The Unfinished Side Of Full-Funnel Retail Media: What Commerce Brands Need To Know

> TL;DR — A new Amazon Ads, MMA India and WPP Media playbook reports that 59% of surveyed Indian advertisers now see retail media as a full-funnel channel, but only 12% call it an established full-funnel partner. The perception has shifted faster than measurement, budgets and execution, so brands should treat upper-funnel retail media as a testable hypothesis, not a settled fact.

Retail media started as the last click: a sponsored product placed in front of a shopper who was already reaching for their wallet. That framing is breaking down. In October 2026, Amazon Ads, Marketing + Media Alliance (MMA) India and WPP Media released From Fragmentation to One View: A Marketer's Playbook for Full-Funnel Growth. Its headline finding, reported by afaqs, is that 59% of advertisers now consider retail media a full-funnel solution rather than a conversion-only channel.

The interesting part isn't the 59%. It's the gap between what advertisers believe retail media can do and what they can actually prove, fund and execute. For commerce brands deciding where the next rupee, dollar or euro goes, that gap is where the real strategy lives.

What The Playbook Actually Found

The survey covered 126 people involved in ad-spend decisions, including brand marketers, media heads, agencies and e-commerce teams. Social Samosa reports it was fielded in July and August 2026. The 59% splits into two very different groups.

• **47% see retail media as an emerging full-funnel solution** that is increasingly used for awareness and consideration, according to Marketing Mind.
• **Only 12% call it an established full-funnel partner.** That is roughly one in eight.
• MMA India's Moneka Khurana described retail media's origin as a search-led conversion channel that used high-intent commerce data to capture demand close to purchase.
• 82% of advertisers aspire to full-funnel execution, but only 18% report being very successful at it, per afaqs.
• Social Samosa gives the full self-rating split: 18% very successful, 38% somewhat successful, 34% work in progress, and 10% not yet started.

The honest summary is that most advertisers are curious about full-funnel retail media, and very few have it working.

Read The 59% Carefully

Before this stat lands in your next planning deck, put it in context. It is a perception figure from a small, India-only sample, and two of the co-authors are a retail media seller and a major agency. That doesn't make it wrong. It does make it a directional signal rather than a benchmark.

There is a more useful takeaway buried in the data. According to afaqs, 14% of advertisers spending over Rs 200 crore a year on digital called their full-funnel execution unsuccessful or not attempted, compared with 4% of those spending Rs 50–100 crore. Bigger budgets don't buy maturity. Larger organizations tend to carry more channel silos, more agency handoffs and more competing dashboards. All of these make a unified view harder to build.

The Upper-Funnel Evidence, And Its Limits

The strongest argument in the playbook comes from WPP Media's econometric modelling. As reported by afaqs, it found that commerce spend drives 20–25% of offline sales impact, a 10–12% lift in brand awareness, and an 18–20% impact on consideration.

These numbers are compelling, but they come with a caveat. afaqs notes that the estimates apply to brands with significant commerce contributions to both sales and media spend. If marketplaces account for a small share of your revenue, you shouldn't assume the same halo effect. You should model your own. A practical first step is to define the counterfactual before you scale retail media. Decide what you think would have happened without the spend, then design tests that can disprove you.

The Real Bottleneck Is Measurement

Ask advertisers what is holding them back and media cost isn't the main answer. Fragmentation is. The playbook's measurement findings make this unusually clear.

| Challenge or need | Share of respondents | Reported by | |---|---|---| | Fragmented view of consumer journeys is the biggest challenge | 62% | afaqs | | Rising media costs is the biggest challenge | 38% | afaqs | | Lack of unified cross-channel measurement is the biggest obstacle | 67% | afaqs | | Unified cross-channel attribution is the most-needed capability | 69% | afaqs | | Closed-loop sales attribution needed | 48% | Social Samosa | | Incrementality measurement needed | 48% | Social Samosa | | Better cross-platform reach and frequency measurement | 34% | Social Samosa |

WPP's Ritika Taneja pointed out that the number of touchpoints needed to influence 80% of a purchase decision nearly doubled, from 12 in 2018 to 21 in 2024, as reported by Indian Television. Every new touchpoint adds another reporting silo. This is why cross-channel is a data infrastructure problem before it is a media problem, an argument we've made in Cross-Channel Is Not a Media Strategy. It Is a Data Infrastructure Problem.

Retail networks also each define attribution windows, view-throughs and "new-to-brand" differently. If you want upper-funnel claims you can defend, you need a measurement contract for retail media reports. That contract should set out the definitions, windows and deduplication rules your team holds every network to.

Budgets Are Lagging Perception

If retail media is truly full-funnel, you'd expect budgets to follow. They are following, but more slowly than you might think. According to afaqs, 55% of advertisers plan to increase retail media spend in 2027, compared with 80% planning increases in video and in social or creator marketing.

WPP Media India's Sairam Ranganathan offered a useful frame, as reported by afaqs. Overall ad spend is growing around 8–10%, while retail media is expanding at 25–30%. He also noted that marketing and sales budgets, which were traditionally separate, are increasingly converging. That convergence is the quiet story here. Retail media sits awkwardly between trade spend and brand spend, and whoever owns the budget usually decides which funnel stage it gets judged on. If your sales team funds it, you will be judged on ROAS. If your brand team funds it, the questions are about reach. Agree on ownership before you agree on targets.

Turning The Playbook Into An Operating Plan

The playbook proposes a five-step framework: Diagnose, Architect, Allocate, Create, Measure. According to Adgully, it includes budget-split guidance for FMCG, electronics, fashion and emerging categories. Here is how a commerce brand might put each step into practice without inheriting a vendor's assumptions.

| Step | What it means in practice | Common failure mode | |---|---|---| | Diagnose | Map where revenue actually comes from by channel and marketplace | Using platform-reported ROAS as truth | | Architect | Assign each channel a funnel job and a primary metric | Asking every channel to do everything | | Allocate | Fund upper-funnel retail media as a time-boxed test | Moving brand budget wholesale on a hunch | | Create | Build creative for awareness formats, not just product tiles | Running bottom-funnel assets in video slots | | Measure | Use holdouts, geo tests or MMM to validate halo claims | Accepting each network's own attribution |

Treat the category budget splits as starting hypotheses, not prescriptions. Your margin structure, repeat-purchase rate and marketplace dependence should shape the final mix far more than an industry average does.

The Funnel Now Starts Outside The Marketplace

There is a stage the playbook barely touches. A growing share of product discovery happens before a shopper ever opens a retail app, in answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. When an AI assistant shortlists three blenders, it has done the awareness and consideration work that retail media now wants credit for.

• AI answers increasingly shape which brands a shopper searches for on a marketplace in the first place.
• Strong retail media performance can mask weak AI visibility, because branded marketplace searches look like organic demand.
• Product data consistency across feeds, PDPs and your own site affects both retail ad relevance and how AI systems describe you.
• Full-funnel planning should include AI search presence as its own measurable stage.

Visibility on its own isn't the goal, though. As we argued in AI Visibility Is Only the Beginning, the real job is connecting that discovery to completed orders, which is the same unified-measurement problem the playbook's respondents are already struggling with.

Key Takeaways

• Treat the 59% as a signal, not proof. Only 12% of surveyed advertisers call retail media an established full-funnel partner, so validate upper-funnel impact with your own holdouts or modelling.
• Fix measurement before scaling spend. Standardize attribution windows and definitions across retail networks, and prioritize incrementality testing over platform-reported results.
• Settle budget ownership early. Decide whether retail media is funded and judged as sales, brand or a blend before you set KPIs.
• Assign each channel a funnel job. Use the Diagnose–Architect–Allocate–Create–Measure sequence, but tune category splits to your own margins and marketplace dependence.
• Add AI search to your funnel map. Measure how assistants describe and recommend your products, and connect that discovery to downstream marketplace and DTC conversions.

Retail media has earned a seat higher up the funnel, and the brands that benefit will be the ones that can prove its impact rather than simply assume it.