Retail Media Needs a Unicorn. That's Why It Can't Hire Anyone.

Every retail media brief we've taken to market in the last six months has the same shape.

It reads like a Frankenstein CV. Ten years in commerce. Deep programmatic. Data science-adjacent. Ad tech platform experience. Brand-side strategy. Sell-side relationships. Fluent in Amazon Ads, ideally Alibaba, definitely Shopee. Ideally based in Singapore. Ideally under 40.

Ideally, in other words, a unicorn.

The problem isn't that unicorns are rare. It's that the brief is asking for a 10-year career in a category that hasn't existed for 10 years.

This isn't a hiring problem. It's a category problem — and the sooner the industry accepts that, the faster the hiring gets solved.

The four disciplines that meet inside a retail media role

Part of what makes retail media hard to hire for is that most people outside the space still misunderstand what the role actually contains. It looks like one job title. It's really four disciplines forced into one seat.

Commerce. How retailers actually make money. How categories are managed. How a promo calendar affects margin. How a listing gets found. What “share of shelf” means in an online context. This layer comes from years spent inside retailers or on the brand side selling into them.

Programmatic and media buying. The mechanics of how ad inventory gets bought, priced and optimised. DSPs, SSPs, bid strategies, attribution windows, incrementality tests. This layer comes from years spent inside a media agency, an ad tech platform, or a performance team.

Data and measurement. How first-party retailer data gets structured, exposed and made actionable. What “closed-loop attribution” actually delivers versus what it promises. How to read a media mix model that includes retailer sales data. This layer usually comes from an analytics or data science background.

Brand and commercial strategy. How retail media budgets sit inside a broader marketing plan. When retail media is complementary to brand advertising and when it's cannibalising it. What the P&L trade-offs are. This layer comes from brand-side experience.

Every retail media role we brief on asks for at least three of the four. Some ask for all four. Genuinely — we've seen job descriptions that require deep commerce, deep programmatic, deep data and deep brand, all at senior level, in one person, based in Singapore.

That candidate doesn't exist. And they wouldn't be under 40 if they did.

The category grew faster than the careers

Retail media is, by most measures, the biggest story in digital advertising right now. Globally, it's been the fastest-growing digital segment for five consecutive years — expanding 14.1% in 2025 and still growing at 12.3% in 2026. In APAC, the growth is even sharper: retail media and CTV are absorbing the majority of incremental programmatic spend across the region.

APAC alone accounts for roughly USD 263 billion of the global programmatic pie — around 32% of the total — growing at 11.6% annually. By some forecasts, retail media will overtake CTV as the biggest incremental spend channel in the region by the end of this year.

That's the good news for platforms and retailers. It's not the good news for anyone trying to hire.

The category has grown much faster than any coherent career path through it. There is no “Retail Media Manager” degree. There are no 15-year veterans who came up through it, because it wasn't really a category 15 years ago. Every person currently succeeding in a retail media role got there by stitching together experience from three or four adjacent disciplines and learning the rest on the job.

The average retail media professional we place in APAC has less than four years of directly relevant experience in the discipline as it's currently defined. Most have more like two.

That's not a talent problem. That's a category problem.

What Digiday called it (and got right)

Digiday recently spoke to three ad executives currently hiring for retail media roles. All of them said the same thing: they can't find candidates who check every box.

But — and this is the important bit — they weren't calling it a talent shortage. They were calling it a training shortage.

“Up until this year, those things didn't exist,” Eric Brackmann, VP of commerce media at Koddi, told the publication, referring to college graduates with formal retail media training. His team only started hiring grads with formal retail media education in 2026, because that's when those programmes started producing them.

That reframe is the entire point. If the problem is a talent shortage, the answer is to look harder — to fish in a bigger pond, to hire a search firm, to raise the offer. If the problem is a training shortage, the answer is fundamentally different: pick the strongest layer, and build the rest.

The companies we see hiring well for retail media in APAC right now have quietly made this shift. They've stopped asking for a person who already knows everything. They've started asking who has the strongest foundation in one of the four disciplines, and what training and structure will get them the rest inside twelve months.

It's not a lower bar. It's a different bar. And it produces a better team.

What we're actually seeing on briefs

We've started rewriting retail media briefs before we take them to market. Not because clients don't know what they want — but because what they're asking for is a composite of three careers that haven't collided yet in SEA.

Here's the pattern we see most often:

• A brief asking for “10+ years retail media experience.” The category has only existed at scale in this region for four or five years. That candidate doesn't exist. If you're being pitched them, verify carefully — you're either being sold a rebranded traditional media buyer, or an unusually senior person early in this specific discipline.
• A brief asking for someone who can own the platform (Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop, Amazon), the ad tech stack, the data pipeline, the brand relationships and the commercial P&L. That's four full-time jobs. Compressing them into one role guarantees either a bad hire or a burned-out one.
• A brief asking for someone who has been on the retailer side, the brand side and the ad tech side. Almost nobody in APAC has done all three. If they have, they've been headhunted three times over and they're not on the open market.
• A brief asking for platform depth across multiple marketplaces. Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop and Amazon each have their own ad platforms, their own data logics, their own commercial teams. Genuine depth across all of them is rare. Depth in one, competence in one more, and a plan for the rest is realistic.

The hire that works isn't the unicorn. It's the person who's genuinely strongest in one layer and can credibly learn the others. Usually that means someone from programmatic who understands commerce, or someone from commerce who's spent a year deep in the ad tech stack.

The gap between those two candidates and the brief is 90% training. It's almost never capability.

Where the strongest hires are actually coming from

Across the retail media briefs we've closed in the past twelve months, three candidate profiles keep working. None of them look like the unicorn.

The programmatic operator who moved into commerce. Usually started on a DSP or in an agency's programmatic team. Spent four to six years learning how paid media actually gets bought, then moved into a retail media role at a platform or brand and learned the commerce layer in real time. Strong on ad tech and measurement. Weaker on retailer relationships and category management — but that's the layer that trains fastest.

The category or commerce manager who leaned into media. Came up on the retail side — understands promo cycles, shelf logic, category dynamics, retailer stakeholder maps. Started running paid promotions in-platform and got pulled into media planning as retail media budgets grew. Strong on the commerce and brand layers. Weaker on programmatic depth — but they know what they don't know and hire around it well.

The publisher-side or SSP alum who moved retailer-side. Less common but very effective when it works. Someone who spent five to eight years on the supply side of ad tech and understands ad inventory, yield and revenue optimisation from the inside. When they move to a retailer's media team, they bring a mindset most brand-side hires don't — the retailer as a media owner, not just a sales channel.

All three archetypes share one thing: they got hired for their strongest layer, and they got the space to learn the rest. None of them arrived complete.

What retail media roles actually need vs. what most briefs ask for

If you're briefing a retail media role in the next quarter, this is the checklist worth running against yours.

Most briefs ask for:

• 10+ years retail media experience
• Platform expertise across every major SEA marketplace
• Ownership of media, data, brand and commercial layers
• Prior retailer-side, brand-side AND ad tech-side experience
• Ready to deliver from day one

What actually works:

• 3–5 years in one strong adjacent discipline (programmatic, commerce, planning) with genuine curiosity about the others
• Deep expertise in one or two platforms — not all of them
• Clear ownership of one or two layers, with the right team structure around the rest
• One prior side of the market plus real willingness to learn the others
• A first 90 days built for learning, not delivery

The candidate who fits column two isn't harder to find. They're just not who the brief is asking for.

Building a first 90 days that assumes training

The other half of hiring well in retail media is what happens after the offer letter lands.

If the hire is strong in one layer and learning the others, the first 90 days can't be treated like a normal onboarding. There are three things the best teams we work with put in place before day one.

1. A named partner for each of the layers the new hire doesn't yet own. Not a training deck. Not a document. A specific person — internal or external — who's on the hook for teaching the layer, answering questions and unblocking. If the new hire is strong on programmatic and weak on commerce, they need a category or retailer lead who's genuinely allocated time to bring them up to speed.

2. A 90-day plan that explicitly separates “learn” from “deliver”. The first 30 days should be almost entirely learning. The next 30 should be shadowing and small wins. The final 30 should be the first real delivery moments. Companies that expect delivery from day 15 will lose the hire — either to burnout or to the next recruiter who calls.

3. An honest conversation about the layer the hire will not become an expert in. Some layers are learnable inside a year. Some take three. The hire who owns commerce and programmatic is unlikely to become a data scientist. That's fine — but the team structure needs to reflect it. If it doesn't, the same role gets briefed again in 18 months.

None of this is exotic. It's just structural clarity, applied specifically. The teams that do it end up with strong retail media talent inside a year. The teams that don't end up rebriefing.

One more thing

Retail media consolidation is accelerating. Smaller platforms are struggling. Larger retailers are going direct to advertisers. The category is compressing at the same time it's growing — which means the pressure on hiring is going to sharpen, not ease.

The teams building strong retail media capability in APAC right now aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones asking clearer questions before they write the brief.

If you're sitting with any of these questions right now:

→ Are we briefing this role for a candidate who realistically exists?
→ Which layer of retail media capability do we need to own, and which can we buy or partner?
→ How would we structure a 90-day plan that lets the right person learn what they don't know yet?

Talk to us. We spend most of our time on exactly these conversations.
chat@uncommonlygoodpeople.com

Sources

• How retail media's identity crisis is fueling a talent crunch — Digiday
• Retail Media Growth, Statistics, and Trends for 2026 — Fugo
• Global ad spend set to surpass US$1 trillion in 2026, APAC leads growth — Marketing-Interactive
• Asia-Pacific Programmatic Advertising Market — Size, Trends & Growth — Mordor Intelligence
• ugp placement data, H1 2026 (internal)