Tesco Retail MediaFrom four-week delays to AI-powered creative compliance

Tesco Retail Media was facing a growing operational bottleneck. Brands could launch campaigns quickly almost everywhere except inside the creative approval process. Every campaign asset needed to pass through complex compliance requirements before going live. Creative teams were dealing with lengthy approval cycles, inconsistent submissions, manual compliance reviews, repeated back-and-forth edits and campaign launch delays. What should have taken days was taking weeks. In some cases, getting creative live on Tesco Media could take up to four weeks.

The challenge wasn't lack of demand. It was the operational friction sitting between campaign creation and campaign launch. Tesco Retail Media partnered with &above to explore whether AI could dramatically reduce creative time-to-launch without compromising compliance standards.

The first challenge wasn't building the product. It was proving the AI could reliably handle highly specific retail compliance requirements.

The team built an evaluation suite to test Google Gemini against real Tesco Retail Media approval rules and workflows. The objective was simple: Could AI identify compliance issues accurately enough to become part of the approval process? The evaluation benchmarked Gemini against alternative large language models across rule interpretation, confidence scoring, issue detection, compliance accuracy and recommendation quality. Gemini consistently outperformed competing models in identifying compliance problems with the highest confidence levels.

That validation created the foundation for the next phase.

&above designed and developed an Auto Compliance module directly within the Tesco Retail Media advertising workflow. The system dynamically composes compliance rules at runtime depending on advert channels and placements, including onsite media, offsite campaigns, Instagram Stories, Facebook posts and banner formats.

Rules covered legal compliance requirements for regulated categories such as alcohol and betting, platform-specific advertising policies and Tesco brand guideline adherence. Using Gemini's multimodal capabilities, the platform could understand creative structure, embedded text, pricing and promotional elements and Tesco brand assets and lockups.

Before campaigns entered manual review, the system scanned uploaded creatives against hundreds of Tesco-specific compliance rules. Instead of waiting for human intervention, the platform could now detect non-compliant creative, flag approval risks early, recommend fixes, reduce unnecessary review cycles and accelerate campaign readiness. Structured feedback meant end users could understand exactly what was wrong with a creative in minutes rather than weeks.

The compliance engine was also built for continuous optimisation. A database-driven prompt and model configuration layer allowed teams to A/B test prompts and rule updates, evaluate model performance over time, reprocess historical creatives against updated rules and improve compliance accuracy continuously. Compliance evaluations themselves became a feedback loop, helping improve both creative quality and operational efficiency over time. The experience was designed to feel operationally invisible.

The AI layer reduced friction inside an already complex process. For marketing teams, that meant fewer delays, fewer revisions and significantly faster campaign turnaround.

Alongside the compliance engine, &above developed a drag and drop ad builder that enabled users to create campaigns that were compliant from the outset.

Starting from a single base creative, the system could automatically derive all other required formats based on a constraint-driven templating system. The platform ensured campaigns always included the correct asset sizes and specifications, eliminating common submission issues caused by missing or incorrect formats. Built around Tesco brand guidelines from the ground up, the editor automatically applied Tesco-approved lockups, Clubcard pricing graphics, legal messaging and promotional formatting standards.

Once generated, all assets were automatically passed back through the same AI-powered compliance workflow for validation before approval. This shifted compliance further upstream, reducing errors before submission rather than correcting them later in the process.

Just like the compliance rules, ad-ops had the flexibility of editing and defining new templates to reflect changes in brand guidelines.

The project focused heavily on practical implementation rather than AI novelty. Retail media environments involve multiple stakeholders, strict governance requirements, high campaign volumes, evolving compliance standards and pressure to launch quickly. The solution needed to work reliably inside real operational conditions. That shaped both the product design and technical architecture.

The system also had to integrate with existing Tesco Retail Media infrastructure and legacy APIs that were not originally designed to support modern AI-driven workflows. Rather than rebuilding operational systems from scratch, the platform was engineered to work within those constraints while still delivering reliable automation and scalable performance.

The system was built to integrate into existing approval workflows, operate reliably across fragmented platform integrations, scale across large campaign volumes, support changing rule sets, maintain consistency across reviews and reduce manual operational overhead. The result was an AI-powered compliance workflow built for enterprise retail environments rather than isolated experimentation.

The impact was immediate. What previously took up to four weeks could now move through the system in days. By identifying issues earlier and automating large parts of the compliance process, Tesco Retail Media reduced friction across the entire campaign lifecycle.

The platform helped accelerate campaign launches, reduce manual review workloads, improve creative quality before approval, streamline collaboration between teams and create a more scalable retail media operation.

Most importantly, it removed a major operational blocker preventing brands from launching campaigns efficiently.

The Tesco Retail Media project demonstrated how AI can create measurable operational value when applied to highly specific workflow problems. Rather than using AI as a standalone feature, the solution embedded intelligence directly into the point of friction.

The result was faster campaign deployment, reduced approval bottlenecks, improved compliance confidence, lower operational overhead and a more scalable advertising workflow.

For &above, the project reinforced a key principle of enterprise AI adoption - the most valuable AI products aren't the most futuristic, they're the ones that remove friction from systems people already depend on.