Retail media is Australia's fastest-growing ad channel, forecast to hit A$2.3 billion in 2026 and overtake TV by 2028. Filip Ivankovic argues that chasing a channel because it tops the growth charts is a herd, not a strategy. Most businesses piling in have not fixed the fundamentals that make any channel work, and the networks selling retail media are the ones grading their own homework on what it delivered.
Adding retail media to a business that cannot see its own numbers is not a strategy. It is a hope. Hope is not a channel.
I have spent years on both sides of this table. Client side, where the CFO wants to know what the money bought. Agency side, where the incentive is to sell you the shiny new thing because the shiny new thing is where the margin is. So when I watch every retailer in the country stand up a media network and every business owner scramble to buy into it, I know exactly what is happening. It is not strategy. It is a herd.
Retail media is now the fastest-growing advertising channel in Australia. Coles has 360. Woolworths has Cartology. Amazon, Chemist Warehouse, Endeavour Group, all of them building shopfronts to sell ads back to the brands that sell through them. The money is flooding in. Here is the thing though. It is flooding in because the channel is growing, not because the businesses buying it have done the work to know it will pay.
That is the worst reason in the world to put your capital somewhere.
Fastest-growing is not the same as best for you
Let me say the quiet part out loud. The fact that a channel is topping the growth charts is a reason to be careful, not a reason to pile in. A fast-growing channel is a crowded channel. A crowded channel is a rising-cost channel. Every dollar that floods in bids the price of the next dollar up. You are not early. You are late, and you are paying the late-arrival tax.
WPP Media has the total Australian ad market hitting A$31.1 billion in 2026, up 7.4%. Retail media is the standout, forecast to reach A$2.3 billion and grow 19.5%, on track to overtake total TV advertising by 2028. Those are real numbers and they are impressive. But a growth chart tells you where the money is going. It does not tell you whether the money is working.
Retail media in Australia is forecast to hit A$2.3 billion in 2026, up 19.5%, the fastest-growing ad channel in the market (WPP Media)
If everyone zigs, you have got to zag. That is not contrarianism for its own sake. It is arithmetic. When every business in your category is chasing the same channel, the channel gets expensive and your edge disappears. The businesses that win are the ones fishing where the others are not, or fishing so well in one channel that they own it.
Sprinkles on a cake you have not baked
Most of the businesses piling into retail media right now have not fixed the fundamentals that make any channel work. A shiny channel does not fix a broken business. It just puts sprinkles on the cake.
We have scored the Australian market. We have measured how businesses across the country actually perform, not how they say they perform. The pattern is brutal. Most of them cannot see their own numbers. Their shopfront leaks. They are running a mobile experience that loses a fifth of their revenue before a customer even reaches the checkout. They do not know the margin on the products they are bidding to promote.
So they buy retail media. Because it is new, because it is growing, because the retailer's sales rep told them it converts.
Here is what should scare you. If you cannot see what your website does with a thousand visitors, you cannot see what a retail media campaign does with them either. You are flying blind into a more expensive channel. The waste does not shrink. It grows, and it grows faster because the channel is dearer.
Every channel is a chess piece
Think about channels the way you would think about pieces on a board. Every one of them only moves a certain way. Search catches demand that already exists. Social builds it. Retail media sits right at the point of purchase, next to the trigger, which is genuinely powerful for the right product. But it is one piece. It does not do everything, and it is not free to move.
The three-part commercial test I run on every channel is simple. Does it make volume? Does it make margin? Or does it keep the regulators happy? If retail media does not do one of those three things for your specific business, I am not sure why you are doing it. Not because it is a bad channel. Because it is the wrong piece for your position on the board.
A grocery brand fighting for shelf placement in Coles has a real case. Retail media puts the ad next to the buy button for exactly the customer who is already reaching for the category. That is a piece that moves. A B2B software business bidding on the same channel because the growth chart looked good is moving a piece that cannot get to the square it needs.
They are grading their own homework
There is one more thing that should give you pause, and it is the part the sales pitch will not mention. The networks selling you retail media are the same networks reporting on how it performed. They own the shelf, they sell the ad and they mark the result. That is grading their own homework.
When the party taking your money is also the party measuring your return, you do not have measurement. You have marketing dressed as measurement. The attractors will all say they are doing a really good job. They are incentivised to do that. The margin sitting inside these networks is going to come out of hiding, and when it does, a lot of businesses are going to realise the reported return and the real return were never the same number.
You would not let a supplier audit their own invoice. Do not let a media network audit its own performance.
What I would do about it
Do not start with the channel. Start with the numbers.
Do you know how much money you make? Do you know how much money you spend? Do you know the margin on the specific products you are about to promote? If the answer to any of those is no, retail media is not your next move. Fixing your shopfront and your tracking is your next move. Get those right and every channel you touch afterwards works harder, including this one.
Then run the test. If retail media makes volume, margin or keeps a regulator happy for your business, buy it deliberately, with your own measurement wrapped around it so you are not relying on the network's scorecard. Track it against a channel you turned off. If you pulled a channel and nothing changed, you learned something. If you added retail media and your real margin did not move, you learned something too. Either way you are getting cleverer.
Keep a little in your back pocket. You do not need to bet the budget on the channel everyone is talking about. Scale when you know. Scale back when you do not.
The channel that fits, not the channel that trends
Retail media is going to keep growing. It will pass TV, the money will keep pouring in and the case studies will keep landing in your inbox. None of that is a reason for you to be in it. The reason to be in a channel is that it fits your business, your customer and your numbers.
Pick the piece that moves the way your business needs it to move. Not the one topping the charts. The businesses that win the next five years will not be the ones who chased the fastest-growing channel. They will be the ones who knew their own numbers well enough to buy the right one and ignore the rest.