Latin America Retail Media Trends 2024: Unpacking the Region’s $2 Billion Opportunity

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Retail media is taking Latin America by storm as advertisers anticipate the cookieless future. With more robust ad formats and solutions emerging, retail media spending will rise to nearly $2 billion in 2024, according to our inaugural forecast.

Key Question: How is retail media advertising changing the paid media mix in Latin America?

Key Stat: Retail media ad spending in Latin America will triple in size between 2024 and 2028, rising from $1.84 billion to $5.45 billion. At which time, it will represent 15.6% of the region’s digital ad market.

Executive Summary

  • Retail media will be the fastest-growing digital ad format in Latin America. Advertisers will spend nearly $2 billion on retail media this year, and we expect outlays to triple in size between 2024 and 2028. Increased spending from advertisers in the region’s two largest ad markets, Brazil and Mexico, will help the format grow to represent 15.6% of Latin America’s digital ad market.

  • Mercado Libre will lead the region’s retail media charge. We expect it to become a $1 billion digital advertising player for the first time this year, representing more than half of total retail media ad spending in Latin America. Amazon’s digital ad revenues will also grow by double digits in Brazil and Mexico, but the company will struggle to reverse its declining market share in the region. This is a stark contrast to Amazon’s dominant position in other parts of the world, including Canada, the US, and Europe.

  • Several factors will fuel retail media’s fire in Latin America. Traditional search engines are falling out of favor with consumers as they rely more heavily on retailers’ digital properties for product research. These behavior shifts are causing advertisers to move spending away from traditional search engines to retail media. The format also provides advertisers in Latin America with some of the highest returns on ad spending (ROAS) in the world, creating an opportunity too good to pass up.

  • Retail media will set advertisers up for success in a post-cookie world. The delayed (yet pending) loss of third-party cookies will boost the value of retailers’ first-party data sets when planning and implementing their campaigns. Advertisers should use the extra time to experiment with different retail media platforms and formats to determine the ones that best align with the goals and objectives they’re looking to achieve.

Read the full report here.