Retail media has become the fastest-growing corner of South African advertising. PwC’s latest Entertainment and Media Outlook expects digital to account for 74% of all local ad spend by 2029, with internet advertising reaching R51.7 billion and retail display and paid search among the fastest-growing formats of all. Retail media itself is growing faster still, at double-digit rates and among the quickest-expanding markets of its kind in the region.
A few years ago, almost none of this existed. Today businesses from Woolworths to ARC to Bash are turning their first-party data into media, and they are not alone. We have largely stopped calling it retail media, because retail was only the opening act. Marketplaces, booking platforms and financial services are doing the same thing, anywhere a business holds first-party data and the demand to meet it. This is commerce media, and the supply of it has grown faster than almost anyone predicted.
And yet advertiser budgets are not shifting at the pace that growth suggests. The reason is not a lack of appetite. It is that the market has built the supply far faster than it has built an easy way to buy it.
This is the part nobody likes to talk about, because it is unglamorous. For an advertiser, tapping all that supply still means assembling it. A separate conversation and plan with every partner. The same manual stitching, by hand, every time a brief lands. For years the hard part of commerce media in South Africa has not been demand but rather getting access to the first-party data audiences at all, and then piecing them together yourself, one partner at a time.
And the audiences are worth the effort. Built on real purchase and behavioural data, they consistently outperform broad targeting, with brands reaching up to 60 times more high-intent shoppers on first-party data than on conventional audiences. The value is not in doubt. Getting hold of it has been the pain point up until now.
That fragmentation shows up everywhere downstream, including in measurement, where each network counts differently and, as Dentsu’s commerce lead Daniel Malan recently wrote, “what appears to be strong performance on one platform often cannot be meaningfully compared to another.” But measurement is the symptom. The root is that buying commerce media is still a partner-by-partner grind, and a difficult process is a hard thing to scale.
As advertisers commit budgets for the year ahead and weigh every rand more carefully, an older, manual way of buying does not inspire confidence, and budget flows to the channels a planner can put together quickly and stand behind. So, the supply of first-party data keeps growing while the ad budgets lag behind, not because the value is doubted, but because reaching it is still too much effort. Fragmented buying makes for a fragmented business case.
The good news is that South Africa is building the fix now, while the market is still taking shape, rather than bolting it on years later the way more mature markets had to. A new layer of tech partners, Flow among them, now lets advertisers discover, book and report on first-party audiences from many partners in one place, on a single plan, instead of negotiating each one separately. In practice it is simple: a beauty brand like L’Oréal could pick Woolworths’ beauty shoppers, book that audience in a few clicks, and run ads to them on platforms like Meta, Google and TikTok, with no separate deal struck for every retailer. It is the thinking behind Flow’s Audience Marketplace 2.0: bring the audiences, the partner packages and the planning together, and the hardest part of commerce media stops being how you buy it.
The prediction is straightforward. With the right technology in play, the industry should soon be buying across the market in one place by default, eliminating the fragmentation that frustrates buyers today. The standalone, partner-by-partner deal becomes the exception rather than the rule, and the question stops being how to assemble commerce media and starts being what to do with it.
That, in the end, is the real test for the next phase of South African commerce media. The inventory is no longer the constraint. The constraint is whether a brand can reach across the whole market, build one plan and commit with confidence. The retailers, agencies, industry bodies and platforms that make buying genuinely easy are the ones who will decide how much of that forecast growth actually becomes spend. Demand sits on one side, first-party data on the other, and the prize goes to whoever puts the least friction in between.
For more information on Flow, visit www.flowplatform.co.za
