Retail media has fundamentally reshaped how brands drive growth, turning digital commerce into one of the most measurable advertising environments. As quick commerce accelerates consumer adoption and purchase decisions move closer to the moment of intent, the next phase of this evolution is already taking shape. By combining retail media with real-time retail intelligence, brands can move beyond visibility to make faster, sharper, and more informed decisions that fuel sustainable growth.
For most of the last decade, “retail media” in India meant exactly two names: Amazon and Flipkart. And the numbers show just how large that duopoly grew. Amazon India’s advertising revenue rose 25% to ₹8,342 crore in FY25, up from ₹6,649 crore the year before, now contributing nearly 28% of Amazon Seller Services’ total revenue. Flipkart’s trajectory is even more striking: from ₹1,008 crore in FY20 to ₹4,973 crore in FY24 to ₹6,317 crore in FY25, a near 600% expansion in six years, with advertising now making up 31% of Flipkart Internet’s topline.
Together, that is close to ₹15,000 crore of retail media revenue; larger than several traditional media categories in India. But it’s important to see this for what it is: the peak of a fifteen-year e-commerce cycle. It took a decade and a half of building consumer habits, seller ecosystems, logistics networks, and search behaviour before advertising became a meaningful monetisation layer. Retail media was the harvest at the end of a very long sowing season.
The second wave: quick commerce compressed the cycle
Quick commerce has run the same playbook in under three years. Zepto’s DRHP makes the case vividly: advertising revenue grew from just ₹49 crore in FY24 to ₹651 crore in FY25 to ₹1,636 crore in FY26; a 33x jump in two years, growing two and a half times faster than the underlying commerce business. With 2,468 brand partners, including advertisers like CRED and AU Small Finance Bank, that don’t even sell products on the platform. Zepto is, in a very real sense, as much a publishing company as a delivery company.
Extrapolate from there. Per Datum Intelligence data cited by Reuters, Zepto holds roughly 22% of India’s quick commerce market, with Blinkit at 46–48% and Swiggy Instamart at 24%. If Zepto’s ₹1,636 crore of ad revenue maps to its market share, the total quick commerce retail media pool is already in the region of ₹6,000–7,500 crore annually — built in a fraction of the time e-commerce took, and compounding faster. And the economics explain why: per Redseer data cited in Zepto’s DRHP, brands on quick commerce generate a return on ad spend of 5–8x, because the ad reaches a consumer minutes — not days — away from purchase.
The third layer: the rise of retail intelligence
But this new media machine has created a new problem and a new market. Unlike the two-horse e-commerce era, there are now five to six quick commerce platforms: Blinkit, Zepto, Instamart, BigBasket’s BB Now, Flipkart Minutes, and Amazon Now; all vying for leadership, all with different assortment logics, pricing dynamics, and consumer bases.
More fundamentally, quick commerce is hyper-local in a way e-commerce never was. What is true in one dark store is not true in the next dark store, let alone the next city. Assortment decisions, stock availability, share of shelf, and consumption patterns vary by the demographics of the population living around each pin code. A brand can be winning in Indiranagar and invisible in Andheri — on the same platform, in the same week.
This has created intense demand for retail intelligence: the ability to see, at pin-code granularity, how a brand is performing across platforms, including availability, share of search, pricing, competitor moves, ad effectiveness. Retail media tells brands where to spend; retail intelligence tells them whether it’s working, store by store, pin code by pin code.
The evolution of brand growth
Put these together and something bigger emerges: brands are now being built on quick commerce in an entirely different, data-led manner, end to end.
It starts with the product itself. New product development is increasingly shaped by data on where the whitespace lies, which price point is unoccupied, which market segment is underserved, and which pack size the channel actually rewards.
It continues through launch. Rather than a national rollout, brands identify which pin codes and which platforms are likely to deliver the best early results, seed those geographies, and expand from there.
And it extends into validating the marketing conversion funnel: how conversion behaves across platforms and geographies, down to nuances like what time of day consumers on each platform buy the most, and tuning ad spend, availability, and pricing accordingly.
The understanding of consumer behaviour, channel behaviour, and the brand’s own strength is being constructed in an entirely data-led way, not from annual syndicated reports, but from live, granular signals.
Retail media gave brands a new place to spend. Retail intelligence gives them the nervous system to spend it well. The first fifteen-year cycle operated with two platforms and one playbook. The next one is starting with six platforms, thousands of dark stores, and data as the operating system of brand growth.
(Views are personal)
