There are few parts of New Zealand’s media industry younger than retail media. If the agencies involved were people, they would all be in kindergarten. The main players are Woolworths’ agency Cartology (a wizened three years old), Foodstuffs’ equivalent Precision Media (an 18-month-old toddler) and Marketmedia, which launched as The Warehouse’s unified retail media group in late 2022.
But what does ‘retail media’ actually mean? Sally Tobin, Managing Director ANZ at Mars United Commerce (formerly the Mars Agency), defines it as any form of media that is owned by the retailer themselves. “I think just defining it as ‘owned assets’ probably covers your in-store and out-of-store assets. When it comes to ʻsocial amplification, we just refer to that as their off-platform partnerships.”
The concept of retail media was pioneered globally by the likes of online retail giant Amazon, which realised the value of its huge customer base (and first-party data) to other advertisers. Tobin says New Zealand’s retail media sector is still in its infancy, but she picks it to have a “much more rapid evolution” than elsewhere in the world.
“That’s because they’ve taken a little bit of a different approach, in that a lot of the people running the media networks actually have
