Retail media is the business of a retailer selling ad space on its own website. When you search a category on a big electronics site and the first few results carry a small "Sponsored" or "Promowane" tag, that is retail media at work. A brand paid the retailer to sit higher on the page than its organic rank would earn. It is now one of the fastest-growing ad channels in the world. But when we look at the Polish consumer-electronics shelf over the last 30 days, almost nobody is running it. One retailer does, and the rest sit close to zero.
Strip away the jargon and it is simple. A retailer owns valuable screen space: the category page, the search results page, the product page. Shoppers land there ready to buy. So the retailer rents that space back to the brands whose products it sells. Pay, and your laptop appears in position two instead of position nine. That is a sponsored listing, and a network of them across a retailer's site is that retailer's retail media programme.
For the retailer it is high-margin money on top of the product sale. For the brand it is a way to buy visibility on a page where the shopper is already reaching for their card. Amazon built a huge business on this, and every large retailer has watched and copied it. If you want the mechanics of how a paid slot differs from an earned one, we broke that down in sponsored versus organic in retailer search.
We track the consumer-electronics digital shelf hourly across the UK, Poland, South Africa and the Nordics, roughly 7.4 million listings a month across 34 retailers. "Sponsored penetration" is the share of category-page listings carrying a paid label. Over the last 30 days on the Polish CE shelf, here is what that looks like:
| Retailer (Poland) | Sponsored Share (last 30 days) |
|---|---|
| Komputronik | 13.5% |
| Media Expert | 3.2% |
| RTV Euro AGD | 0.1% |
| MediaMarkt | 0% |
| Morele | 0% |
| x-kom | 0% |
One retailer, Komputronik, runs real sponsored listings at 13.5%. Media Expert dabbles at 3.2%. Everyone else is a rounding error or a flat zero. Three of the biggest names on the Polish shelf, MediaMarkt, Morele and x-kom, run no visible retail media on their category pages at all. If a shopper browses laptops on x-kom, every product they see got there on its own merits.
The gap is stark once you put it next to a mature market. In May, on the UK CE shelf, Amazon UK ran 27.2% sponsored listings. More than one in four products a shopper saw on a category page was paid placement. Currys sat at 8.5% and Very at 5.2%. We covered the full UK picture in how much of the UK digital shelf is sponsored.
So the UK leader runs double what the Polish leader runs, and the Polish leader is the lone participant while its rivals sit out entirely. Poland is roughly where the UK was several years ago: retail media exists, one player is pushing it, and the rest of the shelf has not moved. That is not a permanent state. It is an early one.
An underused channel is not just a gap. It is information, and it points in two directions at once.
First, whitespace. For a Polish retailer, retail media is money left on the table. Komputronik is the only one collecting it. Any competitor that builds a sponsored programme now enters a market with almost no rivals bidding against it, which means cheap inventory and easy share. For a brand, the same logic runs in reverse: on Media Expert at 3.2% penetration, a modest sponsored spend buys a large slice of the paid slots that do exist, because so few brands are competing for them. Early markets reward whoever moves before the auction gets crowded.
Second, and more useful day to day: on most of the Polish shelf, rank is still earned. On MediaMarkt, Morele and x-kom, where a brand appears is a clean signal. No one paid to be there. If your product climbs on x-kom, that is real organic strength: better content, better reviews, better availability, a genuine improvement in how the retailer's own ranking treats you. On Amazon UK, that same climb might just mean a competitor paused their ad budget. Poland gives you a rare thing, a large shelf where position reflects merit rather than media spend.
Two concrete moves.
The other reason to watch this closely is that it will change. Retail media grew fast everywhere it took hold, and there is no reason Poland stays an exception. The moment a second or third large retailer switches on sponsored listings, the clean organic signal starts to muddy, and the cost of visibility starts to climb. Knowing the baseline now, while it is still mostly zeros, is what lets you spot the shift the week it happens rather than the quarter after. That is the same reasoning behind watching how share of voice moves beneath the number one spot.
Retail media means retailers selling higher placement on their own pages, and brands paying for it. On the Polish consumer-electronics shelf it has barely started: Komputronik at 13.5%, Media Expert at 3.2%, and MediaMarkt, Morele and x-kom at zero, against an Amazon UK running 27.2%. For most Polish retailers that is untapped revenue. For brands it means two things at once: an open door to buy visibility cheaply on the few retailers that sell it, and a large stretch of shelf where rank is still earned, not bought, so position is a signal you can trust.
7.4 million listings, 34 retailers across the UK, Poland, South Africa and the Nordics. Free monthly report with brand rankings, the sponsored split per retailer, and content benchmarks.
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