Retail media

Make retail media easier to plan, compare and measure across networks with consistent data, reporting and measurement.

What it is

A retail media network is a retailer operating as a media owner. In Australia the major grocery and pharmacy retailers have all built one, and the category has extended well beyond supermarkets into marketplaces, department stores and specialty retail.

Inventory typically spans three tiers: on-site sponsored placements within search and browse, on-site display, and off-site activation where the retailer’s audience data is used to buy across the open web, social or CTV. The measurement, tooling and transparency available differ substantially between the three, and between networks.

Why it matters

Retail media has become one of the fastest-growing lines in most consumer advertising budgets, and it has grown faster than the governance around it. Spend is frequently negotiated as part of a trade agreement rather than planned as media, which means it can sit outside the measurement framework applied to everything else.

The other pressure is proliferation. Each network runs its own auction, its own attribution windows, its own reporting definitions and its own taxonomy. A brand active across four retailers is running four incompatible measurement systems, and nothing reconciles them by default.

What Louder does

Network evaluation - what each network actually offers on targeting, transparency, reporting and off-site reach, assessed rather than accepted.
Measurement normalisation - attribution windows, conversion definitions and taxonomies mapped to a common standard so networks can be compared.
Incrementality testing - holdout and geo design to establish what retail media added, rather than what it captured.
Data integration - retailer reporting brought into the warehouse alongside the rest of the media dataset.
Trade and media alignment - bringing spend negotiated commercially into the same planning and measurement framework as the rest of the budget.

Common challenges

Comparing networks on unnormalised numbers. Different lookbacks, different conversion definitions, different view-through treatment. Ranking networks on reported ROAS ranks their attribution generosity.
Trade spend outside the media framework. Budget agreed in a commercial negotiation never enters planning, so total investment in a channel is unknown and its efficiency is never assessed.
No incrementality evidence. Retail media is one of the easiest channels to test with geo or category holdouts, and one of the least frequently tested, usually because the reported numbers already look good.
Off-site treated as on-site. Off-site activation using retailer data is open-web buying with the same supply path and quality questions as any other programmatic. The retailer’s brand on the invoice does not change that.