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.”
Panelist Christine Foster, SVP, Kroger Precision Marketing, outlined her company’s evolution: “We took the time to reallocate resources and teams within Kroger to bring our consumer insights, our loyalty marketing, and our retail media businesses together under Kroger Precision Marketing.”
Walgreens Advertising Group has taken steps to integrate its shopper data capabilities with its retail media offering, said Abishake Subramanian, Group Vice President of Customer Marketing and Media Monetization, “It’s important for us as a retailer to help connect the dots and bring that together. And then really serve in a very connected manner what matters the most for our customers when they’re looking for their category needs as they shop.”
Trade meets Retail Media
Bold steps by these retailers may serve to unify the conversation around trade, personalized offers and retail media – in store and digital. Their brand partners should expect to come to the table ready for a more comprehensive joint business planning process.
Are retail media networks “eating” trade dollars, as some experts have been arguing in recent months? Or is trade marketing “eating” retail media budgets? Both propositions have generated spirited give-and-take on industry podcasts and LinkedIn discussions this year.
“The debate about merging trade and retail media isn’t really about budgets. It’s about goals,” said retail media analyst Tom Limongello, co-host of The Middlemen Podcast. “The goal of trade is to get the product on the shelf. The goal of media is to get people to see it and want it.”
He observed that retailers have largely kept the two separate to ensure that media dollars would be entirely incremental to trade promotion spending. Meanwhile brands have sought to minimize incremental spending.
“But when trade and media are planned together, better ideas emerge. You start to right-size signage, messaging, and media across every place a shopper engages.”
Could this set up a new joint business planning paradigm that merges merchandising with media?
Joint planning ahead
At Ahold Delhaize, Watts said, “We bring our merchants together with my team, literally, we call it ‘two in a box,’ the merchant and the retail media team sitting together with our brand partners in the CPG world to say, please bring your marketing folks, bring your sales team, bring your brand folks.”
Kiri Masters, analyst and host of the Retail Media Breakfast Club podcast, has been vocal in the who’s-eating-who debate. “I love to hear Ahold Delhaize making this statement because it is exactly what brands want,” she said.
“They want their contributions to be counted in totality, whether that is in trade, shopper marketing, or digital retail media. For brands, sometimes retail media feels like an upsell on top of what is agreed in the joint business plan, and there’s nothing left in the budget to give.”
She added, “A more effective marketing strategy could be developed when trade marketing and retail media are in sync. Retail media can actually drive traffic to those deals.”
Unified Shopper Engagement
A new kind of retailer organization seems to be evolving here – we might label it Unified Shopper Engagement. Brands will need to learn how to interact with it successfully in the context of joint business planning.
In the next era, retail media networks may no longer be viewed by retailers purely as a source of incremental revenues. Campaigns become part of the full-funnel strategy to support joint sales objectives. At the same time, some trade marketing hard-liners are grudgingly accepting that overall business performance may be better enhanced by balancing spending and strategies – even if it means some formerly sacrosanct trade dollars are repurposed for the greater good.
This sets up an increasingly complex decision process for brands as they confront a new and more intricate form of joint business planning, with all interests at the same table, as Watts described.
“The goal is to reach a consumer inside the physical four walls, but also digitally through all the wonderful retail media capabilities, and then deliver that through a consistent message,” he said.
AD launches Edge
Ahold Delhaize is especially motivated to crack the code on this methodology since it fights an uphill battle for a fair share of retail media dollars versus the half-dozen or so larger RMNs that presently dominate brands’ attention. To that end it announced a new proprietary ad-buying platform, called Edge, during Groceryshop.
Watts explained, “Edge is a platform that we’re launching in the U.S. in partnership with our global counterparts in Europe to be our ad server for on-site display, sponsored product ads, and in-store digital screens.”
He said Ahold Delhaize believes it has earned the right to compete for brand dollars based on the way it goes to market. “We’re going to build an integrated plan with these folks, like the JBP process.”
When Edge launches its on-site capabilities later in 2026, it will bring targeting for on-site display using the retailer’s first-party data. “We can take in consumer behavior, shopping behavior within grocery, and then better target ads on-site for them versus category contextuality or things that are more traditional.”
He added, “The way we see the world is you have to bring all that together in the way you communicate to the consumer.”
Customer engagement outlook
Going forward, Masters suggests that AI-powered agentic commerce may threaten some forms of onsite and offsite retail media revenue. But “trade is resilient,” she maintains.
“Now that retailers have built in the profitable revenue stream from retail media, they will need to be more collaborative with their brand partners and develop advertising propositions that truly are a win-win both for the retailer and the brand.”
Said Limongello, “The goal isn’t to merge the buckets, it’s to merge the planning. A unified view helps retailers and brands plan for performance instead of just allocating budgets, and that plan will look different by category, season, or trip mission.”
Said Watts, “For me, there’s one gauge of success for all of us. And that is, are you selling more cases and driving market share growth? That’s what the brand teams in the CPGs care about.”
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