Brad Montgomery

Commercial Lead APAC · QSIC

Consumer confidence just dropped 13.1 points in a year. Business confidence fell off a cliff, down 29 points in 2026 alone. Nearly 6 in 10 business owners expect bad times ahead, and almost half say it's a bad time to invest. Read those numbers on their own and you'd think retail is bracing for a collapse.

It isn't. It's splitting.

Retail Didn't Slow Down. It Went Two Ways.

Roy Morgan laid this out at REmade Sydney last week, and it's the clearest read on FY27 I've seen. Demand hasn't disappeared, it's become asymmetric. The same shopper who won't pay a $4 premium on pantry staples will happily drop $400 on beauty, sport, or tech.

• Personal entertainment and cameras are up 24.3% this year.
• Sporting equipment is up 16.1%.
• Meanwhile, cosmetics is down 3.2% and footwear is down 4.1%.

Total retail is basically flat at negative 0.1%, and that flat number is hiding all of it.

Here's the part that should worry anyone running a media budget on gut feel: the middle is getting squeezed out. Retailers and brands that can't win on price and can't win on desire are stuck, and price itself isn't a fixed mindset anymore. A shopper can be in "save mode" on Monday and "reward mode" by Saturday, and no demographic model will tell you which one you're talking to on any given day.

So the strategic question isn't whether the middle can hang on. It's which end you're moving towards, and whether you can prove it's working while you're still moving.

The Human Side of Retail Media Transformation

This is where most retail media conversations stall out. Everyone agrees measurement matters. Almost nobody agrees on what it should actually look like, because "measurement" means something different depending on who's in the room.

TerryWhite Chemmart's TWC Connect story, also shared at REmade, is the best real-world proof of this I've heard. They took us on a journey and generously shared many of their learnings across their journey. When they introduced retail media internally, every department read it differently. Marketing called it a new way to engage customers. Merchandise asked if it was just trade by another name. Finance wanted to know the return. Pharmacy wanted to know what it meant for their store. As their team put it, the challenge wasn't getting everyone to agree, it was getting everyone to understand how their piece fitted into the bigger picture.

It took three years of deliberate work, department by department, building a shared language before Marketing's "new-to-brand" and Finance's "incrementality" and Ops' "dwell time" were understood as three views of the same result. That effort paid off: TWC Connect finished the year up 52%, and they're scaling to 500 screens by December.

What Brands Are Actually Asking For

Every conversation I have with partners eventually lands on the same question: can you show me incremental sales lift or iROAS, not just plays or reach, but actual sales impact, measured consistently across everything they're running in-store.

That's not a coincidence. The brands asking hardest for this are the ones who've already nailed the basics and scaled their retail media spend, and are now trying to run full-funnel campaigns across onsite, offsite, and in-store at once. The moment they do, their measurement stops keeping up. Audio gets measured one way, screens another, signage by whoever sold the placement, and the brand is left trusting a patchwork rather than seeing a result.

This is exactly why QSIC Intelligence exists. It pulls every in-store channel into a single view tied to POS and loyalty data, so sales lift, incrementality, and new-to-brand are measured the same way across every channel, in minutes rather than weeks. For retailers, that's a single, defensible view of what's actually working across the store, and a real answer the next time a buyer asks if in-store performs. For brands, it's finally being able to compare in-store against every other channel on the same terms.

Demand has split and confidence is down. Nobody has budget to spend on hoping something worked. The retailers and brands who win from here are the ones who can prove it, fast enough to act on it while the campaign is still running.

More retailers are activating their networks and seeing the value in retail media, and that's a good thing. QSIC helps you go further: end-to-end solutions from hardware, through GTM and strategy, to real-time optimisation and full measurement and reporting. We've made the mistakes so you don't have to.