Retail Media in South Africa:
The Complete Guide
Retail media is advertising that uses a retailer’s own first-party shopper data, browsing history, purchases, loyalty activity, to help brands reach real customers with precision. Instead of guessing who might be interested in a product, retail media lets brands target people who have already shown intent to buy, whether that’s on the retailer’s own website, on social platforms and search engines off-site, or through digital screens in-store.
For South African retailers, it’s a new revenue stream built from data they already own. For advertisers, it’s a way to reach shoppers who are closer to buying than any other audience they can target.
CONTENTS
01
What is retail media?
02
A brief history of retail media
03
How retail media works: for advertisers
04
How retail media works: for retailers
05
The three types of retail media
06
Retail media and marketing
07
How retail media is measured
08
Retail media in South Africa
09
Real results: retail media in action
10
Retail media vs commerce media
11
Frequently asked questions
12
Where to go next
13
Keep reading on Flow
What is retail media?
Retail media sits at the intersection of retail and advertising. A retailer, whether that’s an online store, a marketplace, or a chain with a loyalty programme, collects first-party data every time someone browses, searches, adds to cart, or buys. That data shows real purchase intent in a way that demographic or interest-based targeting never can.
One distinction is worth making early, because the two terms get used interchangeably and they aren't quite the same thing:
Retail media is the practice: a retailer selling advertising access built on its own shopper data. A retail media network is the thing a retailer builds in order to do it, the audience segments, the ad placements, and the systems that connect brand partners to shoppers. A retailer invests in retail media by launching a retail media network.
Retail media is the practice of turning that data into an advertising channel. Brands pay to reach the retailer’s shoppers, either on the retailer’s own platform (onsite) or across other channels using the retailer’s audience data (offsite). The retailer earns revenue from data it already owns, without having to change how its customers shop. The brand gets access to shoppers who have already shown they buy in the category, not people who merely fit a broad demographic profile.
This is what separates retail media from traditional digital advertising. A standard programmatic campaign targets people based on inferred interest, browsing patterns, lookalike modelling, third-party cookies where they still work. Retail media targets people based on what they’ve actually done: bought a product, browsed a category repeatedly, engaged with a loyalty programme. The signal is stronger because it’s behavioural, not assumed.
That’s also why retail media has grown faster than almost any other advertising channel. Retailers hold something advertisers have always wanted: proof of real purchase behaviour, at scale, tied to an identifiable shopper. Retail media is simply the mechanism that turns that data into a channel brands can plan and buy against.
A brief history of retail media
Retail media didn’t start as a distinct category. It began with sponsored product listings, the paid placements at the top of search results on a retailer’s own website or app, a model that large online marketplaces built into a significant advertising business well before most retailers thought of their own data as a media asset.
From there, the model expanded in two directions. Retailers started activating their first-party data beyond their own platforms, running campaigns on social media and programmatic channels using shopper data as the targeting layer. This is off-site retail media, and it’s where much of the category’s recent growth has come from. At the same time, in-store formats, digital shelf displays, kiosks, connected screens, brought the same data-driven precision into physical retail.
Today, retail media covers all three: onsite, offsite, and in-store. Each format uses the same underlying asset, a retailer’s first-party data, in a different environment.
How retail media works: for advertisers
If you’re a brand or an agency, retail media starts with a simple shift in mindset: stop targeting who you think your buyer is, and start targeting people who’ve already behaved like one.
In practice, that means booking access to a retailer’s first-party audience segments, shoppers who’ve bought a specific product, browsed a category repeatedly, or shown loyalty behaviour that signals high intent. Those segments get activated either on the retailer’s own site (onsite) or across the platforms where that retailer’s shoppers already spend time: Meta, Google, TikTok, and programmatic (offsite).
The mechanics vary by platform, but the logic is consistent. A retailer’s data identifies who’s likely to buy. That audience gets built into a segment. The brand activates a campaign against it, usually alongside its existing targeting rather than instead of it. The result is a layer of real purchase signal sitting underneath a campaign that would otherwise rely on inferred interest or lookalike modelling.
This is why retail media consistently outperforms standard targeting. Flow Platform’s own first-party data audiences have driven over 50% higher conversion rates than standard targeting across campaigns run through its Audience Marketplace, a gap that widens further for categories with strong purchase intent, like everyday essentials, beauty, liquor, and sports nutrition.
For an advertiser, the practical question isn’t whether to use retail media, it’s how precisely the audience can be built. That’s where the real variation sits. Every retailer runs its own process, its own data, and its own booking route, so a brand working across several is managing several relationships at once. And the sharpest campaigns rarely rest on a single audience: they combine signals, verified category buyers, proven premium spenders, high-frequency buyers in adjacent categories, into one audience built for the brief.
How retail media works: for retailers
If you’re a retailer, retail media is a way to generate revenue from data you already collect, without changing how your customers shop and without building an internal ad sales team.
The starting point is the data you already have: browsing behaviour, purchase history, loyalty activity, category and brand affinities. On its own, that data helps you run your business. Packaged into audience segments, it becomes something brand partners will pay to access, because it tells them exactly who’s likely to buy.
The mechanics are simpler than most retailers expect. A lightweight integration connects your first-party data to a retail media platform. That platform organises the data into audience segments, packages them for brand partners, and activates campaigns either on your own site and app (onsite) or across external platforms like Meta, Google, and TikTok using your audience data (offsite). You don’t need to hire an ad operations team, build ad tech, or manage campaigns yourself. Brand partners or their agencies run their own campaigns against your audiences.
Data protection isn’t an afterthought in this model, it’s the foundation of it. Retailers keep ownership of their data throughout. Brand partners access audience segments, not raw customer records, and the model is privacy-first by design, with consent and compliance controls built in at every step.
Flow’s retail media model works exactly this way: retailers connect their data, and brand partners activate audiences without either side needing to build new infrastructure. For a retailer, the commercial case is straightforward: audience data that’s currently generating no direct revenue can become a new, high-margin income stream. If you want to see what that looks like in practice, Flow’s retail media solution covers it in full.
The three types of retail media
Retail media formats fall into three categories, and most mature retail media strategies use more than one.
Onsite retail media
Onsite retail media is advertising that happens on the retailer’s own website or app: sponsored product listings, banners, category page placements, and search result promotions. It’s the format most people picture first, and for retailers with high site traffic, it’s often the easiest starting point. The shopper is already there, already shopping, and the ad sits directly in their path to purchase.
Off-site retail media
Off-site retail media is advertising that runs on media the retailer doesn’t own, targeted using the retailer’s first-party shopper data. The retailer supplies the audience; someone else supplies the inventory. That single difference is what separates it from onsite, where the retailer owns both.
Because the inventory belongs to third parties, the ad takes whatever form the destination platform supports. In practice that means paid social in feeds and stories, search and shopping ads, programmatic display and video, connected TV, and native placements on publisher sites. The audience segment is matched to the destination platform so the ads serve to the same verified shoppers, then the campaign runs like any other campaign on that platform, with the retailer’s data doing the targeting work underneath.
This is the format that’s grown fastest in recent years, and the reason is arithmetic. A retailer’s own site and app reach only the shoppers who visit in a given month. Those same shoppers spend most of their attention elsewhere, on social platforms, on search, in front of streaming services. Off-site is how a retailer’s audience follows them there.
For South African retailers in particular, off-site retail media is often the more commercially significant of the two formats. Flow’s own platform is built specifically for this: a retailer connects its first-party data, and brand partners activate audiences against it across the platforms their shoppers already use. There are two ways to buy, both from Flow’s Audience Marketplace. Booking a first-party audience directly means you choose the segment yourself and build the media plan around it. A campaign package is a retail partner’s own bundle of audience and media placement, already matched and priced by the partner.
In-store retail media
In-store retail media brings the same data-driven targeting into physical retail: digital shelf displays, kiosks, connected screens near checkout. It’s the least developed of the three formats in most markets, South Africa included, but it’s the natural extension of the model for retailers with a significant physical footprint alongside their digital presence.
Most retail media strategies don’t pick one format and stop there. A retailer with strong site traffic will often start onsite, then expand into off-site activation once they want to reach shoppers beyond their own platform. The formats aren’t competing with each other, they’re different environments for activating the same underlying asset: first-party data.
Retail media and marketing
Retail media doesn’t replace the rest of a brand’s marketing plan, it strengthens the part that’s hardest to get right: reaching people who are actually ready to buy.
Most media plans still lean heavily on demographic and interest-based targeting: reaching people who fit a broad profile, in the hope that some percentage converts. Retail media works differently. It targets people based on proven behaviour, what they’ve bought, browsed, or engaged with, which means the audience is smaller but far more likely to convert.
That’s why retail media tends to sit lower in the funnel than most other channels, closer to purchase, working alongside broader brand and awareness activity rather than replacing it. A brand running a broad social or programmatic campaign to build awareness can layer retail media audiences on top to reach people who’ve already shown category intent, tightening the path from impression to purchase.
The other shift retail media has driven in marketing budgets is where the money moves. As more advertising spend follows first-party data audiences, media plans are increasingly built around the question of who has the strongest first-party signal, not just who has the biggest reach. For South African marketers, that means retail media conversations are moving from “should we test this” to “which retailer’s audience fits our brief,” a sign of a category that’s moved past early adoption and into standard media planning.
How retail media is measured
Retail media is measured the way performance marketing is measured everywhere else, reach, click-through rate, cost per click, and conversion, but with one important difference: because the targeting is based on real purchase behaviour, the results tend to be more consistent and easier to attribute to a specific audience decision.
The core metrics brands track are straightforward: how many verified shoppers were reached, how many clicked through to a product page, what it cost to generate that click, and how many of those clicks converted into a sale.
Attribution is more straightforward onsite, where the retailer can track the full path from ad to purchase within its own platform. Off-site retail media requires a bit more care, since the click happens on an external platform like Meta or Google before the shopper returns to complete a purchase, but first-party audience data still gives a stronger, more consistent baseline than standard interest-based targeting.
The real proof of retail media’s measurability shows up in campaign results:
Woolworths’ first-party data helped Johnnie Walker Blue Label grow festive sales 39% year-on-year
Nivea saw 60 times more high-intent shoppers than standard targeting.
USN increased conversions by 3.6 times
Woolworths beauty partners reached 3.6 million shoppers and generated over 131,000 high-intent clicks to product pages.
Retail media in South Africa
Retail media is a global category, but South Africa’s version of it is still taking shape, and that’s exactly why this guide matters.
Search demand for “retail media” in South Africa is small in absolute terms compared to markets like the US or UK. That’s not a sign the category isn’t real here, it’s a sign the market is still early.
South African online retail reached R71 billion in 2023, up 29% year on year, and is on track to cross R100 billion by 2026, still only around 6% of total retail spend.
That’s a base that’s grown consistently as more shoppers move online and as retailers build out loyalty and e-commerce data they didn’t have a decade ago. That growth is the raw material retail media runs on: every browse, search, and purchase adds to a retailer’s first-party data asset.
What makes the South African market distinct is who’s building retail media offerings. It isn’t only the largest e-commerce players. Loyalty-led retailers, marketplaces, and platforms with strong first-party data, from grocery and fashion to beauty, ticketing, and payments, are activating their audiences using the same off-site model that’s driven growth globally. Woolworths’ beauty audience network, covered below, is one of the clearest examples of this in the South African market: a retailer with a loyal, high-intent shopper base building a genuine media offering around first-party data.
The practical implication for South African marketers and retailers is the same one driving retail media everywhere: the retailers and platforms with the strongest first-party data have an advertising asset most of their competitors don’t. For a market where that asset is still being built out and understood, being early isn’t a disadvantage. It’s the reason this is the moment to understand the category properly, before it becomes standard practice rather than a strategic edge.
Real results: retail media in action
Retail media is easiest to understand through what it’s actually delivered. Four campaigns from Flow’s own work show the model operating across different categories, budgets, and objectives.
Johnnie Walker Blue Label: growing festive sales in a category with no organic discovery
Diageo needed to grow festive sales of an ultra-premium whisky in the most competitive gifting window of the year, for a product almost nobody finds by searching for it. Paid media had to do the entire job. Flow built a first-party audience from Woolworths purchase data, combining three signals, verified wine and spirits shoppers, proven premium-gifting buyers, and high-frequency buyers in adjacent categories, and activated it on Meta.
Nivea: cutting the "prospecting tax"
USN: stronger conversions from the same budget
USN, a leading sports nutrition brand, was seeing limited engagement from its internal audience data and needed sharper segmentation. Custom first-party audiences built through Flow drove the increase without increasing spend.
Woolworths beauty: reaching millions of shoppers at scale
Leading beauty groups, Coty, Clarins, ASCO, and PCG, wanted sharper targeting to reach Woolworths' loyal beauty shopper base. Using Woolworths' first-party data, 32 campaigns across 21 brands reached millions of shoppers. It also kick-started Woolworths' own retail media offering, turning a previously inaccessible shopper base into a repeatable revenue stream.
Different categories, different objectives, different scales, the same underlying mechanism: first-party shopper data, turned into an audience a brand can target with precision. That’s retail media working as intended.
Retail media vs commerce media
Retail media, as defined throughout this guide, is retailer-specific: it’s built on a retailer’s own first-party shopper data. Flow uses a broader term, commerce media, for the same model applied to any business that owns first-party data, not just retailers.
That line isn’t only Flow’s. EMARKETER draws the same distinction, describing retail media as advertising sold by retailers on their owned properties using shopper purchase data, and commerce media as the wider category that also takes in transaction platforms outside retail. Its own examples of that wider category include payments businesses, which is precisely where the next example sits.
Zapper is a useful example of the difference. Zapper isn’t a retailer, it’s a payments platform, but it holds the same kind of first-party signal a retailer does: real transaction data showing what people actually spend on and where. When Pokerbet wanted a scalable way to reach new customers, Flow activated Zapper’s first-party audiences off-site on Meta, the same off-site model retail media uses, applied to a data owner outside retail. The result was a 156% return on investment for Pokerbet’s first campaign. See the full case study.
If you’re a retailer ready to explore this for your own first-party data, Flow’s retail media solution covers what that looks like in practice.
Frequently asked questions
What is retail media?
Retail media is advertising that uses a retailer’s first-party shopper data, browsing behaviour, purchases, and loyalty activity, to help brand partners reach real, high-intent customers. It can run on the retailer’s own site or app (onsite), on external platforms like Meta, Google, and TikTok (offsite), or through in-store digital displays.
What's the difference between retail media and commerce media?
Retail media is specific to retailers monetising their own shopper data. Commerce media is the broader term for the same first-party-data model applied to any business with valuable first-party data, retailers included, but also platforms like payments apps, booking platforms, and marketplaces.
Is retail media only for large retailers?
No. The model works for any retailer or platform with meaningful first-party data, loyalty programme activity, purchase history, or consistent browsing behaviour. Smaller and mid-sized retailers can access the same off-site activation model as larger players, without needing to build an internal ad sales team.
How is retail media measured?
The core metrics are reach, click-through rate, cost per click, and conversion, the same measures used across performance marketing generally. Because targeting is based on real purchase behaviour rather than inferred interest, results tend to be more consistent and easier to attribute to a specific audience decision.
Do I need to be a retailer to use retail media?
To monetise data through retail media specifically, yes, you need to be a retailer with first-party shopper data. If you’re a brand or advertiser, you don’t need to be a retailer to use retail media, you’re accessing a retailer’s audience, not building one.
Where to go next
The same data, two different starting points.
Browse the retailer and platform audiences currently available, and see which signals match your brief.
If you’re sitting on first-party data that isn’t yet generating revenue, see what building that out actually involves.
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