Retail Media Summit, the UK’s original commerce media event, returned at Outernet London on October 15, 2025. In its third year, SMG partnered with ADWEEK to deliver a day of fresh thinking and forward-looking debate on the future of commerce media. Under this year’s theme, New Perspectives, Rory Sutherland—Vice Chairman at Ogilvy—shared a masterclass in behavioral economics, reminding retailers and brands that context, creativity, and customer empathy will always outperform algorithms alone.
Rory’s session, The Behavioural Economics of Retail Media, explored how small design and placement decisions can have outsized commercial impact, and why retail media should never settle for being “just performance marketing.”
THE BOTTOM LINE
Retail media’s advantage is context—it reaches shoppers at precisely the right moment. Resist platform-led short-termism, define brand-specific success metrics, and apply creativity to trade marketing and in-store experiences. Small, well-timed interventions can deliver outsize commercial and brand impact over time.
THE TAKEAWAYS:
1. Context is the superpower of retail media
Retail is one of the few environments where advertising naturally appears at a relevant moment. Rory urged brands to think like behavioral scientists: merchandise for the occasion, not the category. Sell ice, lemons, and limes next to spirits. Position premium sugar cubes beside high-end coffee, not baking goods. Place baskets deeper into stores to capture spontaneous missions. These contextual cues nudge behaviour and lift conversion precisely because they meet shoppers in the moment. As Rory put it, retail media “can be as digital as you like, but its advantage is that it’s delivered at a sensible, relevant moment.”
2. Escape metric myopia and own the right measures
Sutherland warned that marketers have caught a kind of “technoplasmosis”: an infection from platform-driven metrics that distort what success really means. When “what gets measured gets managed,” the industry ends up optimising dashboards rather than building distinctive brands. His advice was clear—define your own success metrics. Family- and founder-run businesses often outperform because they balance short- and long-term goals and measure what matters to them, not to investors or platforms. Retail media can and should play the same game: report both short-term sales impact and the contextual brand lift it drives over time.
3. Small creative ideas drive outsized returns
Rory reminded the audience that some of the most powerful marketing ideas are deceptively simple. Offering a “Goldilocks” middle option encourages trade-up. Showing good-better-best pricing reframes value. Replacing “Click here” with “Save to Wallet” respects timing and still captures intent. These subtle interventions, grounded in behavioural science, can deliver millions in incremental value. He urged retailers to apply the same imagination used in consumer campaigns to their trade budgets—often three times larger, yet far less creatively deployed. Because, as Rory said, “Price is a feeling—and how you frame it determines how people react.”
A RORY SOUNDBITE WORTH HEARING
“I started as a direct marketer and I still love it because you can measure and test everything you do. The problem is, you’re not allowed to do anything you can’t measure—and you can only measure the extent to which your activity succeeds in a predefined way. Most marketing works in multiple ways, creating value you can’t always prove straight away. That’s why I’m not a direct marketer anymore—it’s too narrow in its aspirations.”