Movement of Budgets Across Retail Media Networks: Why Static Allocation Is Holding Brands Back

The retail media industry has a budget fluidity problem.

As brands pour billions into Retail Media Networks (RMNs), the prevailing model for allocating those budgets remains stubbornly rigid. Too often, spend is locked into annual Joint Business Plans (JBPs) or static quarterly allocations tied to specific retailers, regardless of real-time performance.

We need to challenge this norm.

Right now, if a campaign on Retailer A is driving highly profitable, incremental growth, while a campaign on Retailer B is flatlining, moving budget between the two networks mid-flight is often treated as an operational nightmare. It requires renegotiating terms, navigating fragmented dashboards, and dealing with siloed agency teams.

But why should it be this hard?

In programmatic display or paid search, liquidity is the baseline. Budgets flow to the highest-performing inventory almost instantly. Retail media, despite being the fastest-growing channel in digital advertising, is still operating with the rigidity of traditional trade marketing.

The brands that will win in 2026 and beyond are those treating their retail media investments as a single, unified portfolio. They are moving away from "We have £X allocated to this retailer" to "We have £X allocated to drive category growth, and the budget will follow the performance."

To make this shift, three things need to happen:

1. Measurement Standardisation: We cannot move budgets fluidly if we cannot compare performance equally. We need to stop grading Retailer A's homework with a different rubric than Retailer B's.
2. Decoupling Media from Trade: Media performance should dictate media spend. While JBPs are important for broader retailer relationships, locking digital media budgets into static annual commitments stifles agility and limits ROAS.
3. Unified Execution Platforms: Brands need the operational capability to shift spend across networks without requiring a week of manual reconciliation and email chains.

The technology to enable fluid, cross-network optimisation exists. The barrier is no longer technical; it is behavioural and organisational.

Are you still locking your retail media budgets into static, retailer-specific silos, or are you building the capability to move spend dynamically based on true incrementality?

I'd love to hear how your teams are navigating this tension. Where do you see the biggest friction in moving budgets across RMNs?