What Myer launched
On July 16 Myer unveiled the Myer Media Network, an in-house retail media offering that lets brand partners buy advertising against the retailer's first-party customer data. The first phase is an onsite digital advertising platform serving sponsored products and campaigns across myer.com.au, built on Mirakl Ads, an AI-native retail media platform. The pitch to brands is precision targeting powered by what Myer knows about its own shoppers, and the strategic intent is to convert audience attention that Myer already commands into a media inventory that suppliers will pay to reach, rather than leaving that spend to walled-garden platforms.
The engine is MYER one, the department store's long-running loyalty program. Amanda McVay, Myer Group chief customer officer, said Myer has one of the country's most engaged loyalty communities alongside a rapidly growing digital business, and that MYER one insights will help power brand campaigns. The network is being positioned as omnichannel from the start, with onsite advertising as the opening move rather than the full scope. That sequencing is deliberate: onsite placements are the easiest inventory to launch and measure, and they let Myer prove the model before extending into offsite media, in-store screens and the loyalty channels where MYER one already reaches customers directly.
Why loyalty data is the asset
Retail media works because the retailer owns something advertisers cannot easily get elsewhere: verified, logged-in purchase data tied to real identities. As third-party cookies keep degrading and privacy rules tighten, that first-party signal becomes the scarce input for targeting and measurement. A loyalty program like MYER one turns anonymous browsing into named customers with known purchase histories, which is the exact raw material a media network needs. The same data that once justified a discount program now underwrites an advertising business, and the marginal cost of using it a second way is close to zero.
Michael Sharlassian, appointed general manager of retail media, framed the strategy around unlocking that data at scale. He said Myer is building a comprehensive omnichannel retail media offering that unlocks the full scale of its loyalty data, giving brands a more unified way to connect with customers where relevance matters most. For a technology leader, the implication is that the loyalty platform stops being a marketing cost center and becomes the data backbone of a new revenue line. That reframing raises the stakes on data quality, identity resolution and consent management, because every gap in the loyalty record becomes a gap in what the media network can credibly sell.
The marketplace made this possible
The media network did not appear in isolation. Myer launched a Mirakl marketplace on myer.com.au last month, adding more than 25,000 new products and global brands to its online assortment through third-party sellers. That expansion does two things at once: it widens the catalog customers can shop, and it creates a roster of sellers who now have a commercial reason to advertise for visibility inside Myer's own store. A marketplace with thousands of sellers competing for the same shopper attention is, in effect, a built-in demand pool for advertising the moment the media network opens.
Running both the marketplace and the ad network on Mirakl keeps the seller relationship and the media relationship inside one platform. Sellers who join to reach Myer's audience can pay to stand out in it, and Myer captures margin on both sides. That build-once, monetize-twice structure is a large part of why marketplace and retail media projects increasingly ship together rather than as separate initiatives. It also simplifies the integration burden, because seller onboarding, catalog data and ad targeting draw on a shared platform rather than three vendors that a small technology team would otherwise have to stitch together.
Buying capability instead of building it
Myer's choice to run on Mirakl Ads is a clear build-versus-buy signal. Standing up a retail media network from scratch means building ad serving, auction logic, campaign tooling, targeting and closed-loop measurement, all of it, before a single brand dollar comes in. By licensing Mirakl's platform, Myer gets to market faster and puts the engineering emphasis on its data and loyalty integration rather than on ad infrastructure. For a retailer whose core competency is merchandising rather than adtech, that allocation of effort is the difference between launching this year and staffing a multi-year platform project that may never reach parity with specialist vendors.
Tzipi Avioz, Mirakl's chief executive for Asia Pacific and Japan, said combining Myer's trusted brand, loyalty scale and digital momentum with Mirakl Ads' advertising technology lets Myer create a high-performing network. The division of labor is telling: the retailer supplies the audience and the trust, the vendor supplies the pipes. For most retailers below the very largest, that split is the only economically sane way to enter retail media. The risk to manage is platform lock-in, so the terms that matter most are data portability and whether Myer can carry its measurement and audience definitions elsewhere if the relationship changes.
The talent signal
Hiring matters as much as tooling here. Myer recruited Sharlassian from Coles 360, the retail media arm of one of Australia's largest grocers, a deliberate move to bring operator experience rather than learn the discipline on the job. Retail media is a specialized craft that blends ad sales, data science and measurement, and the people who have already scaled a network are scarce and in demand. Bringing in someone who has run the playbook at a larger competitor compresses the learning curve and sends a credibility signal to the brand teams who decide where their trade dollars go.
That hire tells brand partners Myer intends to run this as a serious business rather than a pilot. It also tells the market that department stores now compete with grocers and marketplaces for the same retail media talent. For technology and commerce leaders watching from other retailers, the lesson is that the platform decision and the leadership hire are two halves of the same bet, and getting one right without the other rarely produces a network brands take seriously. A best-in-class platform run by an inexperienced team, or a veteran leader without the data plumbing, both stall in the same place.
What it means for retail leaders
Retail media has become one of the few genuinely high-margin lines available to a traditional retailer, because the cost of goods is data the business already collects. Myer's launch shows the now-standard playbook: stand up a marketplace to widen supply, wrap it in a loyalty program that produces first-party data, then license an ad platform to monetize the resulting audience. Each layer reinforces the next, and the sequence is repeatable enough that any mid-sized retailer with a loyalty base and a digital storefront can reasonably map its own version of it.
The open question is execution. A retail media network lives or dies on measurement credibility and on not degrading the customer experience with too many sponsored placements. For a CTO or chief customer officer, the roadmap items are clean loyalty data, a tight marketplace integration and honest attribution that brands will trust. Myer has assembled the pieces, and the next few quarters will show whether the data quality underneath is strong enough to keep advertisers spending. The retailers that win this category treat ad load as a customer-experience constraint rather than a revenue dial to turn up until conversion suffers.
