A skincare marketer and a technology marketer described what worked, what could not be measured, and what they want from retail media networks. IAB Australia published the recording today.

IAB Australia today released video of the brand panel from its Commerce & Retail Media Summit, held on 7 July 2026 at the NSW Teachers Federation Conference Centre in Surry Hills, Sydney. The session, titled RMN or CMN: Brands - Commerce and Retail Media Experiences and Measurement, ran between the discoverability discussion and the closing innovation panel, and it produced the only campaign-level performance numbers disclosed publicly from the day.

According to the summit programme, the panel featured Briana Garcia, Marketing Manager for Global Media at Microsoft, Isabel Gallardo, Senior Ecommerce Manager at Galderma, and Ellie Yi, Global eCommerce Lead at Arnotts, with Georgia Thomas of Georgia Thomas Consulting moderating. The recording as published captures roughly half an hour of discussion, dominated by Garcia and Gallardo, and it covers budget direction, campaign results, team structure, measurement gaps and creative production.

A three-format Amazon test produced the panel's only hard numbers

Gallardo, who manages ecommerce for a dermatology company whose consumer portfolio includes Cetaphil and Benzac, described a campaign run in the fourth quarter of 2025 across three Amazon advertising surfaces at once. Prime Video carried the upper-funnel message. Amazon DSP handled consideration. Sponsored ads on the retailer site handled conversion. The same creative ran across all three placements.

Shoppers exposed to all three formats were nine times more likely to convert, according to Gallardo, and the campaign recorded a consideration lift of 4.5%. It was the brand's first use of Prime Video advertising. "This has obviously then given us ammunition to invest more money into Prime Video this year," she said.

The scale of the test matters as much as the result. "We aren't investing millions," Gallardo said, describing the budget as small and the exercise as a deliberate test-and-learn effort intended to justify continued spending in 2026. Amazon's position as an online-only environment made the measurement cleaner than comparable activity elsewhere. In-store activations, she noted, leave no equivalent trail: what shoppers look at on shelf cannot be connected to what they later do online.

The result lands against a wider Amazon strategy that has been consolidating separate buying surfaces into a single full-funnel proposition. Alan Moss, VP of Global Advertising Sales at Amazon Ads, described live sports, Prime Video, retail media signals and AI campaign tools as one business rather than separate lines in May 2026. The Galderma test is an advertiser-side demonstration of the same logic, executed on a modest budget by a category that is not usually associated with streaming inventory.

Where the money actually sits

Asked directly by an audience member whether Amazon spending had been reallocated from other networks or funded separately, Gallardo drew a clear line. Cetaphil is the company's largest brand, and the majority of its sales run through Chemist Warehouse. "The Chemist Warehouse network is massive and we continue to spend a lot of money with them," she said, describing the pharmacy chain as the company's number one retailer. Amazon budget, by contrast, came partly as incremental funding drawn from other areas of the business.

That ordering is a useful corrective to the visibility Amazon commands in retail media discussion. The largest network by advertiser attention is not necessarily the largest by advertiser outlay, and a smaller online-only retailer can function as a testing environment precisely because it is small enough to experiment in and clean enough to measure.

Chemist Warehouse featured elsewhere in the same summit. In the content-to-commerce session, the chain was identified as a retailer whose appearances in Google AI Overviews rose 220% in a quarter, a discoverability shift that sits upstream of the media buying decisions the brand panel described.

The internal disconnect the research flagged, described from inside

Thomas opened the structural section of the panel by referencing a finding from the State of the Nation research on the disconnect between trade and brand teams. Both panellists confirmed it from experience.

Garcia occupies an unusual position: a paid media role that works with retail trade teams. "You need all the right people in the room and that's going to be, you know, trade, retail, brand, paid media, creative," she said, describing coordination as more critical in retail media than in any other channel. The practical checks she runs extend beyond messaging. Whether the product being pushed in advertising is actually in stock at the retailer, and whether the same message appears in store, both fall inside the remit.

Gallardo described a split rather than a silo. She fully manages the company's ecommerce channels but sees only the sponsored ads component of pharmacy and grocery activity, with commercial teams retaining other elements including in-store. "The shopper doesn't distinguish as well where the retail media is coming from," she said, which is why message consistency across the fragments matters more than which internal team owns them.

That split has been documented repeatedly. IAB Ireland's December 2025 retail media report described FMCG organisations running brand, shopper marketing, trade and digital budgets as separate pools with different objectives, KPIs and datasets. The research released at this year's Sydney summit found that 56% of Australian buyers still keep trade and media budgets apart, with nearly half of retail media investment now fully reallocated from other channels.

Gallardo's proposed remedy was education rather than restructuring. She pointed to the report's suggestion of an industry training component and noted the difficulty of keeping internal teams current as network capabilities multiply. Team structure, she said, is the fundamental variable, and it differs at every business.

Measurement: benchmarks, lift studies and a clean room

Neither panellist claimed measurement was solved. Garcia framed it as a question the industry has been trying to answer for a long time, adding that a working solution would already be in universal use if one existed.

Her argument was that advertisers should not wait for networks to supply the answer, and that the question itself needs changing. Return on ad spend and revenue remain the business goal, she said, and sales and retail teams will focus there. The marketing question begins afterwards: what did or did not drive that result, and what would have happened without the spend. In higher-consideration categories such as electronics, she argued, the decision is largely made before the shopper reaches the retailer. "You've probably already made up your mind by the time you got to the retailer," she said, with a good offer or price often deciding between the two options already shortlisted.

Incremental lift studies and brand lift studies were her answer to that gap. Her worked example was a creator campaign built around trust rather than product promotion, matching each device to the creator's job and lifestyle. The measurement was deliberately not limited to revenue: a brand lift study tracked awareness, preference and purchase intent. Garcia connected that choice to a slide from the State of the Nation research showing brand awareness declining as a stated objective while purchase intent and action intent grew alongside conversions.

The constraint she identified is structural. Lift studies run on individual platforms, in silos, producing no unified attributional view. She raised the possibility of commerce partners supporting more standardised or holistic lift studies across networks, and she named the tying together of offsite and onsite by commerce technology partners, Criteo among them, as a development of the past 12 to 24 months in the Australian electronics category.

Gallardo's methods were different. She asks retailers for category benchmarks, which give her a reference point for judging campaign performance internally. Some retailers have supplied in-depth studies showing how the brand is growing market share within the skincare category, and that evidence has helped justify incremental investment. On the technology side, she reported testing Amazon Marketing Cloud audiences, segmenting first-party audiences to build on-site display campaigns and A/B testing which audience pools perform best. Amazon made the clean room directly accessible to sponsored ads advertisers in September 2025, removing the partner coordination previously required. Whether comparable capability arrives across other networks, Gallardo said, remains open.

The measurement complaint runs through the whole summit. Panellists at the 2025 edition identified omnichannel attribution as the central unresolved issue, and campaign data published in June 2026 showed siloed attribution missing conversions that occur in physical stores.

Creative sequencing and the spec problem

Creative received less attention in the research than the moderator thought it warranted, and both panellists treated it as an execution bottleneck rather than a craft question.

Garcia said her team tries to run creative development and media planning in parallel, rather than building a media plan around finished assets or discovering mid-plan that no video exists. The technical friction is mundane and expensive: formats across networks are almost identical without being identical. Assets end up the same shape but one specification off, requiring resizing across every partner. Artificial intelligence tools help with that resizing work, she said, while the relationship between creative, brand and paid media has to be established first.

Gallardo drew a firmer boundary. Global brand guidelines constrain what can be automated, and the product category constrains it further. "I don't know how much I trust an AI bot showing before and after skincare images," she said. For a claims-driven skincare brand, the controllable variables are clear messaging, called-out product claims and promotional information that gives a shopper a reason to buy.

What brands asked networks for

Asked what they would request from retail media networks in the room, the panellists named two different things.

One request was for best-practice visibility: what the strongest advertisers are doing on each network, without naming them, so brands can see what best in class looks like. The other, from Garcia, was support for lift studies and omnichannel studies, including footfall visibility, on the grounds that those exercises currently run in silos on separate platforms.

Both requests describe the same underlying gap. Networks hold the data that would let advertisers judge their own performance in context, and most do not release it in a form that survives comparison across partners.

Why this matters for the marketing community

The Galderma numbers are the most transferable part of the session. A nine-times conversion likelihood for shoppers exposed to streaming, programmatic display and sponsored ads together is a full-funnel argument made on a budget the advertiser describes as small, in a category with no obvious streaming logic. For teams told that full-funnel retail media requires enterprise-scale commitment, the counter-example is now on record.

The budget disclosure matters just as much. Chemist Warehouse absorbing the majority of spend while Amazon serves as the measurable test bed describes how many advertisers actually operate: one dominant retailer relationship carrying volume, and a smaller, cleaner environment carrying experimentation. Networks competing for share should note which role they are being cast in.

For retail media networks specifically, the two requests put to the room are cheap to satisfy relative to their commercial value. Category benchmarks and anonymised best-practice examples require no new technology. Cross-platform lift study support requires cooperation more than invention. Buyers surveyed for the State of the Nation research said an IAB certification would increase their willingness to work with a partner, and only 22% of networks described their own offering as advanced. The distance between those two figures is where competitive advantage currently sits.

And for brand teams, the panel restated a point the research has made in successive waves without resolving: the shopper does not care which internal budget paid for the message. The retailer's site, the store shelf and the streaming ad are one journey to the person being asked to buy. Every seam visible in that journey is an artefact of how the advertiser is organised.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Briana Garcia, Marketing Manager for Global Media at Microsoft, and Isabel Gallardo, Senior Ecommerce Manager at Galderma, speaking on a panel moderated by Georgia Thomas of Georgia Thomas Consulting. Ellie Yi, Global eCommerce Lead at Arnotts, was also listed on the session. IAB Australia hosted and published the recording.

What: A brand-side panel on commerce and retail media experience and measurement. Disclosures included a Q4 2025 Galderma campaign combining Prime Video, Amazon DSP and sponsored ads that produced a nine-times conversion likelihood among shoppers exposed to all three formats and a 4.5% consideration lift, a statement that Chemist Warehouse rather than Amazon carries the majority of the company's spend, testing of Amazon Marketing Cloud audiences for on-site display, and a Microsoft creator campaign measured through a brand lift study covering awareness, preference and purchase intent.

When: The panel took place on 7 July 2026. IAB Australia published the recording today, 28 July 2026.

Where: The NSW Teachers Federation Conference Centre in Surry Hills, Sydney, with the summit running from 12.30pm to 5.00pm.

Why: Retail media investment in Australia is increasingly reallocated from established budgets while measurement remains inconsistent across networks. The panel supplied campaign-level evidence of full-funnel performance from a small budget, alongside a description of the internal budget splits and cross-platform measurement gaps that continue to limit what advertisers can prove.