Retail media is growing quickly in South Africa, bringing loyalty data, transaction histories and advertising closer together. Broadbrand CEO Vincent Maher examines how AI is changing the mechanics of retail advertising and, with it, the work marketers themselves need to do.
For most of marketing’s recent history, the campaign has been the unit of work. A team defines an audience, develops an offer, selects the channels, launches the work and measures the response afterwards.
That model still has value, but it strains in retail, where one organisation may have millions of customers, thousands of products, several owned channels and a continuous flow of purchase signals. AI is accelerating execution and changing where judgement sits in the process. Nowhere is that clearer than in retail media, the advertising a retailer sells through its own channels.
Where retail media stands in South Africa
Retail media is gaining ground here faster than many marketing teams have noticed. The MMA South Africa Retail Media Ecoscape 2026 Report puts the local market at R9 billion to R12 billion for 2025/26, or 7% to 9% of total advertising spend. In the United States and the United Kingdom the same share is 15% to 16%. That gap of six to eight percentage points is the runway.
The ingredients are already in place. South African e-commerce turnover is expected to pass R130 billion in 2026 and digital advertising spend is growing at 11% to 12% a year. Retailers count more than 50 million loyalty memberships between them, before removing people who belong to more than one programme. Transactions provide proof of sale, loyalty data provides identity and digital growth provides budget.
What has held the category back is trust in the numbers. Brands have been asked to compare a return on ad spend from one retailer with another’s without knowing whether either counted the same way.
What the MMA framework asks for
On 3 September 2026, the MMA South Africa Retail Media Task Force released Working Draft v0.3 of its Retail Media Measurement Framework for 60 days of public comment. The framework does not rank retailers. It asks each one to declare how a number was counted: whether a sale was matched to a known shopper or modelled, whether it is gross or net and what attribution window applied. A brand can then compare two networks and know it is comparing like with like.
How an impression is decided
Once the numbers are comparable, the question becomes how the media itself is chosen. This is where AI changes the mechanics.
In a traditional retailer media business, a sales team books placements against a rate card. A decision system can instead run an auction for every advertising opportunity. Candidate ads are scored using factors such as bid, predicted click-through rate, relevance to the shopper and creative quality. A more relevant ad with a lower bid can beat a bigger budget, helping protect the retailer’s own customer experience. Pacing can spread a brand’s budget through the flight, while consent checks determine which shoppers may be included in addressable channels.
The same decision logic can feed owned surfaces from websites and apps to push notifications, in-store screens, email and call centres. A brand buys an outcome through the retailer’s estate rather than simply a slot on one page.
Why the SKU is the unit
SKU-based retail media starts with a retailer’s live product catalogue. Sponsored placements are linked to stocked products, while non-endemic advertising can be identified and reported separately. That SKU-level foundation supports closed-loop measurement by matching orders to shoppers’ impression histories within a defined attribution window.
Reporting can then show sales and return on the advertised SKU, brand halo on other products, category impact and, where available, in-store purchases linked to loyalty data. The result is a clearer connection between advertising exposure and what happened at the till.
Where the marketer’s work moves
The reassuring version of the AI story says automation will remove administrative tasks while creative roles remain unchanged. I do not think the change will be that tidy.
Some of the work involved in creating offers, selecting audiences and producing campaign variations will increasingly be automated. The more valuable human contribution will happen upstream, where teams define the commercial objective, provide context, set operating boundaries and assess whether the system is producing a useful result.
Creativity moves to a higher level, with marketers designing better briefs for intelligent systems and deciding what those systems should optimise rather than inventing every campaign execution themselves. That is the change I believe many marketing teams are still underestimating.
The change also makes governance a core marketing capability. Retail teams remain responsible for budgets, consent, pricing, brand safety and approval rules. Dashboards may be automated, but the quality of the outcome still depends on clear human instruction and reliable data.
South African retailers already have large loyalty bases, owned digital channels and rich transaction histories. Competitive advantage will increasingly depend on whether they can connect those assets into a decision system that places advertising intelligently, measures it to a common standard and shows what happened at the till. Campaigns will remain useful, increasingly as components within a larger system of continuous decisions.
