Retail Media Land Grab: T-Bank, Avito and Wildberries Build Ad Platforms as the Segment Heads to 285 Billion Rubles

Autumn 2024 became a land grab for the retail media market in Russia: T-Bank has already begun rolling out its own advertising platform, classifieds operator Avito announced a launch for 2025, and the merged Wildberries and Russ group keeps stacking new ad inventory. According to Kommersant, the online part of the retail media segment, which more than tripled to RUB 163.5 billion in 2023, is on track to reach about RUB 285 billion by the end of 2024.

A wave of platform launches

Most companies that announced an expansion of their advertising business in 2024 belong to e-commerce, and the ads placed on their sites form the retail media segment. The trigger, market participants told Kommersant, is the shrinking pool of targeted ad inventory after Google and Meta platforms were switched off in Russia in 2022 (Meta activities on Facebook and Instagram are recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation): brands lost search and social targeting and shifted budgets to formats such as influencer marketing, which cannot be targeted at all.

• T-Bank started deploying its own ad platform in autumn 2024, treating it as a new revenue line for a business with heavy traffic.
• Avito announced its platform for 2025, while digital books platform Litres launched a click-out service and set a goal of 5% of revenue from advertising by 2027.
• Wildberries and Russ integrated their ad inventories in July 2024 and in November extended the click-out service, open to brands absent from the marketplace, to video formats.
• Yandex announced in October 2024 that it is building a retail media platform on top of Adfox, relying on third-party data.

Why e-commerce holds the data advantage

Retail media platforms sit on purchase history: page views, favourites, carts, average order value and abandoned baskets. That is why the advertising revenue of Ozon overtook VK in 2024, and why in the third quarter of 2024 every second seller on Ozon promoted goods through the seller cabinet, while the number of external advertisers who do not sell on the marketplace grew 1.8 times year on year and their budgets more than doubled.

Segmentation of the new platforms

Industry executives expect the newcomers to compete with Yandex and VK on transaction volumes rather than on data: VK and Yandex mostly serve small retailers and the services sector, while Ozon, Wildberries and T-Bank concentrate on marketplace sellers. For T-Bank, staying out of the market is itself a risk, because marketplace financial services can pull banking customers away.

Market size and the European benchmark

The growth story is not only a domestic one. IAB Europe data cited by Kommersant show retail media growing 22% in Europe in 2023 against 6% for the whole advertising market. In Russia the committee of the Association of Interactive Advertising Development estimates the online retail media segment at RUB 163.5 billion for 2023, more than three times the previous year, and about RUB 285 billion for 2024.

Rates will keep rising

More platforms mean more inventory and more contact points with the client, but not cheaper ads: with quality inventory still scarce, competition will not push rates down, marketers say. Success will depend on how deeply a platform is integrated into its parent ecosystem and on technical basics such as interface, ad formats and transparent analytics; without them, brands judge campaigns by indirect signals and leave.