Retail Media continues to mature at pace, bringing with it new opportunities and complexities for retailers, brands, and agencies. One of the most pressing dynamics shaping this space is the relationship between trade and media: how they intersect, where they diverge, and what the future holds. To explore this, IAB Europe launched a five-part content series unpacking the convergence and coexistence of trade and media in Retail Media and have given us permission to share this with IAB New Zealand members.
There is a tension that most in the industry feel but few talk about openly: retail media is still largely controlled by commercial and trade teams, not media teams. IAB Europe, in partnership with IAB US, has just published a five-part series examining exactly this challenge - the convergence and coexistence of trade and retail media. It’s worth reading, and here’s what it means for the New Zealand market.
The series starts with a definition that sounds simple but cuts through a lot of industry confusion. Trade is an economic lever - it covers temporary price reductions, BOGOs, trade-funded coupons, and promotional activity tied to commercial agreements. It's funded through cost of goods and margin structures, governed by finance and sales teams, and measured on incremental volume and ROI on trade funding - so it's not a media budget.
Retail media is paid influence. It covers sponsored products, both on-site and in Search environments. It's funded through brand and marketing budgets, planned and bought using media workflows, and measured on impressions, ROAS, store traffic and footfall.
The problem is that in most organisations - and this is as true in New Zealand as overseas - these two things are managed by different teams with different KPIs, different budget cycles, and often competing incentives. IAB Europe found that even among large retailers, many activations remain ambiguous: catalogues, in-store experiential, CRM, and sampling all sit in a grey zone where budget ownership varies by organisation.
New Zealand's retail media market is earlier in its development than the US or Europe and that’s an advantage. The definitional and structural problems the IAB Europe series describes are not yet fully embedded here, which means there is still an opportunity to build better frameworks from the start.
For the New Zealand industry the practical questions are: how are you classifying retail media investment internally? Who owns the budget and the retailer relationship? And are your measurement frameworks set up to evaluate retail media on media terms, not just trade terms? These aren't easy questions, but they're the right ones to be asking now, before the market hardens around structures that may be difficult to change later.
IAB New Zealand Members can download the resources via this link
For further information or to become an IAB New Zealand Member, please get in touch.
To read the full five part IAB Europe Series you can download the resources below.