Tesco has launched Ad Manager, a self-service platform that lets brands and agencies plan, book, measure and optimise advertising across Tesco’s own media without going through its sales team. Built with the ad tech firm Kevel, it starts with sponsored products in search results and will expand to display and video, as Decision Marketing reported on Monday.
Ad Manager is part of a wider package. Approved influencer content will appear beyond social media for the first time, on Tesco.com, in the Tesco app and on in-store screens, with Tesco citing research that around 40 per cent of shoppers under 45 follow influencers for product suggestions. It will test shoppable video in search results and shoppable display in customers’ Favourites, so a shopper can add an advertised product straight to their basket.
In stores, a system called Intelligent Store Orchestration, using Barrows Connected Store technology, adapts a single campaign to each shop’s location, time of day, stock, promotions, weather and local events. A trial for Costa in Tesco Express stores drove a 47 per cent uplift among customers new to the product. Over the next six months Tesco also plans to extend incrementality measurement to channels covering 93 per cent of Tesco Media spend.
Tash Whitmey, managing director of Tesco Media, said: “Every Little Helps isn’t just Tesco’s retail promise; it’s how we think about media too.”
Retail media is the fastest-growing part of UK advertising, up 32 per cent in the first half, and Tesco, with Clubcard data on millions of British households, is one of the biggest players in it. Self-service is how Amazon built its ad business, and putting creators on in-store screens turns the supermarket aisle into a media channel in its own right.
For brands it is another place they are being asked to pay to reach their own customers, at the moment of purchase. That is powerful and easy to measure, which is exactly why it keeps growing, and why researchers like Les Binet keep warning that money spent at the shelf is not the same as money spent building a brand. For the wider trend, see McDonald’s move into retail media.
He plans, buys and reviews advertising for a living, and helps score campaigns on the site against the same five Crown Score criteria alongside other authors and contributors.
Opening the Festival of Marketing, Hegarty set out a simple triangle for judging creative work, blamed KPIs for a sea of sameness, and admitted he once had no idea if a famous Audi ad would work.
The IPA Bellwether Report finds a net 14.3 per cent of marketers raised budgets in Q3 2026, with main media at a nine-year high, though the 2027 adspend forecast was cut.
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