Published July 14
Retail media is one of the fastest-growing channels across the APAC region, but Southeast Asia-focused marketers say regional networks are yet to fully deliver on their promise.
Their north star? Australian retail media networks (RMNs).
Speaking at ATS Singapore 2026 last week, brand and agency leaders voiced their frustration at having to manage expectations between what many RMNs promise and what they actually deliver.
“I’m trying to mitigate a lot of those overpromises,” Leslie See, senior commerce director at Dentsu Singapore, said. “The hype-versus-delivery gap is there.”
But that doesn’t mean progress isn’t happening. Panelists also praised Asian RMNs FairPrice and AS Watson as examples of “what good looks like” in the retail media space — with Australian RMNs highlighted as the “blueprint” for what networks in the region should aspire to.
“[Australian RMNs] have broken down the legacy walls, given us data that is interoperable [and] given us agile reporting. They are leading the way,” said Shweta Jhamb, e-commerce and digital marketing director at Haleon.
Local retail media’s credibility challenge
According to See, the lack of standardization across RMNs remains a challenge, with some local networks relying on metrics that don’t always demonstrate meaningful commercial outcomes.
“A lot of them are grading their own homework,” he said. “They will show you a vanity metric that you’ve never seen before. They’re not able to demonstrate the incrementality.”
Instead, he said, they should be demonstrating commercial outcomes like category growth and new customer acquisition.
“If they don’t grasp this, it’s very hard for them to deliver on the promise they proposed in the pitch deck,” See said.
“What we’re trying to get to is separating the marketing hype from the reality,” Jhamb agreed, describing that reality as sometimes “very execution-heavy” and “technically difficult.”
“Many of the RMNs promise closed-loop attribution [and] hyper-targeting, but in reality … most of the time we get clunky dashboards, delayed reporting, display banners … so we are trying to separate what we are actually getting from many of these networks.”
Even so, there are some “brilliant examples” she noted, singling out Australian RMNs as the “blueprint” for the rest of the industry.
According to IAB Australia’s recent Retail and Commerce Media State of the Nation 2026, she’s not alone. The report found Australia’s retail and commerce media sector is now an established part of the media mix, with advertisers reallocating budget from other channels. Far from being dissatisfied, 66% of the marketers surveyed rated their experience with retail media partners as good, up from 44% in 2025.
AI could reshape retail media’s next chapter
Looking ahead, See said LLMs will inevitably seek to influence, or even own, the digital checkout experience.
“It’s undeniable that LLMs will try to get a slice of the pie to own that checkout,” he said.
His advice to marketers was straightforward: “Prepare your inventory to make sure that it is programmatically viable. That’s eventually where your ads are going to serve in LLM models.”
For brands, that shift could quickly influence where marketing budgets go.
“My next dollar is going to a place that can influence visibility on LLMs,” Jhamb said. “Whoever can get it to me, that’s where I’m going to focus.”
They’d also better get it done fast. According to Kris Biti, executive director of client success at OMD APAC, marketers have little time to prepare for the next phase in retail media’s evolution.
“The pressure’s on,” Biti said. “Fifteen years ago, the ultimate goal was making sure that we showed up on [search] results pages, and now we’ve got five years, probably less, to make sure that we show up in [AI] answers.”
“If your products aren’t readable by an agent or LLM, then you’ve got to get your skates on, basically.”