Retail Media Operating Model Explained: How to Turn Retail Media Into a Business
A retail media operating model is the system that makes it easy for brand clients to buy the right media, and easy for your organisation to deliver good value. Repeatedly, sustainably and at scale.
It isn't an org chart. It isn't a technology stack. And it isn't a list of media assets with prices.
Most retailers don't have one, and it's the main reason I see retail media growth stall. They're running retail media as a project - or a product programme - and wondering why it isn't scaling.
They've formed a small team. Bought the technology. Launched sponsored products. Added more inventory. Set a revenue target.
And then wonder why the revenue doesn't follow.
My view is simple: retail media needs to be run like a business, with the customer at the centre.
I've spent half a decade working on this problem: building and scaling retail media businesses, developing propositions and commercial models, working with product and technology teams, supporting sales organisations and helping different parts of the machine work together.
Here's what I've learned about what it really takes to make retail media work.
1. Start with why
Before deciding what to sell, decide why you are building retail media at all. "£50m of retail media revenue" is a target. It isn't a strategy.
You need a clear view of what retail media is supposed to create for three groups, such as:
Retail customers: more relevant experiences, useful discovery and better products or offers.
Media customers (brand partners): measurable business outcomes, better customer understanding and access to audiences they value.
The retail business: incremental, sustainable revenue and margin, stronger supplier relationships and better use of customer data and assets.
Those things should reinforce each other. What I've seen too often is a retailer jumping from "there is money in retail media" straight to a revenue ambition without doing the work underneath it.
2. Give someone real ownership
Retail media cuts across commercial, marketing, ecommerce, data, technology, finance and operations. That means it needs someone senior enough to have a mandate, make decisions and be accountable for the whole business.
Not an ecommerce director who has it as a side project. Not a product leader whose main objective is launching technology. Not a committee where everyone owns a piece but nobody owns the outcome.
It’s not just organisational; it’s commercial. The owner doesn't need to do everything. They do need to make sure the right things are being done by the right people. That includes strategy, commercial performance, proposition, product and technology priorities, capability and ways of working.
When nobody has clear ownership, decisions get slower, priorities compete, and problems bounce between teams. Eventually the leadership involved spend more of their time dealing with noise and refereeing than building the business.
3. Design the commercial model intentionally
One of the most common assumptions in retail media is: "The commercial team already has the supplier relationships. They can sell retail media."
No doubt, the commercial organisation has an incredibly important role. It understands the supplier, the category and the broader commercial relationship. It can open doors and help position retail media within the wider partnership. And retail media can help them grow their categories. But selling advertising is a different discipline from negotiating a trade agreement.
Retail media needs dedicated expertise. The retail media team needs to understand advertiser objectives, identify opportunities, build proposals, package products, price them, manage a pipeline and ultimately be accountable for revenue growth. That takes a lot of time. How many buyers would say they have enough hours in the day to keep up with their supplier base as it is?
The commercial and retail media teams should work closely together, for sure. They should not necessarily do the same job.
I've seen first hand why this distinction matters.
In one country, retail media revenue suddenly jumped just before a visit from HQ. It looked like the team had had a great month. I got curious. The commercial team had gone to a handful of friendly suppliers and moved some of their existing investment out of price promotions into retail media. The retail media number went up. But the supplier wasn't spending more. The team had simply moved money from one column to another.
I don't blame the team. Retail media was new, they had targets to hit, and this was the easiest lever available to them.
But it taught me an important lesson: Reclassifying supplier spend is not a sales strategy. You need a commercial model designed to create genuine demand for the media.
And that means proper sales management too - something that is considered far less than technology or measurement. You need target accounts, category plans, revenue targets, weighted pipeline, forecasting, account development and regular intervention when performance isn't where it needs to be.
4. Sell to the people who actually own the budget
Budget often sits in fragments across shopper marketing, brand, ecommerce, digital marketing, performance marketing. And there may also be a media agency responsible for most of this.
So, the operating model needs to connect the retail media business with the wider ecosystem around the brand. That means understanding who actually buys, what they are trying to achieve and how they make investment decisions. And it means meeting them where they are.
Don't make the national account manager sit through a lecture on your retail media technology.
Be ready for the person with a brand budget to question why they should pay a premium for your audience vs the rates they get on Google / Meta.
Understand their objectives and show them how your proposition can help.
The best retail media organisations make it easy for the advertiser to buy because they've done the work to understand why that advertiser would want to buy in the first place.
5. Build a proposition, not an inventory catalogue
A retail media proposition is not:
Homepage banner: £X
Sponsored Products: £Y
Email: £Z
That's an inventory list. A good proposition starts with the advertiser: What are they trying to achieve? Who are they trying to reach? What does success look like? What combination of audience, insight, media and measurement is most likely to help?
That requires clear inventory, transparent pricing, defined audiences, relevant case studies and benchmarks, sales materials, media guidelines and clear rules around discounts and added value.
It also requires discipline about what not to sell.
I've watched teams lean on one flagship placement while better performing options were ignored - because they were more comfortable with what they knew, and every asset they added made the proposition harder to sell, not easier.
Sometimes the biggest opportunity is simply selling more of what already exists.
And more inventory doesn't automatically mean more revenue, something I underestimated massively when I first started out. If you haven't built the capability to sell what you already have, adding another ten media assets may just create ten more things for everyone to be confused about.
As retail media increasingly spans on-site, in store and off-site, being able to support multi-channel activation is becoming critical. And under the hood, that is no small feat.
6. Build the delivery engine
The buying and delivery experience matters more than many retailers realise.
A campaign should move through a clear process:
Brief → proposal → booking → activation → optimisation → measurement
<Insert image here of this in a loop>
Everyone should know:
who does what
how inventory availability is checked
how campaigns are approved
who gets them live
who optimises them, and how
how results are shared
what happens when something doesn't fit the standard process
The advertiser shouldn't have to understand your internal organisation to get something done.
Good operating models create processes that are clear, repeatable and governable.
And once those processes work, they can be automated. That's where some of the current innovation in retail media operations is interesting, increasingly using AI: turning insights and briefs into campaign plans, checking inventory availability or that assets meet guidelines, audience modelling, automating repetitive campaign setup or optimisation and speeding up the journey from lead to close. Standardise first. Automate second. It's one of the ways a good operating model scales.
7. Make measurement part of the product
This is where I think retailers sometimes get the sequence wrong.
Measurement shouldn't only be something that happens after the campaign. Measurement is part of the offer. For media connected to commerce, measurement is the whole point. Being able to identify a person from exposure to purchase, and being able to understand purchase behaviour - that is exactly what makes retail media unique and why brands are paying increasing amounts of attention, and their budgets, to it.
Before a brand buys, it should understand:
what success looks like
what will be measured
how it will be measured
what can and cannot be proven
how the results can inform future investment
The retailer also needs measurement to understand its own business.
Which advertisers are spending?
On what?
Which products and placements are driving revenue?
Which categories are growing?
Where is inventory under-utilised?
Where is there capacity to grow?
What is genuinely incremental?
Without that information, sales are dependent on gut feel. You can't build a credible growth plan if you don't know what's driving your current revenue.
And you can't build a sustainable advertiser relationship if the brand doesn't trust the evidence you're giving it.
The goal isn't to produce the biggest possible ROAS number. It's to provide credible evidence of business value. Because retail media only becomes a sustainable revenue stream if brands have a reason to invest again.
8. Build the organisation and capability around it
Good people can compensate for a weak operating model for a surprisingly long time.
They shouldn't have to.
Retail media needs dedicated resource, clear roles and responsibilities, agreed ways of working, capability building and a talent pipeline.
If you're serious about building a £50m+ retail media business, you can't assume the organisation already contains all the skills you need.
You may need to develop people internally. You may need to hire from outside. And you may need to build capabilities that don't currently exist in the business - particularly around advertising sales, media planning, measurement, data and client servicing.
You also need clear "contracts" between teams.
Who owns the supplier relationship?
Who sells?
Who sets strategy?
Who approves creative?
Who gets campaigns live?
Who owns the technology roadmap?
Who handles exceptions?
Who is accountable when something goes wrong?
If those aren't clear, people will be forced to work things out for themselves, ad hoc. That's when friction rubs.
What I actually put in place at Delivery Hero
At Delivery Hero, we were building a retail media business across multiple markets. The scale was significant, but the interesting part wasn't the headline revenue number.
It was the machinery underneath it.
We started with a clear north star:
Help brand partners grow through data, insights and media.
I built a central team around that ambition and established dedicated product leadership and technology capacity.
We developed a multi-year product roadmap, prioritising sponsored products first, then display and eventually offsite. Negotiated a technology partnership with CitrusAd, worked with markets on adoption and launch plans, developed pricing guidance, sales materials, FAQs and supplier education.
We ran webinars and workshops so local teams understood not just how the technology worked, but how to sell it. We developed growth plans with markets, set revenue targets and commitments, tracked performance monthly and intervened when markets were underperforming.
We built insights and performance benchmarks, developed propositions and business cases, ran bootcamps to share best practice and supported local teams in supplier conversations and quarterly business reviews.
But we didn't centralise everything.
Markets owned the customer. They owned sales, supplier relationships, local proposals, contracts, campaign delivery, reporting, case studies and local growth plans.
The central team provided the infrastructure, product, frameworks, tools, support and consistency that made those things easier to do well.
This split was important: you don't enable global scale by putting everything in the centre. You do it by being deliberate about what benefits from centralisation and what needs to stay close to the customer.
The simplest test
There is a surprisingly simple way to test whether a retailer has a fit-for-purpose retail media operating model.
Ask: Could a new person join tomorrow and understand how to sell, execute and report on the media?
Could they understand:
what you're selling
who you're selling it to
how it is priced
what they can promise
who does what internally
how campaigns go live
how performance is measured
how revenue is tracked
where to go when something doesn't fit the standard process
If the answer is no, you probably don't have an operating model yet.
And if all the knowledge lives in one person's head, you don't have a scalable business. You have a big risk.
From project to business
Running retail media as a business doesn't mean making it unnecessarily complicated. It means making complexity manageable.
A summary of what it takes:
A real owner with a real mandate.
A clear business purpose and growth plan.
A deliberate commercial model.
A proposition that solves advertiser problems.
Sales management.
Straightforward operations.
Technology and measurement that support the business.
The capability and talent to keep the whole thing moving.
And, perhaps most importantly: decisions that actually get made.
Retail media doesn't become a business because you launch an ad product.
It becomes a business when the organisation around that product is designed to make it work: commercially, operationally and repeatedly.
Retail media isn't a project. It's a business.
If you're trying to work out what needs to change between where your retail media business is today and where you want it to be, that's the work I do with retailers. Get in touch with Tara Carroll.
FAQs
What is a retail media operating model?
A retail media operating model is the system that makes it easy for brand clients to buy the right media, and easy for your organisation to deliver good value - repeatedly, sustainably and at scale. It isn't an org chart, a technology stack, or a list of media assets with prices. It's the machinery around the ad product: who owns it, who sells it, how the proposition is built, how campaigns are delivered and how performance is measured.
What is retail media?
Retail media is the ecosystem that allows brands to reach shoppers using a retailer's first-party data and media inventory - on their website, app, in-store, and across the wider web. For retailers, it's a high-margin revenue stream built on data and audience they already own. See more detail on what retail media is here.
Is retail media a project or a business?
A business. It doesn't become a business the moment you launch an ad product - it becomes one when the organisation around that product is designed to make it work commercially, operationally and repeatedly.
Why does retail media revenue stall?
Retail media usually stalls because it's being run as a project or a product programme rather than as a business. A retailer forms a small team, buys the technology, launches sponsored products and sets a revenue target - but without a real owner, a deliberate commercial model and a proposition that solves advertiser problems, the revenue doesn't follow. The missing piece is almost always the operating model, not the ad product.
Who should own retail media inside a retail organisation?
This is one of the most common and consequential questions. Retail media sits at the intersection of commercial, marketing, data, and technology - which means it often ends up owned by nobody, or contested by several teams. The most effective structure is a dedicated retail media function with a single accountable leader, clear mandate from the CEO or CCO, and defined handshakes with category, marketing and tech. Without this, retail media almost always stalls.
Can the existing commercial team sell retail media?
Not on its own. The commercial team understands the supplier, the category and the wider relationship, and it can open doors, but selling advertising is a different discipline from negotiating a trade agreement. Retail media needs dedicated expertise to understand advertiser objectives, package and price products, manage a pipeline and be accountable for revenue. The two teams should work closely together; they shouldn't do the same job.
How do you know if your retail media operating model is working
Ask one question: could a new person join tomorrow and understand how to sell, execute and report on the media - what you're selling, who to, how it's priced, what they can promise, how campaigns go live and how performance is measured? If the answer is no, you don't have an operating model yet. And if all that knowledge lives in one person's head, you don't have a scalable business; you have a big risk.