When a new category of advertising spending grows at 13–21% annually, someone benefits. The obvious winners are the retailers building media networks. But there’s another group with significant upside: advertising agencies. For holding groups, retail media represents both a structural revenue tailwind and a strategic repositioning opportunity.
Why Agencies Win When Retail Media Grows
The conventional wisdom was that retail media might disintermediate agencies — that brands would go direct to retailers’ self-serve platforms, cutting out the middleman. The reality is more nuanced. Trade promotion dollars converting to digital retail media have historically been managed by specialist trade marketing teams within brands, often not coordinated with the media agency relationship. As these budgets digitise and scale, brands are looking to their media agencies for strategic coordination, cross-retailer planning, data integration, and measurement infrastructure. The complexity is growing, not shrinking — and complexity favours specialists.
The Numbers: 1.5 Points of Additional Media Growth
Scenario analysis suggests retail media could add approximately 1.5 percentage points to agencies’ average media growth rate — taking average agency group organic growth from 3.5% to 3.9% in 2025, and from 3.0% to 3.4% in 2026. These represent incremental growth in a category with higher margins than traditional media planning and buying. Publicis and Omnicom are best positioned, with Publicis ahead on data infrastructure (Epsilon, CitrusAd) and Omnicom ahead on commerce execution (Flywheel Digital).
The In-Housing Risk
The legitimate risk is pressure from brands to bring retail media management in-house — particularly self-serve campaign management on Amazon and Walmart’s platforms. But the data complexity, cross-retailer coordination, and measurement standardisation required to run retail media at scale requires expertise that is difficult and expensive to build internally. For most brands, the value continues to land with specialist agency partners — at least for now.