The click tax: The trap of Retail Media fragmentation in LATAM
If you are a mass consumption brand in Latin America, you are not buying advertising; you are paying a "data toll" to each retailer separately. Retail Media is the great promise of the decade, but the lack of standards is creating a black hole in marketing budgets. This post analyzes why your reports from Mercado Ads and Rappi are never going to match and how to avoid being charged three times for the same sale.
Latin America is living the "gold rush" of Retail Media. From giants like Mercado Ads and Amazon to regional players like Rappi, Falabella, and Cencosud, everyone has discovered that it is much more profitable to sell clicks than to sell products.
But at Zenda, we don't buy the hype without looking at the numbers. Behind the 20x ROAS dashboards, an uncomfortable reality is hidden: fragmentation is breaking your growth strategy.
1. Walled Gardens: The garden that keeps your margin
The concept of Walled Garden is no longer exclusive to Google or Meta. In LATAM, each retailer is building their own. Mercado Ads doesn't know what you did on Rappi, and the e-commerce of a pharmacy chain has no idea what happened on Falabella.
The real problem: Duplicated attribution. If a user sees your ad on three different platforms before buying, all three retailers will claim the conversion at 100%. According to your reports, you sold triple what actually left your warehouse.
The Zenda solution: Stop measuring silos and start measuring Incrementality. If you cannot run a Holdout test (audience that does not see ads) to compare real sales vs. advertising sales, you are operating blind.
2. From "Brand Awareness" to the "Search Toll"
They sell us Retail Media as a full-funnel strategy (from when the user discovers the brand until they buy). The reality in the region is that most brands are trapped in the lower part of the funnel, paying for clicks from users who were already searching for their brand.
We are seeing a massive transfer of budget from traditional channels toward Retail Media, not because of creative efficiency, but because of the need to "rent" space on the digital shelf. If you don't pay for the Sponsored Product, your brand disappears from the first page. That is not marketing; it is an operating cost.
3. How to survive the third wave without dying in the attempt
For Retail Media in LATAM to be truly scalable in 2025, companies need to stop being "report collectors" and start being "data architects."
Demand Data Clean Rooms: It is the only way to cross your client data with the retailer's without anyone losing control. If the retailer does not offer you transparency about who actually bought, the data is not yours, it is theirs.
Implement MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio): Do not look at the individual ROAS of each platform. Look at your total revenue over the total investment in Retail Media. If the MER goes down while the investment goes up, you are buying traffic that you already had organically.
Retail Media is the most powerful tool to understand buying behavior in real time, but today in Latin America it is being used as a patch for the lack of first-party data.
Do not settle for the green arrows of Mercado Ads. If you cannot validate that every dollar invested generated a sale that would not have occurred otherwise, you are only financing the technological infrastructure of your distributor.