CPGmatters

Brands Strain to Meet Audiences as Retail Media Networks Catch Fire

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Leora Kelman discusses Retail Media Networks

FOR CPG MARKETERS, the rise of Retail Media Networks (RMNs) continues to create opportunities to drive brand awareness and sales lift in stores by advertising to shoppers much nearer to the point of decision.

The lion’s share of this ad spending in North America has been concentrated on a handful of the very largest digital RMNs. Now many more retailers are angling to capture a fair share of this growing pie, installing digital screens, promising better measurement and even bringing merchants to the table.

At January’s National Retail Federation (NRF) pre-Expo conference day in New York, “What’s In-Store for Retail Media Networks,” sponsored by STRATACACHE, an all-star cast of industry experts and practitioners offered bullish forecasts and strategic advice for advertisers.

Originallly published in CPGmatters.com, Feb. 2026. Reproduced here by permission.

“The retail media market is exceptionally concentrated between Amazon and Walmart,” said Leora Kelman, Managing Director and Partner for Boston Consulting Group, noting that Amazon will control more than 75% of all retail media spending “through at least 2027.”

In-store is a more level playing field than ecommerce. A handful of digital giants command more than half of all online retail sales, led by Amazon with 40 percent, Walmart with 7 percent, Apple and eBay with 3 percent each, as reported by eMarketer in its May 2025 Forecast.

By comparison, total retail sales are far less concentrated, with Walmart garnering 11 percent and Amazon capturing just 5 percent in the NRF 2025 Top 100 Retailers ranking.

“How do we capture that attention of all of the people that we are not reaching through Amazon and Walmart?” Kelman asked. “They are shopping local retailers and a much, much wider range of players. How do we make sure we’re telling stories across those touchpoints? This is a huge opportunity.”

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Unified Shopper Engagement is Coming. Are Brands Ready?

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Unified customer engagement panelists at Groceryshop

CALL IT UNIFIED SHOPPER ENGAGEMENT. Once-sharp dividing lines that have separated trade marketing from personalized offers from retail media are blurring, as trading partners pursue best total returns across the full marketing funnel.

At the recent Groceryshop event in Las Vegas, executives from Ahold Delhaize USA’s AD Retail Media, Kroger Precision Marketing, and Walgreens Advertising Group shared how their organizations are each taking a more connected approach with these core marketing processes, to cover more of the spectrum of shopper engagement. They have aligned organizational structures and platforms to make this possible.

“We brought the digital merchandising team inside the retail media practice,” said panelist Bobby Watts of Ahold Delhaize USA. “We call it our connected store initiative.”

Originallly published in CPGmatters.com, Nov. 2025. Reproduced here by permission.

Watts’ job title offers a clue to what’s happening. He is SVP, AD Retail Media, Digital Merchandising & Marketing.

He elaborated in an interview: “We believe that you need to bring these areas together and build a holistic omni-channel commercial plan. This includes brick-and-mortar display, brick-and-mortar promotions, and price.”

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Is Category Management Ready for AI?

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AI Category Management

WITH THE ADVENT of Artificial Intelligence, Category Management is poised to get faster, more frequent, more connected and more accurate.

At least those are the promises we keep hearing from advocates of AI-powered decision tools: Your AI agent will access more and better data sources… Its decision tools will slash the duration of planning cycles… It will recommend actions in minutes that presently occupy countless hours for human merchants… It will plan and track personalized promotions with greater granularity… It will free human experts to focus more on strategy and less poring over spreadsheets.

If even some of this turns out to be true, CPGs could be facing some foundational changes in the way they collaborate with retailers to bring their products to market.

For Dr. Brian Harris, widely credited as the developer of the eight-step framework that solidified Category Management in 1997, AI holds the potential to re-animate a widely-used business process that has become a rote (plodding) exercise for many.

“Six months to develop a plan is no longer good enough. You need it within six weeks or even six days,” he said.

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As Retail Media Evolves, Brands Face Tough Challenges

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Shopper media experience

AMONG THE MANY CHALLENGES facing CPGs in their efforts to make sense of retail media networks has been a pervasive storytelling bias.

On daily basis, we encounter widespread published commentary and reports celebrating retail media’s headlong growth, along with advice on tech, measurement, and monetization for retailers. Much of it comes from solution providers, consultancies and ad agencies vying to cash in on the burgeoning media sales opportunity. Wall Street analysts have been a megaphone for this side of the story too.

This article is part of a series. Republished here by permission from CPGmatters.

The bandwagon effect has been so powerful, the lure of “new” digital revenue so enticing, that critical thinking is too often abandoned by analysts and bloggers. Spending forecasts are frequently represented with “hockey stick” charts. With each new quarterly release, it seems as if proponents keep expanding the definition of “commerce media” to help drive the forecasts to new heights.

Meanwhile, for brand marketers (the lion’s share of all that juicy ad spending) pragmatic guidance about RMN strategy and practices seems relatively hard to come by.

Balancing the retail media story

As we have been documenting here in recent months, retail media is just now emerging from its nascent state. The digital network side has been dominated by early adopters who pioneered search and sponsored product advertising – Amazon Ads, Google Ads, Walmart Connect, Albertsons Media Collective, Kroger Precision Marketing, Instacart Carrot Ads, and a few others.

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