Retail media is not an entirely new concept at The Iconic. For at least half of its 15-year history, the platform has been signing marketing and advertising deals with brand partners. And, much like a snowball, the fashion and lifestyle business has been scaling its retail media tech stack as it saw fit.
For a time, it worked just fine. But management started picking up on the potential of this media space, which led them to offer Joshua Nunan – The Iconic’s then general manager of sports, beauty and home – an entirely new employment contract.
Nunan stepped into the new director of marketing partnerships role in February last year, essentially kickstarting the reset of The Iconic’s digital retail media arm. Since April 2026, he has been director of platform media and services.
“I changed roles, and that's when we really broke it apart and really did a complete transformation on exactly what it should stand for; what's the real flywheel for success,” Nunan says.
Working with The Iconic’s overarching parent company Global Fashion Group, Nunan pulled together and assigned a global and local team of ten people to help establish a new media arm, with another five in the local team joining in. He says the last five were influential in the reset.
Eighteen months later, Iconic Media was born, with much of the new infrastructure being built and developed in-house. This includes self-service advertising technology that allows advertisers to create, manage and optimise onsite advertising campaigns in real time.
Much of this was done through leveraging Global Fashion Group resources to rebuild the new media arm, which included building a server and accompanying technology and the software programs to run it all.
“Iconic Media is a real shift from just selling placements to building what we like to call a growth platform for brands,” Nunan says.
In the first half of 2026, The Iconic’s new media platform delivered 160 per cent year-on-year revenue growth with an average return on ad spend (ROAS) of 390 per cent for sponsored products. Currently supporting over 290 brands, the platform noted these results reflect growing partner demand.
The Iconic also launched another tool in the rebuild called carousels, which Nunan says is increasing campaign frequency. With this, brands log on, conduct a multi-layered quality control and approval workflow, and place content directly onto app tile.
“They're going on there, they're loading these elements on, they're getting the results in real time, and of course the frequency of campaigns has been heightened because they're able to test things. We've got brands now testing content in our environment,” Nunan says.
This means brands are able to see what campaign content works with The Iconic’s consumer base, get the real insights on the spot, and react to that and apply it to their broader DTC strategy. Despite what you may think, Nunan says The Iconic doesn’t mind that at all.
“We're happy for customers to go into stores,” he says. “We're happy to support brands and their extended store network.
“Yes, we've got more partners, definitely, but it's been driven by smarter investment, not just more investment.”
For Nunan, retail media can’t just be the last click anymore, simply because the customer journey is no longer linear. He says that if a brand only spends at the bottom of the funnel, then it is just competing for demand that already actually exists. It’s not creating new demand.
“The customer journey now moves way beyond discovery, inspiration, research and social media, and it's not in an obvious order anymore. That means retail media budgets need to work harder across the full journey,” Nunan says.
Of course, sponsored products remain critical for conversion, but The Iconic is also seeing partners invest in discovery-led formats that build consideration earlier through rich content, catalogue visibility and storytelling.
At the crux, Nunan calls Iconic Media a growth multiplier for its core retail operations. Essentially, it is part of the online retailer’s flywheel. And while The Iconic doesn’t have a massive physical retail network like other players in the retail media space, like David Jones with its 30,000+ touchpoints or Kmart with its 300+ stores across Australia and New Zealand, Nunan believes the platform's digitally native history is a key advantage.
For one, online advertising can be tracked and measured better than an in-store billboard, in terms of views, clicks, hover time and more.
And while much of the marketing partnerships are driven online, Nunan says this can also include out-of-home activations as well.
“We've just come off sports where we did an ASICS run. That was fantastic,” he says. “We did a Puma Hit class, and we also did an Adidas watch party for the World Cup. So we're always going to meet our customers in a physical environment. But I think what sets us apart is being native and digital in the customer journey.”
Looking ahead at retail media, Nunan says the next chapter is not going to be won by who sells the most advertising, but by who makes advertising and commerce most useful. He predicts four key shifts ahead:
“We're going to go from placements to performance, which talks to my point before. We're going to go from advertising to growth ecosystems. I mean, the strongest retail media businesses will connect media with customer insights, trading data, fulfilment, everything across that broader funnel, and bringing it into a commercial strategy.
“I think we'll go from reach to relevance. Customer relevance is so key. It's not just about more inventory; it's about actually finding the customers that makes sense.
“I also think agentic commerce is going to accelerate this evolution. If you think about the new world that's coming, retailers are going to need to respond quickly because discovery and decision making is increasingly happening through AI-led journeys.”
On the last point, Nunan says The Iconic is in a really good position, as Google tapped the platform to trial its new Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) in Australia, which allows shoppers to complete single-item purchases directly within Search, AI Mode and the Gemini app.
“We're looking forward to bringing all these learnings that we're doing through this pilot, and bring it back into our flywheels. So making customer discovery more relevant, helping brands respond to demand faster, and continuing to evolve how media and commerce comes together.”