Retail media has mastered demand capture. The next challenge is proving it can also create demand.

By Dina Thebian, Associate Director – Performance, UM UAE

For the last decade, media investments have relied more on attribution models than growth models. Today, retail media stands out for its measurability – marketers can link every click, basket addition, unit sold, and transaction back to a campaign. This visibility is helping retail media attract greater budgets across the UAE and Saudi Arabia. But it raises a more important question: can retail media create new demand at the scale brands need for long-term growth?

Marketers naturally gravitate towards channels that show clear impact. Search placements and sponsored products attract major investment because they sit closest to the point of purchase – their attribution is clean and ROAS is strong. The question is whether we are rewarding true growth or simply rewarding measurement.

Ironically, many brands say they want growth yet spend most of their retail media budgets reaching shoppers who were already planning to buy. Think of a shopper looking for baby diapers on Amazon or browsing supplements on Nahdi. The ads work, sales happen, attribution is clear. But how much demand was truly created? Attribution and incrementality are not the same thing, even if the industry frequently treats them as such. A campaign showing 8x ROAS is automatically considered superior to one showing 3x, even if the 3x campaign introduced the brand to entirely new shoppers.

The GCC Shopping Journey Is Already Telling Us Something

We are very good at measuring how retail media converts intent into sales. What we discuss far less is its ability to create that intent in the first place.

Consider the GCC shopping landscape. A customer opens Noon Minutes to buy water and butter, then adds a protein bar featured in an ad. A Talabat user orders lunch and leaves with an extra drink or snack. A shopper searching Amazon for a coffee machine ends up signing up for a new credit card offer. A beauty browser adds an unfamiliar skincare brand to their basket through a category sponsorship rather than a search. These are not harvested purchases, they are demand created within the shopping environment itself.

This is why advanced retail media networks are investing beyond sponsored search. Homepage takeovers, audience targeting, video, off-site media, and category sponsorships are all gaining importance. Influencing choice before a search is far more valuable than competing once intent has already been set.

Fragmented Journeys, Fragmented Credit

This matters especially in the GCC, where shopping journeys are non-linear. A consumer might discover a product on TikTok, encounter it again on Noon, research it on Amazon, and complete the purchase on Carrefour. The final retailer gets the credit, but the decision was shaped across many touchpoints. Retail media is no longer simply a conversion engine, it has become a critical driver of discovery, consideration, and purchase.

Yet many retail media strategies still focus narrowly on short-term sales, with search, sponsored products, and retargeting consuming the majority of budgets because they are the easiest to justify.

The Full-Funnel Opportunity

The real opportunity lies in treating retail media as a full-funnel channel. Brands should allocate greater investment to upper- and mid-funnel formats — display, video, off-site placements such as Amazon DSP and Carrefour Links, and premium on-site placements that build awareness and consideration. These formats may not deliver immediate sales at the same efficiency as search, but they create future demand and expand the pool of shoppers that conversion tactics can ultimately capture.

Senior marketers are already asking better questions: Did we acquire new-to-brand customers? Did basket sizes increase? Did penetration grow? Did we gain market share? These measure business growth, not just campaign efficiency.

Retail media has won the attribution battle. Its next challenge is demonstrating that it can create future demand and contribute to category growth, not just measure transactions after they occur. The future of retail media lies not only in capturing demand, but in creating it.