Reconsidering generational experience in retail media

But as it grows in technical sophistication, it keeps running into a persistent blind spot: it is getting better and better at targeting a shopper, without always understanding what kind of shopping experience it is actually addressing. Yet behind every profile lies a consumption history, ingrained habits, built-up reflexes, and a relationship with brands and advertising that cannot be reduced to an age criterion. This is precisely what transactional data makes it possible to reveal today.

Beyond age: a shopping experience

Retail media, like digital marketing as a whole, has developed the habit of segmenting audiences along generational lines. Cohorts are built - Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z - and then addressed individually with a strong conviction: the right message, at the right moment, to the right shopper. A classic and almost "lazy" segmentation, one that stops at date of birth.

And yet, generational belonging tells us far more. What really matters is how shoppers buy. And for most of them, how they have come to buy out of habit.

A Baby Boomer who has been shopping at the same hypermarket for fifteen years, loyal to their brands and their aisles, does not have the same relationship to the act of purchase as a Millennial entering working life, discovering the autonomy of consumption and making trade-offs between price, convenience and values. Still less than a Gen Z who grew up with digital commerce as their natural horizon - price comparators, online reviews and next-day delivery as implicit standards.

Three generations. Three distinct purchase logics. And yet a single sales channel through which to reach them all.

The experience of consumption - in the sense of the learnings and habits accumulated over time - is a parameter too often overlooked when building a retail media strategy. Because it is precisely these ways of buying that reveal each generation's relationship with brands, and their sensitivity to advertising.

The relationship with advertising: a matter of habit as much as age

The relationship with advertising varies from one generation to the next - but not solely for reasons of age. It is above all a matter of habit: familiarity with the medium, the formats, the modes of solicitation, the acceptable frequency of contact.

A shopper who discovered the internet as an adult had to learn to navigate digital advertising. They learned to tolerate it, sometimes to appreciate it when it proved relevant, but they remain alert to any form of intrusion. A shopper who grew up with a smartphone in their pocket internalised the codes of targeted advertising from adolescence: they understand the mechanics, detect them immediately, and reject them without hesitation the moment they ring false or forced.

This is not merely a behavioural nuance - it is a strategic parameter. The tolerated frequency of exposure, the format deemed acceptable, the level of personalisation perceived as useful rather than intrusive: all of this is generational. And all of it is measurable.

The objective for brands and retailers alike remains the same: for communication not to be experienced as an interruption, but as a service. Something that enriches the shopping experience rather than disrupting it. This is precisely where retail media has a card to play - provided it moves beyond a purely transactional vision of activation.

The opportunity of transactional data

As generational divides become more pronounced, an unprecedented opportunity is opening up for brands: access to transactional data, and its activation in service of more precise personalisation.

Transactional data - recording what shoppers actually buy, how often, in what context, with what regularity - offers a richness that declarative or socio-demographic data cannot match. It does not tell us what consumers think they will do. It tells us what they do, week after week.

Exploited at scale and over time, this data reveals far more than average basket sizes. It makes it possible to distinguish the routine shopper from the opportunistic one, to understand which signal each profile responds to, to anticipate the moments of switching to a competing brand. Combined with a generational reading, it gives brands the means to personalise not only the offer, but the relationship itself.

It is this combination - behavioural depth and generational insight - that enables retail media to move from an activation tool to a brand preference-building tool. No longer simply triggering a purchase, but establishing a lasting relationship with each generation of shoppers, on their own terms.

The retail media that will prevail in the years ahead will not be the one that broadcasts best or segments most. It will be the one that truly understands who it is talking to.