‘Things have changed’: Diageo pulls retail media upstream

Once treated largely as a place to activate trade promotions after a campaign was already live, Tesco’s retail media now plays a more expansive role. It has become a full-funnel media and data collaborator, shaping how campaigns are conceived as much as how they convert. 

“Where retail media is concerned its starting to evolve from ‘feature and display’, which was very much around building visibility at the shelf, or sales activation,” said Diageo’s head of culture, entertainment, media and digital Mike Cheetham at a Tesco event in London last week (Jan. 23). “Now, it’s more around how we appropriate a space relative to what we’re doing in marketing and how we’re priming consumers as they come into the store.”

One of the clearest expressions of that shift is the way Tesco data is being linked with external media partners to support cross-platform campaigns. Guinness, and its long-running association with the Premier League is an obvious example. Diageo already holds major broadcast partnerships around  the league, including with main broadcaster Sky. The ambition now is to connect that broadcast presence more directly to off-trade behavior, and therefore position Guinness as the default at home drink for watching football. 

In practice, this means using Tesco data to understand how people drink Guinness at home, which households over-index on football occasions and which formats best suit those moments. The rationale being that if football on Sky sets the cultural frame, Tesco’s retail media ecosystem can reinforce it at the point of consideration, through pre-shop targeting, in-store activation and post-purchase message designed to promote other occasions. 

Cheetham frames this less as a campaign tactic than as a data collaboration. Tesco, through its data science arm Dunnhumby, supplies transaction level signals that allow other partners – broadcasters, delivery apps and media owners – to plug into a shared understanding of the customer journey. Broadcast builds relevance. Retail media shapes choice. Commerce data closes the loop, with Tesco acting as the anchor that holds the system together. 

“We use Dunnhumby data in lots of various ways, not just in terms of the way the commercial teams use it to validate a lot of the stuff they’re doing with Tesco or even through a marketing perspective for planning and almost buying purposes,” Cheetham said. “We’re trying to move away from that. We’re trying to think a little bit more about how we can move into data collaborations, where the currency of data, which we get from Dunnhumby, could be used in conjunction with say Sky.”

More broadly, this reflects a wider shift in retail media – and increasingly commerce media – from a performance layer at the end of the funnel to something closer to infrastructure. Retailers like Tesco are positioning themselves as connective platforms, linking media, data and transactions across ecosystems, while advertisers use those connections to plan more holistically rather than optimize in silos. As that model spreads, retail media is moving from a fast-growing channel to a structural force in shaping how campaigns are designed, how partners work together and how the advertising market itself evolves. 

“It’s now becoming less of a sales activation, but more of a component of our marketing plan,” said Cheetham. “Things have changed in the way we actually look at how we work with retailers in general. As a consequence that means we need to start thinking about strategies that incorporate all the different types of solutions that Tesco has been working with, and likewise with other retailers. We look at them [retailers] in the same way we would TV, radio, outdoor or digital.”

For all of this to work, advertisers have to resolve their own friction, particularly as the boundary between shopper marketing and brand marketing grows less distinct. 

“One of our challenges is to try and make sure that the commercial and the marketing conversations are coming close together – something that’s working really successfully with Tesco at the minute, and we’ve got some clear direction on how we’re going to make that work in the future,” said Cheetham. “Consequently, we have to think differently around data. If data is there to advise on our marketing, it should also be advising on our commercial strategy as well.”

The retailers that understand that — and can actually deliver it — are likely to be the ones that emerge strongest from the inevitable correction ahead. Retail media may be booming but the space remains fragmented, uneven and increasingly crowded. Not all retail media networks are built to survive that.

“Retailers are becoming media platforms and media platforms are becoming retailers,” said Shailesh Jejurikar, president and CEO of Procter & Gamble, on the company’s earnings call last week (Jan. 22). “In summary, the consumer path to purchase is changing every day, is nonlinear, and littered with millions of possible distractions. We expect an even more intense pace of change in the next three to five years. We will adjust to and leap ahead of these disruptions to invent CPG company of the future. The way to break through consistently is to build the strongest brands in the industry.”