Seeing across your retailers was the hard part. Turning that view into growth means finding the pockets that broad-stroke spending can’t see, and in Australia they’re both harder to find and worth more.
A typical Australian retail media plan allocates its budget the way it always has: Across the range, across every retailer and every tentpole event on the calendar. It looks disciplined. In growth terms, it is little more than guessing. The sales that actually compound are hiding in a handful of products, shoppers and moments that a channel-level report will never show.
The first article in this series argued that most brands cannot easily see performance differences across their retailers. Solve that, and a harder question arises: What do you do differently now that you can see? For a commercial leader, the answer is not to spend more evenly but to spend surgically, targeting the specific pockets where incremental demand actually sits.
Mohammad Heidari Far, MD of Flywheel Australia, told Inside FMCG that the unit of precision is smaller than most plans allow.
“Broad-stroke marketing treats grocery shoppers, marketplace shoppers and quick commerce shoppers as one audience,” he said. “Surgical growth starts with the single product a customer buys first, because that first purchase predicts the value of everything that follows (CLTV).”
Flywheel calls this the point of market entry: identifying the product that serves as the best front door into a portfolio, then building the plan to get the right shoppers through that door. It rests on connecting product-level purchase data to a customer identity, which turns targeting from a probabilistic guess into something close to deterministic.
That resolution is where hidden share turns up, and the richest seam sits within a brand’s own portfolio. When Flywheel ran a cross-purchase analysis for a consumer health group with two related brands, 24 per cent of new-to-brand customers won by the first brand bought a product from the second within three months, most of them on a different day rather than in the same basket. That is a sequential path no single-brand view was built to see, and one an enterprise portfolio can engineer deliberately rather than leave to chance. Other pockets hide in time: Shoppers who convert more than a day after seeing an ad carry bigger baskets, so a plan measured only on same-day return undervalues its best customers.
In Australia, precision is not evenly available, and that is where imported playbooks fall short. Amazon is the only local environment where a brand can reach this product-and-customer signal on a self-service basis. Everywhere else, the same insight is accessible only through the retailer’s own media team, which adds delay and a layer of interpretation between a brand and its own data.
Far is deliberate that this is not necessarily a case for moving money to Amazon, whose Australian category share still trails the major grocers where the volume lives.
“Use the one mature environment to build the frameworks and the muscle memory now,” he said, “so you are first to exploit precision everywhere else as the other networks catch up.”
This fine precision sounds like it should collapse under its own weight, and it would without the right foundation, since managing thousands of small pockets by hand only makes a team busier. The standardised layer underneath, Flywheel Commerce Cloud, makes the bespoke work runnable: Automation carries the repeatable decisions, and people keep the judgement calls, such as which tentpole event to back, which product is the front door, and which cross-brand path is worth funding.
When that same consumer health brand re-sequenced its plan around these signals ahead of a major sales event, retargeting first-brand buyers with the second brand at the moment the data said they would buy, and applying negative targeting at its pharmacy retailer to prove the sales were genuinely incremental, new-to-brand sales rose 47 per cent and return on ad spend more than doubled year on year. Cost per click fell through a peak trading event because bidding moved hour by hour rather than holding static.
None of it is about spending more. In a market as concentrated as Australia’s, where five retailers hold roughly a third of all sales, the advantage goes to the brand that finds the growth that its competitors are spreading their budget past.
“The brands that win won’t just ask how much they sold,” Far concludes. “They’ll ask which customer entry point builds their next three years of growth.”
