A year ago, Cotswold Outdoor Group launched its retail media network, writes Jamie Kristow, CEO of Cotswold Outdoor Group.

Since then, we have been cited in trade press, referenced at industry conferences, and held up as an example of what specialist retail can do when it stops thinking of itself merely as a place to buy things and starts thinking of itself as a high-value media environment.

The recent HOKA campaign on March 7 delivered a 30 per cent increase in share of revenue, a 13.3 per cent lift in incremental units sold in activated stores, and product engagement nearly four times higher than the control group. Those numbers are real and we are proud of them.

But if I am being honest about what the past year has actually looked like from the inside, the story is more complicated, more demanding, and ultimately more instructive than any campaign result communicates on its own.

We Built the Network Whilst Rebuilding the Foundation

Launching a retail media network is not a marketing decision. It is an infrastructure decision. And we made it at the same moment we were undertaking a significant business and group-level digital transformation; a new customer experience platform and a data integrity programme that touched virtually every part of how we operate.

That combination created complexity that was, in retrospect, underrepresented in our change management planning. When you are simultaneously reengineering your CXP, cleaning and unifying your data estate, and launching a commercial media proposition to brand partners, you are not just running three workstreams in parallel. You are running them in interdependency.

We navigated that. And what is emerging on the other side of it is genuinely exciting. The capability we are building into the platform right now will unlock value in our retail media network that was simply not possible twelve months ago.

The commercial opportunity ahead of us is significantly larger than what we have already demonstrated. But I want to be direct: getting here required investment, tolerance for complexity, and organisational patience that should not be underestimated by any retailer considering this path.

The Change Management No One Talks About

The technology is the visible part of a retail media network, and we’ve got great partners in Zitcha to support us there. The organisational change is not visible, but it is where the real work happens, and where the real risk lives.

Building our network required us to transform how marketing, data, measurement, retail operations, merchandising, and trade teams work together. These are functions that have operated – successfully, I should say – with a degree of structural separation for years. We have people in this business who carry institutional knowledge that no system can replicate. The challenge was not to replace that knowledge. It was to connect it.

That meant upskilling teams across the organisation, not just in technical capability, but in a new way of thinking. We needed people to become genuinely curious about data they had not previously had access to, to be comfortable with faster feedback loops, and to trust cross-functional conversations that previously would not have happened. We had to break down silos that were not broken through lack of intelligence or effort, but through decades of structural separation that simply had not needed to change until now.

That cultural shift is ongoing. It is not something you solve in a quarter. But the progress is visible. The quality of our campaign planning, how quickly we can respond to performance signals, and the conversations we are now able to have with brand partners about what the data is actually telling us are all reflections of this progress.

Marketing Integrity Is Not Optional

One of the less comfortable truths about launching a retail media network is that it forces you to hold a mirror up to your own marketing accountability. When you are selling media to brand partners based on the quality of your data, your attribution, and your ability to demonstrate incrementality, you have to be able to meet that same standard yourself.

Our level of sophistication from a marketing integrity perspective had to increase materially over this past year. We invested heavily in our omnichannel data capability, in media attribution frameworks, and in understanding the richness of the signals available to us across our customer estate. That work made us significantly better at understanding the true value of our own marketing investment, not just the investment our partners make through the network.

That accountability is now a genuine competitive strength. Brands like HOKA, Asics, Montane, and Nike are not partnering with us because we can offer them screens. They are partnering with us because we can offer them proof. Proof of incrementality. Proof of audience quality. Proof of commercial outcomes. The integrity of that proof starts with how seriously we take our own data.

What the Next Chapter Requires

One of the less obvious shifts of this past year has been in how we think about the role of our buying function. Historically, a buyer’s accountability ended at the purchase order – select the right product, negotiate the right terms, get it onto the floor. That discipline remains essential. But in a retail media environment it is no longer sufficient. Our buyers now own the full product lifecycle from purchasing through to the end customer.

That means understanding how retail media investment can accelerate rate of sale and reduce markdown risk, and it means sitting with brand partners not just to negotiate ranging and margin, but to co-design go-to-market activation that genuinely connects product to consumer.

The buyers who have leaned into this are becoming some of the most commercially rounded operators in our business — because they are now offering brand partners something more valuable than a range decision: a route to the customer, with data behind it.

That commercial evolution only works, however, when every go-to-market tactic is pulling in the same direction. The campaign that moved the needle for HOKA was not built on a single channel. It worked because in-store digital screens, onsite placements, CRM, and paid media were designed as a unified system rather than a collection of independent activations.

That level of integration requires planning disciplines and briefing processes that align marketing, digital, retail, and trade around a single view of the customer journey from the outset. When it works, the effect is compounding – each tactic amplifies the others, and the whole becomes significantly more powerful than the sum of its parts.

Underpinning all of it is a commitment to keeping the customer at the centre of every decision we make. In specialist retail, customer trust is the most valuable asset we hold – and it is also the thing that makes our retail media proposition worth something to brand partners in the first place.

What we are building with brands like HOKA, Asics, Montane and Nike is not an advertising arrangement. It is a storytelling partnership.

Their product expertise, combined with our customer knowledge and the depth of our service environments, creates something neither party could deliver alone: a rich, relevant and genuinely useful experience for the customer at the exact moment it matters most.

A customer mid-gait-analysis, or deep in conversation about expedition layering, is not a passive audience. They are at the most consequential point in their purchase decision. Connecting them with the right brand story at that moment is what this network was always built to do.

I am looking forward to an honest conversation at Shoptalk, not just about where we’re going, but where we’ve been.

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