Retail’s Data Goldmine: Are You Harnessing Your Data to its Full Potential?
How are retailers adapting their systems to capitalize on the opportunities of retail media networks (RMNs)? What are the challenges they foresee – and how are they tackling them? To find out, we brought together senior leaders from some of the UK’s most forward-thinking retailers. Here’s what we learned.
Retailers Understand the Scale of the Retail Media Network Opportunity
A glance at the research shows the size of the RMN opportunities. The Worldwide RMN market generated a revenue of $31.5 billion in 2024 – and that’s just the start. Estimates suggest the market is expected to reach $57 billion by 2030, which equates to a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.5% between 2025 and 2030. In the UK, retail media and commerce is growing at 17.7% year-on-year, which makes it the second fastest-growing channel after streaming in the UK.
Retailers recognize the scale of the opportunities. It’s reflected in the tech investment decisions they’re making and the retail digital transformation efforts they’re pursuing.
For the majority of retailers, the majority of spend is going on RMNs, loyalty platforms, tech for tech, and enhancing the customer experience.
Retailers Recognize the Potential Pitfalls of the Retail Media Network Journey
The focus of investment decisions right now demonstrates retailers’ understanding of the need to get in on the ground floor of the RMN story rather than risk being left behind during its rapid growth phase.
At the same time, there’s clear recognition that investing in RMNs is not without risk.
A successful RMN rollout involves enabling integrated chains of activity and the sharing of data within internal systems. The most exciting – and the most risky – opportunities will involve extending the potential into collaborations with partner brands.
Delivering on these opportunities will require retailers to embrace new technologies and stay on top of developments in a rapidly evolving field, which is no easy task.
But there is another, bigger, issue that concerns retailers. As they start to embrace RMNs and roll out new technology, is there a danger of losing sight of the person enabling all the opportunities – the customer?
Getting the Retail Media Network Balance Right
As we see, the opportunities are huge – but so are the pitfalls. So how are today’s forward-thinking retailers seizing the opportunities while also maintaining the customer experience?
During our discussion, several issues surfaced and were discussed. The common theme across all of them was the need to change the approach to internal culture and organization. The UK's most forward-thinking retailers recognize that RMNs touch every part of a business. For that reason, they see it is essential to have a laser focus on the bigger, organization-wide picture when planning software development projects.
The Danger of Building on Unstable Foundations
The first issue that presents itself when viewed through an organization-wide lens is the instability of the modern retailer’s software ecosystem.
A modern established retailer typically has a software ecosystem that consists of hundreds of applications, often built up over many years. The foundations are likely legacy systems. The nature of DevOps processes means there may be technical debt in every system of every age. The regular updates that are an integral part of the DevOps process can – and do – derail processes that sit upstream and downstream of the application being updated.
In contrast, newer, more digitally native retailers often have leaner, more integrated architectures – but for traditional retail organizations, this complexity is a significant hurdle when adopting new technologies like RMNs. Added to that, RMNs rely on systems which were initially intended for other purposes, e.g. loyalty systems, data architectures and ERP systems which provide the rich content needed to drive additional supplier funded revenue.
This is problematic when we consider that RMNs will need to sit at the top of this ecosystem, and they will need every system underneath to function and interconnect more seamlessly than ever before. Adding to the complexity is the issue of data quality: interconnected systems expose discrepancies and inconsistencies in data – for example, outdated or incomplete product and customer data, or misaligned sales data. These issues can undermine the effectiveness of RMN campaigns. Furthermore, brand partners will increasingly demand access to high-quality, trustworthy data to justify co-investment in retail media campaigns. Without clean, consistent, and actionable data, retailers risk losing out on critical media spend.
Suddenly, the average retailer’s software ecosystem looks like the digital equivalent of the Sutyagin House – a 144-ft tall wooden structure built over many years without any formal architectural plans.
Viewed like this, building anything as significant as an RMN on top of this seems risky at best.
To overcome the issues, forward-thinking retailers recognize effective software development will now need to look different.
Before, the big-picture view of a new piece of software and its role in improving the customer journey would have been considered at the requirements stage and often forgotten once a team got immersed in the process and detail of development.
Now, that big-picture view and the wider customer experience will need to remain front and center throughout the development process.
Only then is it possible to understand how every element of the software needs to be tested in a true end-to-end approach, with both the customer experience and supplier needs in mind and to ensure it delivers on expectations.
Think of it as a switch from a worm’s eye view of software development to a bird’s eye view.
Where Does Quality Sit?
Related to this shift is the question of quality and where it sits in the development process.
Often, quality requirements are considered late in the development process. As we saw above, by this time, the original business case for development and its desired impact on the customer experience may no longer be top of mind.
In this scenario, QA processes can only focus on functional testing because those are the only metrics it’s possible to measure against. A vital opportunity to consider the customer experience has been lost.
It stays lost in the maintenance phase too, because the original business case is further from people’s minds than ever. This is particularly true when maintenance is outsourced to a third party.
In the RMN world, testing has added complexity. Retailers must not only test how data behaves across internal systems – including eCommerce, loyalty platforms, inventory and ERP systems – but also validate how these systems interface with external media agency platforms. These agencies rely on high-integrity data to trigger targeting, personalization, and attribution. Testing strategies must therefore account for the broader RMN ecosystem, with quality assurance processes that span internal data flows, customer-facing experiences, and seamless integration with supplier-side media systems.
Then there's the question of who's responsible for quality from end to end. What happens in the handoffs between systems? Will an update have an unexpected impact on a process in another system? Where are the opportunities for improvement across the entire journey?
To overcome these issues, forward-thinking retailers are considering how to embed QA throughout their systems. The aim is to keep the customer experience front of mind, while also boosting retail technology risk management processes. (For more on this, see our whitepaper Where Does the Responsibility for Quality Sit?)
Using AI in Retail to Meet the Challenge of Doing More With Less
Alongside the issues of unstable foundations and QA processes are the issues that affect every retailer – time and money. In a sector where margins are so tight, there’s always a need to do more with less.
Retailers want and need to devote more resources to developing effective and robust RMNs. But to do this, they have to consider where and how they can create the necessary bandwidth.
Keysight offers a way to create this bandwidth – and more.
It achieves this by providing an end-to-end retail test automation solution that delivers automated assurance in retail. Keysight’s AI-driven robotics test POS terminals and connected physical devices. Keysight Eggplant automates the test process across eCommerce, mobile, and backend retail systems – including all the interactions between systems. Automating all these test processes frees up resource and creates more bandwidth.
The tools also provide the ability to use AI-powered retail decision-making so developers can use real metrics, not gut feel, when focusing testing resource.
Equally as important in the new, bird’s eye view of development, is the fact it simplifies the tech stack by being a single tool that can conduct retail systems integration testing from end-to-end.
The Start of the Conversation
The conversation we had with the UK’s most forward-thinking retailers on RMNs was just the first of many we’re planning as the RMN space evolves.
If you’d like to hear more, tell us here.