Why identity is the engine behind retail media outcomes​

Retail media is becoming more competitive, and that shifts the expectations placed on brands and agencies. When most retailers can offer onsite inventory, the real difference lies in whether campaigns can reliably reach genuine buyers and demonstrate which activity influenced sales, rather than simply reporting clicks.

What IDC highlights

In Identity Drives End-to-End Retail Media Outcomes, IDC analyst Ananda Chakravarty outlines how person-level identity underpins precision targeting, closed-loop measurement and scaled activation across channels and formats. It separates networks that are limited to retargeting site visitors from those able to extend reach across the full customer journey.

Why the timing matters

Many retail media networks are encountering the same constraint. Data quality and accessibility are becoming the bottleneck, with IDC’s research identifying “data issues” as the leading challenge at 36.2%. Without strong identity foundations, teams end up spending more time stitching together customers, channels and transactions than improving campaign performance.

Where momentum is building

The report also points to the next phase of growth in-store, where almost four in five retail purchases still take place. Robust identity infrastructure, paired with AI-driven decisioning to interpret fragmented signals, is what enables genuine omnichannel attribution and practical optimisation rather than theoretical ambition.

Download the whitepaper to explore what delivering true end-to-end retail media actually involves, along with the key questions worth considering before investment increases.