Written by
Kate Scully
Published on
August 17, 2026
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Retail media works best when it connects brands with shoppers at the moments that matter.
Football tournaments, warm weather, BBQ season and summer weekends all create natural moments for shoppers to purchase soft drinks and other convenience products. For FMCG brands, the challenge is reaching consumers at scale while keeping that message relevant to where they actually shop.
A leading convenience retail network in the UK found a way to do both. After nearly a year building and monetising its local social media network through SocioLocal’s retail media portal, this convenience retail network recently activated a paid social campaign for a major soft drinks brand, promoting Pepsi across participating convenience stores during a period of football and warm weather.
The campaign demonstrated how a retailer can turn hundreds of local social channels into a single, scalable retail media network.
Rather than asking a brand to manage individual local campaigns, the retailer provided SocioLocal’s centralised solution that allowed one piece of creative to be distributed across hundreds of trusted local retailer pages.
The campaign generated:
The result was national-scale campaign delivery through a network of local audiences - combining the efficiency of centralised media buying with the authenticity of local retail.
For years, brands have faced a trade-off between scale and relevance.
National social campaigns can deliver reach, but they can lack the connection to the local store where the purchase happens. Meanwhile, individual retailer pages have highly relevant audiences but can be difficult to activate at scale.
Retail media built around local social channels changes that model. One campaign can be distributed across hundreds of retailer pages, allowing brands to reach shoppers in the communities where their products are available.
For this campaign, the combination of football, sunshine and local convenience created a particularly relevant environment for a soft drinks brand. The campaign reached shoppers through retailers they already knew, creating a natural connection between the advertising message and the local shopping occasion.
The value of the model isn't limited to the FMCG brand. Participating retailers receive 50% of the revenue generated from branded social posts, turning their local social presence into a new commercial asset.
That creates a three-way value exchange:
For retailers, this is particularly powerful because it doesn't require new physical infrastructure. The social pages already exist. The audiences already exist. Retail media simply creates a way to monetise that existing digital footprint.
The campaign also highlights an important shift in how retail media can be used.
Rather than treating retail media as a series of isolated advertising campaigns, retailers can build always-on opportunities around the moments that influence shopper behaviour.
These moments give brands a reason to engage shoppers, while local retailer pages provide the trusted environment to deliver that message.
The result is a retail media proposition that is not just about selling advertising space - it's about helping brands become part of the moments when shoppers are most likely to buy.
This campaign demonstrates the commercial potential of a retailer's local social footprint. By building engaged audiences across individual stores and creating the infrastructure to sell, distribute and report on supplier campaigns, retailers can transform local social media from a marketing channel into a scalable revenue-generating media network.
And for brands, it offers something increasingly valuable: the ability to combine national campaign scale with local relevance.
The future of retail media won't just be about owning digital shelf space. It will be about owning and activating the customer relationships that exist around every physical store.
Local audiences are already there. The opportunity is to turn them into measurable, monetisable media inventory.
