Brazil is the fastest-growing retail media market in the world. And if you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in Latin America, iFood is the story you need to know.
In this episode of Unlocking Retail Media, James sat down with Sam James, VP of Ads at iFood, live on stage at the Retail Media FC Summit in São Paulo. Sam has spent the better part of a decade in Brazil, moving through Uber, Groupon, and then a stint as Chief Digital Officer at Carrefour before joining iFood almost a year ago. What he's helped build in that time is remarkable.
Here's what we covered, and what the global retail media industry can learn from it.
The Brazilian Market: Nascent, Fragmented, and Exploding
Before we get into iFood specifically, it's worth understanding the market they're operating in.
Brazil is projected to be the fastest-growing retail media market in the world over the next three to four years. But the market is also uniquely fragmented. In Brazil, the top 10 retailers represent just 19% of total sales. Compare that to 52% in the US, or over 80% in markets like Germany and Italy.
That fragmentation creates real challenges. Smaller retailers don't have the capital to invest in retail media technology. Advertisers are forced to navigate dozens of disconnected relationships to run a single campaign. The infrastructure just isn't there yet.
But where others see fragmentation, iFood sees opportunity. With 80% market share in food delivery, partnerships with 45 of the top 50 grocery players, and over 20,000 pharmacies on the platform, iFood is positioned as the aggregator that consolidates demand without competing against the retailers it works with. That's a critical distinction, and one that sets iFood apart from the Amazon model.
From Seller Ads to Brand Campaigns: The iFood Maturity Curve
Sam walked us through the progression of how iFood built its retail media business, and it's a playbook worth studying.
Step one was seller ads. Simple, scalable, low-touch. Over 100,000 restaurants advertise on iFood today, managed by a team of just 10. For any marketplace, this is the obvious starting point: create a performance-driven ad product that lets sellers buy incremental orders on a clear P&L basis.
The natural ceiling of that model, though, is the size of your platform's GMV. Once Sam's team started building out the grocery and pharmacy verticals, brands started knocking. And brands think about advertising very differently from restaurants.
"Marketing budgets as a whole don't grow," Sam said. "It ends up being a zero-sum game. Whereas the restaurant looks at it like, 'How much can I spend to get this order and still be profitable?' the brand is asking, 'What's going to give me the best return across all my options?'"
That shift in buyer mindset requires a different commercial motion entirely. It means investing in brand-building formats, building a relational sales team, and proving performance against real metrics. iFood responded by layering in display advertising, CRM, and offsite media on top of its core sponsored search product.
The Offsite Bet: Why iFood Is Taking First-Party Data to Meta and Google
The most forward-looking part of iFood's strategy is its offsite offering, accelerated by its November acquisition of Advolve, an AI-native performance marketing company.
The thesis is straightforward: brands are already spending on Meta and Google. iFood has first-party transactional data on 60 million consumers, covering essentially all of Brazil's Class A and B customers. So why not take that data offsite and help brands get better results on the channels they already use?
"I can provide almost a strictly better experience end-to-end," Sam said. "I have closed-loop measurement, the best audience in Brazil in terms of knowing the customer, and best-in-class technology for optimizing the campaign."
The early results speak for themselves. iFood ran a campaign with a major Brazilian beer brand using a co-bidding model where both parties put in 50% of the budget. The incremental ROAS was 30. When you factor in that each party only contributed half the spend, the effective return was even more compelling.
This co-bidding approach is genuinely novel. iFood controls the performance marketing budget for its grocery and pharmacy businesses, which means they can negotiate in real time and invest alongside brand partners without the internal bureaucracy that would slow down a traditional retailer.
"What other publisher is going to come and say, 'You give me money, but I'm going to put money with you'?" Sam put it plainly. "It's a win-win for everybody."
The Agency Layer: A Market-Specific Challenge
One thing that makes Brazil particularly interesting, and challenging, is the dominance of agencies. Approximately 80% of brand spend in Brazil flows through an agency of some kind.
That creates a two-tier commercial problem. The trade marketing budgets that sit directly with brands are relatively easy to unlock without agency involvement. But those budgets represent only about 20% of total spend. To access the remaining 80%, iFood has to go through agencies, which requires a completely different sales motion, different relationships, and different proof points.
iFood has already signed contracts with all the major agencies in Brazil. But Sam was candid that there's a lot of ground still to cover. The offsite product has helped open doors, partly because it offers a different rebate structure than Google or Facebook would provide directly, which is increasingly valuable to agencies as the major platforms reduce their rebate programs.
Measurement: Honest About Where They Are
On measurement, Sam was refreshingly straightforward. Most brands are still asking for ROAS, and iFood delivers it. A ROAS of four to five is the benchmark that keeps clients happy.
But as iFood pushes further into mid-funnel and brand-building budgets, the metrics need to evolve. Brand lift, CPM, and reach-based KPIs become increasingly important. Sam has recently brought in a dedicated resource to build out that measurement infrastructure.
It's a common challenge across retail media networks globally. The industry built itself on a foundation of performance measurement, and now it's trying to speak the language of brand advertising at the same time.
Sampling: The Underrated Opportunity
One of the more interesting ideas Sam shared was around product sampling. iFood believes its logistics network and audience intelligence can fundamentally rethink how sampling works as a marketing channel.
"If I can bring the intelligence of who exactly I need to give that bag of Doritos to for maximum effect, that unlocks a ton of value," Sam said. The concept is straightforward: instead of producing and distributing trial-size samples through the traditional supply chain, brands insert full-size SKUs directly into commerce orders, targeted to the right customer at the right moment.
The economics work better, the logistics are simpler, and the data to measure new-to-brand acquisition is already built in.
AI at the Core
iFood is deeply AI-enabled across the business. Sam described Advolve as the first truly AI-native company he's encountered, where the boundaries between product and engineering have essentially dissolved. His entire commercial team works with dedicated AI agents. And iFood is in the process of integrating its Databricks environment with Claude, which Sam says is enabling analysis in 15 to 20 minutes, which would have previously taken a week.
In ads specifically, Sam sees a structural advantage. Because the ads business operates at the periphery of the core iFood platform, they can move faster and take more risk with AI-driven products without affecting the underlying marketplace.
What the Rest of the World Can Learn
iFood's story offers several clear lessons for retail media networks at any stage of maturity.
Start with seller ads and get them right. The sponsored search business still drives the overwhelming majority of iFood's revenue, and it funded everything that came after.
Build toward aggregation. In fragmented markets, the most powerful position is the one that consolidates demand across multiple retailers without competing against them.
Take first-party data offsite. Brands are already spending on Meta and Google. If you have better data, you can earn a share of that budget by making their existing spend more effective.
Align incentives through co-investment. The co-bidding model is genuinely differentiated, and it works because iFood controlled the budget needed to make it real.
Move fast with AI. In an industry where data is the competitive advantage, the ability to analyze it in near real-time changes what's possible.
Brazil's retail media market is still early. But with a player like iFood setting the pace, it's not going to stay that way for long.
Listen to the Full Conversation on Unlocking Retail Media
For more insights like these, tune in to the full episode of Unlocking Retail Media, the podcast where Kevel CEO James Avery sits down with industry leaders and innovators shaping the future of retail advertising.
Listen to this episode with Sam James here.
