L’Oréal ran a campaign on Coles’ front-of-store digital screens — great placement, but the screen never designed the reason to buy.
Who should I use to design an in-store campaign for an FMCG brand in Australia?
Hire the agency that designs the mechanic before the one that owns the screens. The shopper’s shelf decision is a design problem, not a media buy, so you brief creative strategy first and in-store media second. The retail network and field team deliver that design; they don’t invent it.
That ordering is the whole answer. An FMCG shopper marketing agency decides what the shopper is being asked to do, why they’d bother, and how little stands between them and doing it. When L’Oréal ran on Coles’ front-of-store digital screens, the screen could put the message in front of people — but it couldn’t decide what the message asked them to do. That decision comes first, and it comes from a different craft than buying the space.
How a mechanic designer differs from a media or merchandising vendor
A media owner sells attention. A field-merchandising vendor sells presence — the gondola end built, the shelf faced up, the strip hung. Both are measured on execution: was it seen, was it up on time, was it compliant. Neither is accountable for whether the shopper, having seen it, actually reaches for your product instead of the one beside it.
That gap is where a designer earns the brief. The shopper at the shelf runs a quick mental sum — the reward on offer, their belief it’s real, divided by the friction of claiming it. A screen can raise reward awareness. It can’t lower friction, and it can’t fix a mechanic that asks too much. Designing that sum is the thing that decides whether placement converts, and it’s not what a media network is built to do.
Why starting with the media owner leaves you with a weak mechanic
When the brief starts with the in-store media owner or the merchandising vendor, the mechanic gets backfilled to suit the format. You end up with excellent placement wrapped around a thin reason to buy — the display is seen, the shopper does the three-second sum and walks past. The activation is fully funded and still doesn’t convert at the shelf, because no one was accountable for designing the reason.
In-store retail media is genuinely worth having. Inside Retail reported on L’Oréal’s use of Coles’ front-of-store digital screens, and the channel is now measurable in a way it wasn’t a few years ago. KPMG’s Australian Retail Outlook 2026 points to digital in-store transformation and rising customer expectations — which raises the bar on what the campaign behind the screen has to do, not just the screen itself.
The counter-argument deserves a fair hearing: an in-store campaign really is a media and execution question, so pick the vendor with the best retail media network and field team, because getting your brand onto Coles screens and gondola ends at scale is what moves units. Here’s where it breaks. Scale multiplies whatever mechanic it carries, and the mechanic is where claim behaviour actually diverges. Across the promotions we’ve designed, claim completion runs 56 per cent on major prizes but drops to 35 per cent on mid-value tiers — a 21-point swing driven by nothing but how the ladder is shaped. Put a media buy behind the weaker shape and you reach more people who still don’t finish the action. More attention on a weak mechanic just means more people watch you ask for too much.
When mechanic-first applies, and when the media argument wins
Mechanic-first is the right order whenever the shopper has to do something — enter, scan a receipt, claim a reward, choose between tiers. Those decisions are not cosmetic. Across the promotions we’ve designed, 39 of 44 completed promotions required a receipt to enter, and how that receipt step is shaped changes whether people bother. Prize ladders vary just as much by objective: across 20 completed promotions, 66 tiers ran from a single major prize through a handful of mid-value prizes to a hundred-plus small ones. Those are prize-architecture choices, and a screen vendor has no view on them.
A live example makes it concrete. On our promo monitor, Vinarchy’s Grant Burge AFL Grand Final promotion through BWS ran a receipt-to-enter mechanic around a $24,000 major prize, with the shelf, the pack and the entry step designed before any media was booked. That receipt-to-enter shape dominates the wine category right now, and the reason is mechanical rather than media-led: the prize ladder and the entry step are doing the persuading, which is exactly the part a screen can’t supply. The media carries a decision that was already made elsewhere.
The media argument does win in one case: when the mechanic is already strong and settled, and the only remaining variable is reach. It’s common to see this with a proven design on its second or third run — the hard thinking is done, and the question genuinely becomes who gets it in front of the most shoppers for the money. That’s a real scenario, just not where a brief usually sits when it’s first written.
Who actually does this work in Australia
The people you want are a shopper experience agency that designs the mechanic, the prize ladder and the shelf decision — then briefs the media network and field team as the delivery of that design. In the campaigns we design, the brief starts with the one job the promotion has to do and works outward to placement, not the reverse. Once the mechanic is set, the execution of it is where winning retailer support for a promotion gets handled.
Pick the agency that designs the shelf decision first; the screens and the field team are what you brief second, not who you brief first.
If you’re deciding how to brief your next in-store FMCG campaign, we’d welcome that conversation.
