IAB Finland organised the Retail Media Summit on 2 September 2026, bringing together a wide range of marketing professionals who work with or are interested in retail media. The day’s talks offered a diverse selection of current themes. At the same time, they also reflected certain tensions and contradictions in the Finnish retail media market. Dagmar’s retail media expert Mari Riipinen summed up her views on the day’s takeaways and the growth opportunities of retail media.

How should the role of retail media be defined – and who in the organisation is responsible for it?

Perhaps the most central of the tensions that emerged during the day relates to the role of retail media in the marketer’s toolbox. Although retail media players would very much like to position themselves as partners in brand marketing, advertisers still perceive retail media primarily as tactical activity that drives purchases. There are many reasons for this, and one of them is history.

The Finnish retail media field is dominated by grocery retail players, and the tactical marketing of FMCG brands in particular has for decades been built on various forms of trade marketing cooperation, such as in-store activities and promotional advertising. For this reason, investments in tactical marketing are in many companies classified as sales costs rather than marketing costs, and they are not necessarily included in the marketing organisation’s budgets.

The rise of retail media is breaking down this traditional division of labour. Indeed, several talks highlighted the need to dismantle the silos between sales and marketing. In its own way, these silos are also reflected in a finding of the Retail Media in Finland 2026 survey conducted by IAB Finland’s Retail Media working group: the use of retail media would increase if activities could be better connected to the brand’s other marketing.

I believe there are many significant opportunities for brand building in retailers’ channels, but so far retail media’s product offering provides hardly any solutions for executing impactful, emotionally engaging brand advertising. For example, the most interesting in-store media concepts are not in retail media organisations’ sales portfolios, at least not yet.

In-store vs. retail DOOH

Although the words brand and brand marketing were repeated many times in the talks, it was more tactical encounters along the consumer’s path to purchase, and especially in physical stores, that emerged as a particular strength of retail media. Alongside the survey conducted by the IAB working group, Aller Media’s ReTALE also published its Retail Media State & Trends survey during the day. According to both surveys, in-store media is by far the most interesting channel in Finland. A distinctive feature of Finnish retail media is the extensive in-store DOOH networks of grocery retail: in this respect, we are a pioneering market by international standards.

Several of the day’s presentations dealt with the interplay between in-store screens and DOOH encounters that take place during the shopping trip. Media agencies already treat in-store DOOH as part of the digital out-of-home ecosystem: chains of encounters close to the place and moment of purchase are built along consumers’ concrete paths to purchase by combining solutions offered by out-of-home media owners and retail media.

For FMCG brands, DOOH visibility close to the place and moment of purchase, for example in shopping centres and near grocery stores, can be highly effective, but a purist like me would hope that not every possible path-to-purchase encounter is branded as retail media – especially when it is not combined with the retailer’s (receipt) data. Interestingly, this kind of product offering was also launched during the day in a presentation by Rebl and Kesko.

Is Finland lagging behind the rest of the world in investment?

Several speakers pointed out that in Finland, retail media’s share of companies’ marketing budgets is considerably smaller than in more developed markets. Will Finland also soon be in a situation where 20% of brands’ media budgets go to retail media? Perhaps this is already the case for some brands, but in the bigger picture I don’t see this development as in any way self-evident or automatic.

Globally, the drivers of retail media have been the e-commerce giants, especially Amazon. The strongest driver of investment and its growth has been retail search, meaning sponsored search results in online stores and comparable visibility elements. The same development can also be seen in Europe: according to IAB Europe’s AdEx Benchmark 2025 report, retail search, which has grown clearly faster than the market, already represents 17.8% of the entire search advertising market and as much as 75% of digital retail media investment in Europe.

In Finland, the role of retail search in retail media has been rather modest. In practice, retail media has hardly yet reached the general merchandise business, and FMCG advertisers’ investments in search or performance marketing in general have never been particularly significant. Here, the drivers of market growth have had to be found elsewhere.

Growth is also slowed by the fact that planning roles and responsibilities are still in transition. At the moment, even small one-off investments in retail media require multi-stage communication and coordination, and small individual experiments do not generate enough clear lessons to guide future investments towards a more significant role for retail media. Both the IAB and the ReTALE surveys paint a picture in which retail media is perceived as laborious to buy and difficult to connect with other marketing. Standardisation, clarity of measurement and ease of buying emerge as areas for development.

The inspiring possibilities of data

Much more could have been said about data during the day, after all, high-quality first-party data, alongside encounters at the moment of purchase, is retail media’s undisputed strength. Previously, the greatest significance of data has been seen in verifying the sales impact of retail media investments. Now its possibilities are also recognised, for example, as a measure and a fuel for the success of product development and marketing communications – this is easy to get excited about! High-quality data naturally also comes with a price tag, so data investments are only worth making if the data is genuinely used and helps make better decisions.

The use of retailer data for targeting advertising in digital channels was hardly discussed in the day’s talks. It is possible that the role of retail media data in brand building will soon become absolutely central. For example, big-screen CTV advertising targeted with retailers’ data may become a key part of building awareness and brand image for FMCG brands. These solutions are not yet available in Finland, but the future may be closer than we think.

Not just for advertisers – and more than grocery retail

Retail media is not a single channel or medium but a diverse ecosystem. No other market has a uniform retail media offering either, and it would not be realistic to demand one. Retail media is not developed solely for the needs of advertisers, as a large share of retail media channels are media that retailers have built for their own customers, and they play a significant role in the retailer’s own marketing. In the words of Tokmanni’s Veli-Pekka Ääri: “The primary goal of our own media is to support our own business.”

The development of retail media in Finland has been characterised by the strong role of grocery retail players. Encouragingly, however, the event clearly wanted to remind us, through the talks by Vendi and Wolt, that retail media is more than grocery retail and that the concept has expanded to include players other than traditional retailers.

Interested in retail media? Get in touch, and we’ll help you create effective advertising!

References:

IAB Finlandin Retail media Suomessa 2026 -kyselytutkimus
ReTALE’s Retail Media State and Trends VOL 2 survey, order the report here: contact us; or by e-mail: retale@aller.fi