In an AI world, creativity is retail media’s differentiator

Opinion – Week in Focus

Retail media turns creative effectiveness into a hard commercial case. You can confidently show a CFO exactly how a tailored, context-aware campaign drives proven results, writes Uber Advertising’s head of UKI restaurants.

There was once a time when retail media had to prove its value. Brands and agencies wanted to know that ad placements on shopping, delivery, and travel platforms could do more than just drive last-minute purchases.

Today, that debate has largely moved on. Retail media has established itself as a meaningful part of the media mix, supported by strong first-party data, growing advertiser demand, and improving measurement. In the UK, the latest IAB Digital Adspend Study shows retail media grew 18% year-on-year to £3.8bn.

The industry has matured, however, and the conversation is shifting. We are entering a new phase, defined by advancing AI integration and changing consumer search patterns.

AI has long been foundational to how retail media networks operate – optimising bidding strategies in milliseconds, hyper-personalising product discovery feeds, and finding the right audiences faster and more precisely. What’s changed is the broader landscape around them. Retail media networks are not alone in the AI race – the entire digital ecosystem is integrating these tools at the same pace.

For advertisers, this creates a paradox. The same technology that unlocks extraordinary precision is also making it more widely available. When every brand can access AI-driven targeting and guaranteed delivery efficiency, basic performance marketing becomes less of a differentiator in retail media.

The answer, increasingly, lies not in the plumbing, but in what flows through it: the quality of the creative.

The moment economy

To understand why, we need to look at how retail media is being used.

For years, the industry categorised digital behaviour in two ways: leaning back (watching Connected TV) or leaning in (scrolling through a social feed). But retail media (and AI search) operate in another state – we use these digital platforms to navigate the physical world, complete tasks, and facilitate our daily lives.

Attention functions differently in these environments. It is highly compressed and deeply intentional.

For example, when a consumer opens a retail app, a travel booking site, or an AI search platform, they aren’t there to browse passively; they’re usually there to get something done. Because their attention is fleeting and goal-oriented, you cannot simply interrupt their experience with a loud advertisement. You have to add value to it in the moment.

The death of the repurposed asset

This is where our industry has a bad habit to break. As retail media has scaled, too many brands have tried to reuse creative built for other environments, from banner ads to generic social cut-downs.

Imagine a busy parent doing their online grocery shop on a Friday evening. They are tired, time-poor, and focused on getting to the digital checkout. If a brand hits them with a generic, recycled banner ad featuring a smiling family, it simply registers as white noise.

But what if a brand uses the platform’s data to serve an interactive, contextually relevant format?

Imagine an ad that, when the local weather forecast turns sunny tomorrow, dynamically offers a one-click, shoppable ‘weekend BBQ bundle’. This is far more likely to grab attention because it offers genuine relevance, using the platform’s insight to deliver a message that matters in the moment.

Data-driven creativity

The winning formula for the next frontier of retail media is not a choice between science and art. It is the combination of both: using the rich data these platforms offer to build bespoke, context-aware creatives that actually earn their right to be on the screen.

Getting there requires a shift in how brands and their agency partners approach the channel.

Media and creative teams can no longer operate in silos. Historically, the creative was locked in weeks before the media was bought, leaving no room for adaptation. Today, that model no longer fits how the channel works.

Rather than treating retail media placements simply as an end destination, the best-performing brands and their agencies will treat them as an active environment for creative learning: testing formats, contexts, and messaging; iterating quickly; and letting data sharpen decision-making.

This is how bespoke campaigns get better and faster. The teams willing to treat each ad as a source of creative intelligence, not just a delivery mechanism, are the ones building a genuine competitive advantage.

Creativity you can measure

Crucially, the industry is now at a point where it can prove it.

When brands invest in interactive, contextually relevant creative within retail media environments, they do not just generate impressions – they drive physical, measurable action. The closed-loop measurement capabilities of mature retail media networks mean marketers can finally draw a direct line from brilliant creative execution to the sales it generates. 

Indeed, today’s retail media turns creative effectiveness into a hard commercial case. You can confidently sit in front of a CFO and show exactly how a tailored, context-aware campaign contributed more effectively than a static, repurposed asset.

What’s more, in a landscape where AI has commoditised targeting, this creativity is the differentiator.

The next phase of retail media growth will not be won by the brand with the most sophisticated bidding strategy, nor the one with the largest programmatic budget. It will be won by the advertisers that use data and context to make creativity work harder in the moments that matter.

Shane Buckley is the head of UKI restaurants at Uber Advertising