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Your favourite e-shop is secretly a media mogul. Welcome to retail media.
There is an advertising channel growing faster than anything else on earth, printing billions and quietly preparing to snatch the crown from television. And in Central Europe it gets written about roughly as often as tax optimisation comes up on a first date. It is called retail media, and it is a megatrend the region, a place built on e-commerce, is practically designed for. Let us take it apart, bold, no fluff, and with a few jokes you have earned by reading this far.
Daniel Votruba · 28 July 2026 · 6 min read
How a shop became a media house
Every retailer eventually bumps into a sad truth: selling goods is hard graft on margins thin as petrol-station loo roll. You move boxes, you fight over pennies, the competition is one click away. And then someone shows you the other side of the business: selling ads next to those goods. Margins like a law firm, costs close to zero, because you already own the space. Once you have seen that equation, you cannot unsee it.
This is exactly what Amazon worked out, quietly growing an advertising business worth tens of billions of dollars while half the world still thought of it as a bookshop with ambitions. Today it is the third-largest ad player on the planet, right behind Google and Meta. And every retailer with decent traffic is now asking the same question: why am I leaving that money on the table?
The third wave of digital advertising
The history of online advertising can be told as three waves, and each one took a different piece of you. The first was search: Google asked for your intentions. The second was social: Meta asked for your attention. The third is retail media: the retailer asks for both, plus something Google and Meta never had, the receipt. It knows not only what you wanted and what you looked at, but what you actually bought, how often and for how much.
In advertising that is the holy grail. Most targeting is an educated guess. Retail media is a till receipt.
Why now: the cookieless world plays into retail's hands
While third-party cookies die in stages like a favourite character in a show you already know will not end well, retailers sit on the most valuable thing left in advertising: first-party data on real purchases and a logged-in shopper. They do not need to snoop across other people's websites, they own the gold mine. In an era where everyone else scraps over the leftovers of a signal, retail media is the adult in the room.
Add closed-loop measurement: you do not just see a click or a presumed conversion, you see the real sale of a specific product at a specific retailer. The marketer who spent a whole career dreaming of linking a spent euro to a sold unit finally gets the wish. With one catch, which we will get to, because I would not be me if I let you leave with only good news.
And the best part: Central Europe is built for this
Here comes the point you came for. Czechia and the wider region are an e-commerce powerhouse. Czechia has the highest share of online shoppers in the region, more than fifty thousand e-shops, and a population that handles online ordering better than parallel parking. If retail media is going to find fertile ground anywhere, it is here.
And it is already happening. Rohlík launched Rohlík Ads and turned grocery delivery into an ad channel. Alza, Košík, Notino, Kaufland and the Mall/Allegro marketplace are all building their own ad businesses. Budgets that used to go into shopper and trade marketing, the fight for shelf and leaflet, are quietly migrating onto the screen, straight into the basket. Yet while the rest of the world publishes books and runs conferences on retail media, here it is treated like an awkward family story nobody mentions. Which is, incidentally, exactly the kind of gap where you get rich before everyone else shows up.
A small glossary so you do not look lost at the table
- On-site retail media: ads right on the retailer's site or app (sponsored products in listings, banners).
- Off-site retail media: the retailer uses its data to target beyond its own site, on social and the open web.
- In-store retail media: screens, self-checkouts and displays in the physical shop.
- Endemic vs non-endemic advertiser: endemic sells through the retailer (a yoghurt brand on Rohlík), non-endemic does not but wants its audience (a bank targeting people buying organic food).
- Closed-loop measurement: linking an ad to the real sale of a given product.
The catch, because no lunch is free
I promised a catch, here it is, and there is more than one. First, the retailer is both the seller of the space and the referee keeping score. Having your results measured by the party that sold you the space is a bit like having your dictation graded by the classmate who copied off you. Demand independent verification and measure incrementality, not just whether a sponsored product was bought by someone who was going to buy it anyway.
Second, fragmentation. Every retailer is its own walled garden with its own platform, rules and dashboard. Five retailers means five logins and five versions of the truth. Third, ad clutter: when the product listing turns into an avenue of billboards, shoppers stop trusting even the results that are not paid for. And fourth, the classic: retail media is brilliant at harvesting demand you already have and much worse at creating it. A sponsored slot will not turn a brand no one knows into a star. It turns a searched-for product into a bought one.
Who should pay attention
If you are an FMCG or consumer brand, retail media is the new battle for the shelf, only digital and measurable. If you are an e-commerce seller, it is a lever to win visibility exactly where buying happens. And if you are a retailer, you are sitting on an ad business with margins your core operation can only dream of, and you may not know it yet. In all three cases the same thing holds: whoever understands retail media before the competition wins years of head start, while it is still a gap and not a crowded room.
The takeaway (TL;DR)
- Retail media is advertising at retailers targeted by real purchases. The third wave after search and social.
- It grows because ads carry far higher margins than goods, and it runs on first-party data with measurement down to sales.
- In a cookieless world retail media is the adult in the room: own data, closed-loop measurement, the shopper at purchase.
- Central Europe is an e-commerce powerhouse (Rohlík Ads, Alza, Košík, Notino, Kaufland), so it resonates doubly here.
- Watch out: the retailer grades its own homework, the market is fragmented, and retail media mostly harvests demand rather than creating it.
Frequently asked
What is retail media?
Advertising bought directly from retailers (Amazon, Rohlík, Alza, Notino). The retailer sells ad space on its site, app and in store, targeted using its first-party data on what people actually buy.
Why is retail media growing so fast?
Retailers sit on data about real purchases and the shopper at the moment of buying. Ad margins are far higher than margins on goods, and in a cookieless world it runs on first-party data with measurement down to sales.
How is retail media different from classic PPC?
PPC (Google, Meta) targets by intent and behaviour across the web. Retail media targets inside the retailer by real purchase history and measures down to the sale of a specific product (closed-loop). Closer to purchase and more precise, but more walled-off and fragmented.
Which retail media networks operate in Czechia and Slovakia?
Rohlík (Rohlík Ads), Alza, Košík, Notino, Kaufland and the Mall/Allegro marketplace, alongside global Amazon Ads. The market is young but growing fast, because the region is among Europe's densest e-commerce markets.
Is retail media worth it for smaller brands?
Yes, if you sell through that retailer or want its shoppers. Sponsored products move the needle even on a small budget because they catch the shopper at purchase. Watch measurement supplied by the retailer and platform fragmentation.
Sources & context: EMARKETER (retail media spend forecasts) · IAB Europe, Retail Media Guide · Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey (retail media analyses) · Criteo, State of Retail Media · Amazon Ads · Médiář (Czech market coverage). Figures are directional and rounded; validate against the latest reports before committing budget.
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