Amazon lands its first European retail media deal with UK grocer Asda
Amazon has agreed a retail media partnership with Asda, giving the company its first foothold in European retail media at this scale, according to Drum columnist Ada Wachowska. Asda ranks among the UK's largest grocers and has pursued retail media ambitions for several years, a stretch during which European retailers cycled through the same handful of specialist media partners. Wachowska writes that the deal tests whether large European retailers are ready to build a core part of their media business alongside Amazon, and whether Amazon will expand the model if it gains traction.
Brands running campaigns on both Amazon Ads and Asda could gain a single attribution standard across two major budgets, closing a gap IAB Europe calls the industry's biggest barrier to growth. Media buyers juggling several retail media networks, each with its own attribution window and ROAS definition, have struggled to tell a marketing director honestly which network performed best in a given quarter. Wachowska warns that solving this measurement problem through one company's infrastructure hands Amazon influence over the terms other networks eventually have to match. Europe's retail media market has spent years building shared standards through its own institutions, work that now competes against a faster route to consistency controlled by a single company.