Retail media in Australia and New Zealand is growing quickly, but its next phase will depend on how effectively the market can move past uneven maturity, operational friction and unanswered measurement questions.
As a partner of NORA’s 2026 State of Play report, Criteo had the opportunity to examine these challenges through input from more than 60 brands, retailers and practitioners across the market. The report offers a clear snapshot of where the market stands today and what retailers need to address as they build more mature, measurable and scalable retail media businesses.
In this blog post, we look at three findings from the report and what they mean for retail media marketers looking to unlock the next stage of growth in ANZ.
Measurement must move beyond ROAS
Measurement remains one of the ANZ market’s defining challenges. Across survey groups and interview cohorts, it emerged as the most consistent constraint on future growth, with the industry increasingly aligned that attribution and ROAS alone are no longer enough.
Retail media is now expected to answer a more commercially important question: whether the media drove genuinely incremental growth. That expectation is rising because retail media increasingly serves multiple audiences at once. Trade teams may want sell-through and distribution proof, while marketing and agency teams want incrementality, brand impact and full-funnel performance. Yet many retailers are still trying to serve these needs through a single measurement framework.
From a Criteo perspective, ROAS remains a useful baseline, but it can’t deliver the proof of incrementality that brands, agencies, and CFOs now require.
That’s why measurement needs to evolve beyond isolated platform reporting toward more transparent, credible and comparable frameworks. The networks that build confidence will be the ones that can connect exposure to outcomes with greater rigour, bring together online and in-store signals where possible, and provide metrics that stand up against the same scrutiny applied to other media channels.
Incrementality should not be treated as a future enhancement. It needs to sit at the core of retail media measurement if the category is going to attract larger and more durable budgets.
Agency activation is the next growth lever
NORA’s findings make clear that, in ANZ, retail media still often sits structurally outside the agency ecosystem. It is frequently briefed too late, bought differently and measured separately from the rest of the media plan, leaving it adjacent to broader planning rather than fully integrated within it.
Agencies are also often brought into the conversation after creative and budget decisions have already been made. That makes retail media harder to operationalise within standard workflows and means agency budgets remain underrepresented.
From a Criteo standpoint, agency activation is one of the clearest levers for unlocking incremental budgets beyond reallocated trade spend. Retail media will scale faster when brands and agencies can brief, buy and measure it without having to work around bespoke processes or unfamiliar reporting standards.
That means retail media networks increasingly need to operate more like media owners, with stronger analytics, transparent data, accredited media and better integration into broader planning and activation workflows.
As retail media becomes easier to compare, easier to activate and easier to measure alongside other channels, it becomes a more natural destination for broader brand and media budgets, rather than simply absorbing spend that already existed inside retailer relationships.
Reducing friction will unlock larger budgets
The report also indicates that demand is not the limiting factor for market growth. Media buyer appetite already exceeds what many retailers are equipped to service, particularly across early and mid-stage operators where the real constraints are resourcing, workflow maturity, data integration and internal coordination.
This is closely connected to another key finding: ANZ is not one market moving through a single maturity curve. Some retailers are still determining whether retail media should exist as a dedicated function, while others are already dealing with oversubscribed demand, advanced measurement needs and growing non-endemic revenue.
At the same time, much of the market’s recent growth has come from formalising existing trade and brand investment, with truly incremental advertiser budgets typically appearing only once stronger measurement and commercial foundations are in place.
From what we’re seeing, operational simplicity will become a major competitive advantage as brands spread investment across more retail media networks. The challenge is not simply building more technology. It is removing the friction that slows activation, optimisation, reporting and decision-making across fragmented ecosystems.
Retailers need to meet media buyers where they already work, through self-service tools, APIs and other workflow integrations that make campaigns easier to run and easier to scale. The opportunity is not to give up control, but to reduce complexity while preserving pricing, inventory, shopper experience and direct commercial relationships.
The retailers that simplify operations most effectively will be best positioned to unlock larger, more incremental budgets, rather than simply reshuffling spend already in market.
The bottom line
The NORA research makes one thing clear: the next phase of retail media growth in ANZ will not be driven by inventory expansion alone. It will be shaped by better measurement, stronger agency integration and lower operational friction. Retailers that can make retail media easier to prove, easier to buy and easier to scale will be in the strongest position to attract the next wave of investment.
