Retail Media vs Owned Channels: What The Very Group's AI Win Actually Proves

What happened

The Very Group — which runs Very and Littlewoods — has partnered with AI personalisation platform Made With Intent to run real-time, on-site personalisation driven entirely by its own first-party data. The platform analyses more than 800 behavioural signals to predict what a shopper actually wants to see, and when. In its first month, Very reported a 20% increase in revenue per customer from just one of the strategies it ran — a figure independently confirmed by Retail Times. Sarah Hanna, Very's digital director, called it a way to “unlock fast-paced, scalable real-time personalisation that can be executed to help enhance the customer experience.”

Why it matters if you're a brand, not a retailer

Very is a retailer with its own platform and its own customer relationship, so this isn't a direct read-across for an FMCG brand selling mostly through someone else's shelves. But the principle is exactly the one that gets lost in every retail media conversation I sit in: the data a brand already holds — email lists, loyalty sign-ups, D2C order history, app engagement — is usually sitting there half-used while budget flows toward retailer platforms promising reach and “first-party data” that's actually the retailer's first-party data, not yours.

Here's the bit that annoys me: every retail media pitch deck I've sat through this year leads with scale, transparency and measurement. Not one of them has asked what the brand itself already knows about the customers who've bought from it twice. A 20% revenue-per-customer uplift from switching on existing data — rather than buying more of someone else's — is the kind of number that should earn a line in every FMCG media plan review.

The question to ask before your next planning cycle

Before the next budget conversation defaults to “more retail media”, audit what first-party data you're actually sitting on and whether anything is live and utilising it — an email flow, a re-order trigger, a loyalty segment. If the honest answer is “not much”, that's the gap to close before the next line item goes to a retailer — and exactly the kind of retail media vs owned channel audit I help FMCG brands run as part of a media strategy engagement.