AI-powered retail media breakthrough in Australia
By Belinda Lloyd (pictured), Senior Technical Account Manager, Amperity
The martech, advertising and retail world is abuzz with the prospect and potential that retail media brings to the sectors. It’s an exciting channel that is poised to deliver greater coverage and connectedness across customer journeys.
But despite explosive growth, brands continue to struggle with a key question that undermines confidence in the channel: which digital campaigns actually drive in-store sales?
It’s a question that gets to the heart of retail media’s biggest challenge. With most purchases still happening in physical stores, the inability to connect online touchpoints to offline transactions has left marketing teams defending spend to sceptical stakeholders armed with little more than proxy metrics and hopeful assumptions.
I was part of a recent retail media panel session where we discussed a success story in retail media attribution and data. We dived into how partnership between MixIn by Endeavour Group, commerce media platform Criteo, and customer data cloud platform Amperity delivered Australia’s first closed-loop attribution solution at scale, connecting verified in-store sales directly to digital advertising campaigns.
The Attribution Challenge
Kicking off the discussion, panel moderator Hope Williams, who is Managing Director of global marketplace marketing agency Podean and serving on the IAB Australia Retail Media council, noted that today’s customer journey is non linear, and that customers span a web of touch points leaving behind data breadcrumbs.
On the one hand this leaves brands with a wealth of customer data, but not necessarily the clarity on what it represents. With most transactions still happening in-store, it is often unclear which online touchpoint drove a sale.
When asked what makes omnichannel attribution so challenging, Hayley Robinson, Head of Sales & GTM Retail Media at MixIn, Endeavour Group’s retail media arm, outlined some of the tension that retailers face.
“I think from a retailer perspective, we probably deal with the paradox of, first and foremost, and absolutely paramount, protecting our customer data,” she said.
“On the flip side, there is also an expectation that we know as consumers that you are serving personalised ads and shopper journeys, making sure you know who they are, when they show up, and what they want to see.”
The scale of the data challenge is staggering. Robinson shared that across Dan Murphy’s and BWS, Endeavour Group generates 185 million shopping trips annually, operates over 1700 physical locations and processes two separate websites generating five million unique visits each week, with the group totalling $10 billion in transactions each year.
“So hopefully that starts to set the scene. We are very passionate about making sure [brands] and our customers have the right experience, the right information, but it is not an easy journey to stitch them all together and make sure that we are doing it in a legal and compliant way. That’s why we have reached out to partners, because we can’t answer all of that on our own,” she said.
Also on the panel was Meredith Lewis-Jones, Head of Digital & Omnichannel Connections at Vinarchy Wines, a partner of MixIn already experiencing the benefits of the solution. Lewis-Jones described the complexity that makes attribution sometimes feel impossible from a brand perspective.
“In Endeavour specifically, we’ve got 250-plus [SKUs]. You look at that level of fragmentation from a media buyer perspective, layered with 250 SKUs that are on different trade promotions, different price promotions, different [above-the-line] media being bought, different retail media being bought, different shopper activations,” she said.
“When we try to take a step back from a brand POV and look at what lever is driving what, in terms of profit at the end of the day, that becomes a very complicated puzzle to start putting together without any closed-loop attribution.”
How the Solution Works
Solving the retail media attribution puzzle required bringing together multiple distinct capabilities, starting with Amperity’s AI-powered data unification platform.
This is the first time that these partnerships have come together, and it’s the first in region closed-loop attribution in this area that Amperity has stood up, the first that Criteo has stood up, and first that MixIn has stood up.
There are so many data points the Endeavour Group will come across. We then data unification and identity resolution platform to ingest data from all of those touch points from over 40 data sources in a compliance-safe way for them.
We then do the identity resolution at scale to be able to provide the customer IDs and all of the transactional data that’s required for this closed-loop attribution onto Criteo and into Criteo to do the magic linking between what’s been happening in the online advertising world and what’s been happening in terms of transactions in store.
What is new is the agility that MixIn showed as a retail media network. We were able to, from when this project was greenlit, to actually implementing it and giving access to Vinarchy to the self-serve attribution picture, it all happened in just five weeks. So that, for me, has really set a new standard for retail media networks in Australia, in being agile and speed to enablement and speed to value.
Jess Truesdale, Client Lead for Retail Media at commerce media platform company Criteo, explained how this speed advantage extends into ongoing operations.
“We can now, with that great data, enable brands to be able to see activity … down to the SKU-level purchases that happened in store within a couple of days on a self-serve platform, and they can view that with different attribution windows,” she said.
“They could have a one-day, a 30-day look back, and they can use that to see peak times throughout the week, or peak periods, or when they’ve also got promotions happening in store, and exactly how the online activity has influenced the in store sales, and vice versa.
“What this has enabled is that anybody can access information they need from a brand point of view at the right time, and they can [tailor it to their] specific business needs.
“There’s no one size fits all. Every retailer is structured differently. All of the buying behaviour changes constantly. So it’s not about doing a bit of a look back after the campaign, it’s about using that information and being able to look at it in almost real-time and making optimisations and changes throughout the campaign, as well as looking at what they can do further ahead.”
Changing the Stakeholder Conversation
For Lewis-Jones at Vinarchy Wines, the impact has been transformational across multiple internal conversations.
“This advancement has been pretty big in our business. It’s really enabled me to have a number of different conversations with different stakeholders in our business. The one interesting one is we’ve got a large category team, and for them this has unlocked a whole new data set that gives them a different level of insight from that sort of digital touch point, to that bridge to in store, which they never had before,” she said.
“The way we’re looking at our portfolio and looking at SKUs that we previously would say ‘that doesn’t work online, let’s uninvest there’, we are now able to look at and say, ‘you might not sell it online, but someone’s viewing it while they’re in store, purchasing while they’re in store’. We just could never track that before.”
“We then have a pretty happy commercial conversation going on. Part of that for us is our commercial leads aren’t particularly interested in [return on ad spend]. They are interested in profitability, but accessing that data to prove that out with other retail media channels and networks is really challenging.”
The impact on reported performance was dramatic.
“I’m super stoked because our team is being able to change the way that we’re optimising, not just for the 15% of our sales that happen online, but the 100% that’s happening online and in store. If you look at our [performance metrics] … overnight it doubled. It’s a very fun conversation to have with our head of commercial that it’s even more effective than we originally had anticipated.”
Building Trust in Retail Media
It’s important to understand retail media’s broader credibility challenge and how closed-loop attribution addresses it – and there is recent industry research that underscores the scale of the problem.
There was some fantastic research done by Teresa and the team at Arktic Fox this year, and they found that 96% of the major Australian brands that they surveyed stated that quantifying their uplift or their return or their value from their retail media spend was one of their key challenges. That’s pretty much everyone. So this type of innovative solution is a fantastic leap forward in that challenge.
I don’t think it starts or stops with this solution, though. I believe it starts with retail media networks and… having a complete handle on your first-party data. That’s what makes retail media networks different from other channels. Having the first party data at a point that it’s ready to do what it needs to do for you to create those opportunities for brands is really important, and is the key to making any of these solutions work.
What Comes Next?
The panel concluded by looking ahead to how omnichannel attribution will evolve over the next 12 to 18 months.
Robinson emphasised that this is just the beginning.
“This is exciting, but this is just the first step. This is not a stopping point. This is a great step in the right direction, but there’s more to come, and I think it is about bringing our data together, using retail media and our first party data to help you measure your wider media buys as well, not just for retail media campaigns.”
For us, Amperity’s focus is on AI-powered optimisation. We’re really focused on AI and how AI can optimise insights, particularly around customer data and customer intelligence.
It’s about how we help retail media networks and our customers further optimise and automate with AI and provide data science teams with that AI intelligence and machine learning intelligence that they need to do their job to get the insights.
From the brand perspective, Lewis-Jones identified two critical needs.
“We obviously buy from multiple retail media networks. No one’s speaking the same language. I know it’s come up multiple times, but some sort of common understanding around reporting frameworks would be killer,” she said.
“But my meta is, any time I get something through that has some way of showing incrementality of the spend, it’s like gold dust, because we can take that back to our business and it unlocks a dollar conversation and a budget adjustment conversation straight away.”
Truesdale emphasised the importance of remaining adaptable as technology and shopping behaviour evolve.
“Even shopping behaviour is going to change with agentic agents. So really, the next 18 months is just about making sure that we are open and listening and being able to unlock the different services and the different products that all of our stakeholders need. It’s not only the retailers, but the brands and the customers,” she said.
The Last Drop
The MixIn, Criteo, and Amperity partnership demonstrates what’s possible when retail media networks prioritise measurement and move quickly. In just five weeks, the three companies delivered Australia’s first closed-loop attribution solution at scale, connecting digital advertising to verified in-store sales across Endeavour Group’s retail network.
For launch partner Vinarchy Wines, the results validated the approach. Performance metrics doubled overnight as the solution revealed retail media’s true impact; not just on the 15% of sales happening online, but across the entire portfolio.
The brand now has SKU-level visibility into how digital campaigns influence in-store purchases, transforming internal conversations with category teams, commercial leads, and finance stakeholders.
With 96% of Australian brands citing retail media measurement as a key challenge, this case study offers a blueprint for solving the industry’s credibility problem.
