Retail Media Radar - December 2025: Strategic Signals From Peak Season and What to Carry Into 2026
Creative performance is under the microscope. Retail media’s glow-up is starting to face tougher questions. And AI’s hype cycle is flattening into something far more operational - and far more interesting.
This December, we’ve tracked how festive ad campaigns are really landing, beyond just view counts. System1’s global leaderboard offers a rare lens on emotional resonance at scale. We’ve also dug into the retail media stats that actually matter right now - what they signal about platform power, creative agility, and the shift from channels to ecosystems.
2026 isn’t a reset. It’s a recalibration. Less “launch and learn”, more “prove and perform”.
1. The ‘Front-Loaded’ Festive Funnel
This year’s Black Friday window showed a notable compression of both budget and attention. Advertisers poured spend into the core promotional days, with daily investment spiking 77% vs the prior fortnight. Online video (OLV) accounted for a third of that spend. A few patterns jumped out from the data:
36% of spend went into online video formats during Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
Daily spend during peak days rose by 150% compared to baseline.
Short-form video dominated, driven by emotional punch and speed to launch.
Brands de-risked performance by front-loading across fewer, higher-impact days.
Creative agility (modular formats, real-time tweakability) outperformed grand narratives.
While front-loading defined the shape of spend overall, the approach varied sharply by vertical. Shopping brands went all-in on peak moments. Health and pharma prioritised brand-safe environments. Home and Food categories maintained steadier, more distributed investment. The lesson? Peak planning doesn’t mean one-size-fits-all.
Front-loading spend isn’t just a tactical play, it’s a symptom of audience fatigue and fragmented media behaviour. But compressing campaigns into shorter windows risks creative burnout, especially when every brand floods the same channels at once. Retailers and advertisers need to stop thinking in terms of “event days” and start planning for attention elasticity. Timing is tactical. But creative intelligence is what actually shifts the numbers.
Find out more here.
2. Gen Z x AI: Shopping Is Now Modular, Not Linear
Festive discovery has evolved. For Gen Z and younger Millennials, the shopper journey no longer begins at the website or ad. It starts with a ChatGPT prompt, a TikTok scroll, or a private message to a friend. If your brand doesn’t show up across that loop - you’re not just missing awareness, you’re missing inclusion. For brands and retailers, the implications are clear:
Prompts are the new SEO - between 15% and 30% of online shoppers will use Ai this year - and most brands haven’t optimised for them.
TikTok creators are the validation layer - 77% of Gen Z use them to finalise decisions.
Shareability is a UX feature - 71% want links, prices and formats that can be shared in chats.
AI is reframing the shortlist - gift searches now start with questions, not product names.
Gen Z are layering AI over social and social over loyalty - AI inspires, creators affirm, loyalty mechanics close the loop.
For retail media, marketing or loyalty leads, this shift isn’t just behavioural - it’s architectural. Brand-driven discovery no longer lives in one channel or team. Success means building modular journeys that stretch across AI prompts, creator content, and loyalty activation.
Retail media and social shouldn’t operate side by side in isolation - they should actively feed one another. Retail media can generate content designed for social amplification, while social campaigns can spark personalised offers within retail media networks. This joined-up approach keeps brands present throughout the customer journey and relevant at the moment of choice.
Find out more about Gen Z’s share-first mindset here, and how AI is shaping gifting habits here.
3. Cut-Through at Christmas: What the Leaderboard Really Tells Us
This year’s festive creative season has registered some of the highest effectiveness scores in recent memory. Since 2000, System1 has helped marketers understand and harness consumer emotion to predict and maximise the commercial effectiveness of advertising and ideas. Their approach is grounded in pioneering behavioural science and emotion-led research, drawing on the work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Paul Ekman. According to System1’s Christmas ad leaderboard, several campaigns earned the maximum 5.9‑star rating for brand‑building potential - indicating both strong emotional impact and commercial relevance.
Across the top creative ranks (as measured on System1’s Test Your Ad platform, which predicts both short‑term sales impact and longer‑term brand value), we’re seeing an unusual level of consistency and repeat performance from established assets rather than purely new launches:
Amazon - “Joy Ride” holds a 5.9‑star rating and leads the board, with an uplift of +3.1 stars versus the retail category.
Waitrose - “The Perfect Gift” also earns top stars, showing how a long‑form brand story can cut through with emotional depth.
Coca‑Cola - “Holidays Are Coming” and Lego - “If It’s Play You’re Looking For” each score 5.9 stars, signalling global nostalgia and cultural resonance.
ASDA, Heathrow, Marks & Spencer, Etsy and others fill out the leaderboard with very strong uplift scores - across categories.
System1 data shows this isn’t luck: the average star rating among the festive cohort is the highest in five years, and the drivers are clear - emotion, context and familiarity. Amazon’s reuse of a previous winner, Waitrose’s four‑minute rom‑com energy and Coca‑Cola’s evergreen seasonal theme all tap into emotional memory while maintaining consistency of creative identity.
System1’s analysis highlights that the most effective ads this year aren’t merely watched, they’re felt. “Happiness accounted for around 60% of responses,” and ads that lean into place, story and emotion generate stronger brand building as well as sales potential.
What this means for retail media teams:
Creative longevity beats one‑off novelty. Winning ads leaned on familiar characters, established narratives and cultural touchpoints that audiences already understand.
Predictive effectiveness trumps vanity metrics. Star ratings combine emotional resonance with predicted commercial impact - a richer measure than views alone.
Consistency scales. Many top creatives were not new; rather, they built on pre‑existing equity, suggesting that brand memory and repeat exposure are core drivers of cut‑through.
This year’s festive leaderboard reinforces a strategic shift we’re seeing in retail media planning: effectiveness is now defined less by how many eyeballs you get and more by how deep and how enduring the connection is. Emotional resonance and consistency - across platforms, formats and audiences - are becoming the most reliable predictors of both short‑term impact and long‑term value. Retailers and brands should think of Christmas advertising not just as seasonal bursts but as continuously reinforced creative ecosystems with measurable business outcomes.
Find out more here.
4. Retail Media & AI: What’s Working Right Now
Forget theory, the most interesting signals in retail media right now come from hard stats. TikTok Shop click-through rates now rival top-tier email campaigns. Generative AI is measurably improving ad effectiveness. And real-time optimisation isn’t a buzzword anymore - it’s the baseline.
Recent data shows how retailers are actively retooling for performance:
TikTok Shop ads are delivering: CTRs are hitting 4%, with a strong uplift from influencer-driven content.
AI-generated creative is outperforming: WARC data shows 66% of AI-assisted assets scored above average in effectiveness.
Retail media budgets are shifting: 62% of brands say they're reallocating spend to owned and retail media, reducing reliance on social and search.
Measurement gaps persist: 71% of marketers cite cross-retailer standardisation as their biggest challenge - not targeting or inventory.
Loyalty ecosystems are emerging as the glue: Brands using loyalty-linked personalisation see higher repeat conversion and lower acquisition cost.
The takeaway? Retail media has matured into a performance engine, but results aren’t being driven by media presence alone. They’re being driven by precision: creative matched to moment, message matched to mindset.
If you’re not layering AI into creative workflows or treating loyalty data as a media lever, you’re already behind the curve.
Find out more about these stats here.
5. 2026: The Year Retail Media Gets Real
The past few years have seen a flood of Retail Media Networks, budget shifts, and breathless coverage of the "retail media revolution." But 2026 is shaping up to be the year it all gets tested - commercially, creatively and operationally.
What the headlines won’t say, but the data does: the gold rush is over. Retail media isn’t new anymore. The bar is rising, scrutiny is growing, and the distinction between experimentation and real ROI will define the next wave of growth.
What we’re tracking:
Harmonisation will define scalability - Fragmentation across metrics, tech, and formats is now a barrier. Retailers embracing IAB Europe's evolving certification and measurement frameworks will attract more stable investment.
In-store media will (finally) get serious - With agentic AI surfacing intent earlier, converting at shelf becomes critical. Expect hybrid models that fuse digital precision with physical touchpoints.
AI hype will collapse into utility - Agentic systems will mature, but retailers will need to prove value with their own proprietary models, not rely on generic tools. Those who build AI around their own data will win.
Retailers will differentiate through ecosystem design - Self-serve simplicity for smaller brands, multichannel storytelling for enterprise advertisers. Sophistication will lie in orchestration, not inventory.
3rd-party insights will power true competitive edge - First-party data isn't enough. The ability to enrich with external signals (e.g. spend, demographics, behaviour) will separate leaders from laggards.
2026 won’t be about launching more media - it’ll be about designing better ecosystems. Retailers who align media, loyalty, and data strategy will outperform those chasing ad spend without proving value. The winners will integrate AI where it matters, own their models, and treat standardisation as an accelerator, not a constraint.
Read more on what’s next for retail media in 2026 here and here.
This month’s signals reveal a retail media landscape that’s shifting from expansion to scrutiny. Discovery behaviours are mutating fast - shaped less by ad exposure and more by how Gen Z layers AI, creator content, and shareability into one continuous, nonlinear loop.
The ads that landed this Christmas weren’t the glossiest. They were the most culturally attuned, emotionally resonant, and sequenced to match how people really consume. And while the headlines shout about views, the real story sits beneath - in the architecture of campaigns built for speed, modularity and emotional response.
Retail media is entering its accountability era. Growth isn’t enough. Value must now be evidenced - through clearer measurement, tighter orchestration, and smarter connections between platforms, partners and audiences.
The strongest 2026 strategies won’t be louder, they’ll be better wired.