Conversations around retail media in the Middle East region are maturing – and fast. What was once discussed largely as an extension of shopper marketing or e-commerce is now causing brands to rethink budgets, operating models, measurement, data partnerships and even the way teams collaborate internally.
On the latest episode of Campaign Middle East’s On The Record podcast, Ghida Batal , Head of Consumer Experiences, Arla Foods ; Krinio Christaras , Head of Consumer Experiences – MENAP, Mondelēz International ; and Oliver Klander , Vice President – MENA Brands, LiveRamp discuss how retail media has evolved and where it is heading in the region.
Their message was clear: the opportunity is real, but the industry needs to develop a deeper understanding of retail media networks, build collaborative and sustainable pathways, and ensure strategic discipline if it is to avoid turning retail media into just another performance dashboard.
Retail media connects brand communication with shopper behaviour, and it gives marketers access to signals that were previously difficult to reach at scale. But like any fast-growing discipline, it also brings noise, confusion and a few old habits wearing new clothes.
While it’s true that the retail media landscape in the Middle East region has grown rapidly, it’s also true that the much of the market is still finding its feet. As more retailers, platforms and partners build their own ecosystems, marketers face a familiar challenge: how to avoid recreating the same fragmentation problems that already exist across digital media.
“Retail media as a discipline has come in the Middle East, specifically over the last 24 to 36 months. It’s stratospheric, it’s been at lightning speed,” says Oliver Klander , Vice President – MENA Brands, LiveRamp . “The advent of players such as Majid Al Futtaim with Carrefour, Alshaya, and other retail networks have brought something to the region that enables access to data to improve consumer experiences and efficiency of marketing.”
Klander argues that retail media has the chance to move the market towards more connected ways of working. While closed ecosystems will continue to exist, he sees more willingness to partner across categories, platforms and industries.
Klander adds, “Anything where a single platform or a single system exists is essentially a walled garden. Retail media has got an opportunity in this region to break that down. The next 12 to 18 months are going to see more significant and divergent collaborations across multiple brands, retailers and service providers from different industries, different protocols, and with potentially non-competing consumer packaged goods (CPGs) sharing insights and data together.”
The hard truth is that the old separated pieces don’t fit the new puzzle. For many organisations, retail media is creating an internal ownership question. Does it belong to trade, shopper, media or e-commerce? The answer, increasingly, is that it cannot be neatly parked in one corner of the business.
Ghida Batal , Head of Consumer Experiences, Arla Foods, explains that the traditional structure made sense when channels were clearly separated. But once retailers began offering both inventory and audience intelligence, the boundaries became much harder to maintain.
Batal says, “Historically, the trade team owns the trade budget, trade activity and the promotion. The shopper owns the shopper activation. And everything that lived on di…