Australian brands are spreading retail media budget across more networks than ever. The problem isn’t the spend. It’s that no one can see across it.
Most Australian FMCG brands now sell across at least four retail media environments at once: a marketplace, two or more omnichannel grocers and a quick commerce platform. Each runs on its own tech stack, placement types and measurement standard, and 65 per cent of Flywheel’s CPG clients are managing exactly that spread simultaneously. The people running it are busier than ever. Almost none of them are any clearer.
The daily cost shows up as time. Flywheel has seen brands spend up to 60 per cent of their week simply collating data into something usable. The sharper cost shows up in the seams: a national campaign driving demand for a product that is out of stock on the shelf, or a retail promotion running at a major grocer while brand media pushes a different line. Neither team sees the other’s calendar until the money is already spent.
Mohammad Heidari Far, MD of Flywheel Australia, told Inside FMCG the issue is structural, not budgeting-related. “To the shopper, there is no separate journey for each retailer. There is one path to purchase, and it is increasingly non-linear,” he said. “The real cost isn’t in any single retailer relationship. It’s in the seams between them, because brands still run trade, brand media and retail media as three separate businesses, with separate budgets and KPIs, even though the shopper experiences them as one continuous thing.” Flywheel’s own research quantifies it: 80 per cent of consumers now take a non-linear path from discovery to purchase.
Retailers have become media businesses with their own growth targets, Heidari Far said, so the point is not to distrust them but to bring an evidence-led view of their own. “Retailers know their own network deeply. What they can’t see is how a brand performs across all of them, other retailers and platforms included,” he said. “That view has to come from the brand’s own side of the table.”
The incompatibilities are specific. Most Australian retailers run on third-party adtech such as CitrusAd, Criteo, Zitcha or Topsort, and auction models, attribution windows and reporting cadences differ enough that bidding the same amount across networks does not buy the same thing. In February 2026, IAB Australia launched a retail media certification program to move measurement onto a common standard, with Coles 360 first in; Heidari Far welcomes it but notes it is voluntary and far from closing those gaps.
Amazon is the clearest exception. It runs its own stack, and through Amazon Marketing Cloud is one of the only Australian networks giving brands clean-room control over their audience and transactional data, letting them strip out duplicated reach across campaigns. It is also self-serve rather than managed-service: where reporting elsewhere often lands daily, Amazon’s Stream Dashboard reports hourly, turning optimisation from a weekly ritual into a same-day decision.
Even so, the most advanced single network still sees only its own corner. Heidari Far’s answer is not another platform. Consolidating tools is the necessary first step, not the strategy: it lets a brand see across Amazon, omnichannel and quick commerce, which Flywheel delivers through its proprietary Flywheel Commerce Cloud (FCC). The harder work lies in the operating model behind it.
Flywheel frames that model in four stages, from Fragmented, where every network is run separately on channel-level ROAS, through Unified and Harmonised, to Mastered, where trade, brand and retail media operate as one function, measured not on ROAS but on what the company calls Return on Consumer: the value a shopper builds over time rather than the credit for a single sale.
The commercial case is already evident. One brand increased its retail media digital sales 18 per cent at Coles and 94 per cent at Chemist Warehouse while reducing spend, once it could see performance across retailers and optimise for incremental sales rather than following each retailer in isolation. That is the move off the Fragmented rung: same budget, read across retailers, not inside each.
For Heidari Far, that is the shift worth making, and the difference between chasing ROAS in each channel and building Return on Consumer across all of them. “Fragmentation doesn’t mean you’re invisible. It means you’re loud in a dozen places and clear in none,” he said. “The brands that fix that don’t spend more. They finally get seen.”
