens, placed at point-of-sale and high-traffic areas, aim to serve both supplier and brand messaging.
The move aligns Officeworks with other Wesfarmers businesses, including Bunnings and Kmart, which are actively leveraging owned media assets.
Financial services are entering the fray, too.
Commonwealth Bank has launched CommBank Connect, a retail media network operating across more than 660 branches and up to 2,000 digital screens.
The platform uses transactional data to target high-intent categories such as travel, retail, and telecommunications.
Elsewhere, non-traditional players like Australia Post are exploring media opportunities across their physical networks, while Adore Beauty and Petbarn have joined the retail media race.
This expansion has led to a more fragmented landscape.
According to the IAB and Pureprofile’s Retail Media State of the Nation 2025 report, 77% of brands are now using three or more retail media networks, up from 58% just a year prior.
Despite this activity, the same report flags persistent pain points, particularly around standardisation and measurement.
“To fully unlock the potential of this channel, the industry needs shared frameworks, clear measurement principles and greater transparency across networks… establishing consistency is what allows innovation to scale,” said IAB CEO Gai Le Roy.
The study found that 35% of budgets now come from reallocated funds, often pulled from trade marketing, while 19% stem from new investment.
Yet marketers still cite difficulty in measuring return on investment.
The lack of shared metrics complicates comparisons across fragmented ecosystems.
“Return on investment continues to be the number one challenge,” the report detailed.
“There is a growing need for consistency in metrics, especially as media buyers work across a fragmented mix of retailer platforms and data ecosystems.”
Retail Media Council chair Lachlan Brahe said the report provides a clear picture for the sector.
“Moving into its third year, this report demonstrates growth and enthusiasm for retail media whilst reminding us where we, collectively, need to lift our game,” he said.
Georgas said marketers need to reframe retail media as a full-funnel tool.
“When done properly it can be leveraged to achieve or support all marketing objectives, from awareness and customer acquisition to conversion and performance,” he said.
“It’s truly omnichannel, and as you can see from global trends, growing at pace.”
Both Gold and Morrison pointed to recent brand activations that showcase what’s possible when retail media is aligned with broader strategies.
Gold highlighted The House of Robert Timms campaign, combining Coles sales data with DOOH and digital to drive both awareness and sales.
“The results showed solid uplifts in awareness, intent and sales, proving retail media can deliver both brand and performance when it’s part of a joined-up strategy,” he said.
Morrison cited Goodman Fielder’s Helga’s campaign as a model for synergy between brand and performance.
“Retail media played a pivotal role in connecting brand awareness with performance, ensuring consumers received the right communication at the right moment,” she said.
Georgas added that creativity plays a key role in elevating retail media beyond a conversion-only tactic.
“It’s about how you use the assets. In-store, for example, can be a great salience driver if used correctly,” he said.
“Using in-store assets just for pack and price won’t move the needle, using them in a creative way to create a memorable footprint for the brand can.”
Retailers, for their part, are actively investing in innovations to enhance impact.
The increasing use of digital infrastructure, from CommBank’s data-driven targeting to Bunnings' in-store screens and Adore Beauty’s integration of digital and physical touchpoints via Zitcha, suggests a move toward more sophisticated, hybrid models.
Measurement also remains a focal point.
The IAB reports that 78% of respondents prioritise ROAS, while 71% are now focused on incremental sales, indicating a maturing mindset.
“Incrementality is the metric that matters,” Gold said.
“Total sales or ROAS can be misleading without test and control groups.”
Georgas said the Australian market still has room to evolve in format sophistication.
“There has been a prolific rise in the use of retail media over the last three years, and a significant rise in the type of formats,” he said.
“Australia still has headroom to greatly increase the sophistication of these formats, which will in turn see greater utilisation.”
Co-founder of Retail Media Works, Jon Harding said adding agility and internal collaboration is vital.
“We work with brands and agencies alongside ad-serving tech providers, data management providers and all manner of publishers to ensure an omnichannel canvas is accessible and effective as the industry grows,” he told AdNews.
“Brands that collaborate both internally and externally and those who can be agile, will win.”
Supporting this momentum, PwC’s Retail & Consumer Deals Digest (June 2025) highlights rising consumer confidence and a favourable retail environment for experimentation and investment.
The digest also points to industry consolidation and cross-sector partnerships as catalysts for further innovation.
Broad industry trends reinforce the urgency of integration and innovation.
PwC’s Entertainment & Media Outlook 2023 underlines that shifts in advertising spend are reshaping the media landscape, with retail media emerging as a major growth driver amid evolving consumer behaviours and digital adoption.
As Australia’s retail media market grows at 4.6 times the pace of the US and is forecast to exceed $3 billion by 2027, experts agree that the leaders in this space will be those who embed retail media into cohesive, omnichannel marketing strategies, not those who treat it as a siloed tactic.
“Retail media is going to keep growing, but there’s still work to do,” Gold said.
Morrison said that the more integrated retail media becomes, the more powerful it will be.
“It’s not just retail media anymore, it’s media,” Morrison said.
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