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Retail media ad spending is expected to reach €127 billion globally this year.
That number not only represents a 22% increase over 2023, it also reflects a 23% rise in the estimate we provided this past spring in our last European Retail Media Report Card. This segment of the commerce marketing landscape is growing too fast for even the forecasters to keep up.
Retail media isn’t just inescapable within the digital marketing industry right now (as we also noted in our last report), it has become a dominant topic of conversation within all circles of advertising. And despite Google’s recent reversal of plans to eliminate third-party cookies, retail media ad spending continues to grow rapidly as the number of networks across Europe continues to expand. IAB expects spending to climb 36% to €14.3 billion this year and rise at a similar pace to reach €25 billion by 2026 — and this even though only 50% of European buyers have worked with a retail media network in the past year, IAB finds.
These figures are, of course, increasing with good reason: retail media has become an incredibly powerful tool for brands to reach their target audience effectively: 90% of buyers are motivated by access to the retailer’s first-party data; 75% by the point-of-sale proximity, per IAB. By partnering with the right networks, brands can tap into a retailer’s customer base and gain access to valuable customer insights. This allows brands to deliver relevant, personalised marketing to shoppers, increasing the chances of driving conversion at the point of purchase.
As the market continues to grow and networks keep launching across Europe, the challenge for brands to determine the best investment opportunities becomes even more complex. Effectively evaluating the various opportunities can be difficult enough to manage for commerce marketers working within a single market — let alone for those whose remit runs across the entire region.
That’s because, when looking at retail media across Europe, each country is at a different level of maturity with its own pace of development, for a few reasons:
- The fragmented nature of Europe in general.
- The different shopping trends and habits in each country.
- The unique nature of brand and retailer relationships across the region.
For this third edition of Mars UnitedSM Commerce’s Retail Media Report Card Europe, we have added three more networks to our assessment: John Lewis Insights & Media in the UK, Valiuz Ads in France, and MC Sonae in Portugal — the last of which represents our initial coverage in a sixth European nation.
We also have added 19 more capabilities across four Key Performance Areas to the evaluation — most significantly introducing a distinct scorecard for the in-store and digital out of home opportunities that have become such an important element of each network’s offerings.
This report, along with its predecessor published by Mars United in the US, has been widely viewed by the industry as an effective tool for brands to compare retail media network capabilities and help determine where and how to allocate their investments. It has also played a part in helping retailers understand how they stack up against the competition and plan their future product roadmaps.
Those are our goals once again: to provide our clients with the valuable insights and recommendations needed to make the best, most informed investment decisions, and to help retailers in building the most effective capabilities roadmaps for their networks.
To further those objectives, this edition retains the in-depth analysis of strategies for picking the right network partners that we introduced last spring (see page 4), and a review of the “Table Stakes” capabilities that all networks should be offering (page 5). We also continue tracking the evolution of the marketplace by calling out the new capabilities each network has released since our spring Report Card (page 11). And we take a closer look at another emerging capability with transformative potential: the alignment of digital and in-store advertising opportunities (page 6).
We hope you enjoy this third European edition of Mars United’s Retail Media Report Card. We trust this report will become a key driver in helping your teams make informed decisions on their investments.
To download the Report Card, fill out the form below.
