Retail media’s growth has opened doors for brand visibility and customer engagement, but it’s also reshaping how consumer packaged goods brands (CPGs) and retailers allocate marketing dollars.
To succeed, brands must strike a balance that benefits the trifecta of stakeholders—the consumer, the retailer and the supplier, said Marisa Perez, senior vice president of digital commerce sales at PepsiCo, Chicago.
Perez was on a panel discussion with Jen Fitting, vice president of e-commerce at Ferrara, based in Chicago, at Supermarket News’ Grocery NEXT event, which took place last week in Itasca, Illinois.
Retail media networks (RMNs) have become a powerful lever in delivering on that trifecta, she said. It helps drive relevance and engagement with shoppers, supports retail goals, and fuels CPG business growth. It also builds customer loyalty by enabling greater agility and responsiveness through closer partnerships with retailers, she said.
Unlike traditional advertising, however, retail media requires a new skill set. Perez said she’s focused on upskilling internal sales teams so they can effectively navigate the increasingly complex retail media landscape.
“There aren’t enough people, and it’s not financially viable to have a dedicated marketing person for every single retailer,” Perez said. “So, how do we upskill our sales talent to not just talk to their merchant, but also engage with RMN leads or tech partners? There’s a lot of work internally to prepare our teams for the future.”
From a marketing perspective, retail media now influences both brand awareness and short-term sales, said Fitting. That dual role makes thoughtful planning essential.
Ferrara is planning its marketing strategies a year in advance, with careful consideration of retail media’s role in both long-term branding and short-term sales goals.
“You can’t have everything sit in one pocket,” Fitting said. “It’s got to be a balance so you can manage both short- and long-term objectives. But again, as retail media evolves, it has the ability to influence both, which is really exciting.”
This shift is leading companies like PepsiCo to stop treating retail media and national media as separate efforts, said Perez. Instead, it’s trying to plan them as part of a more cohesive, integrated strategy.
But breaking down those traditional silos has also created new budgeting complexity, Perez said.
A decade ago, digital marketing mostly involved simple tactics—boosting Facebook posts or running static display ads. Back then, it was easier to tap into advertising and marketing budgets, because results were immediate and tied to incremental sales.
Today, those same budgets are being pulled in many directions, across long-term brand building, short-term conversions, equity marketing and retail-specific investments.
“It’s great that the silos are breaking down, but it’s also creating this dynamic tension of: Where do we actually spend the money? What’s the best place to invest?” Perez said.
To navigate those questions, data is essential.
Perez said her team uses data to prove incrementality, for example, analyzing campaign performance when paid search is turned on versus off. They also use tactics like dayparting to maximize efficiency.
“When performance data isn’t available, the conversation is typically short—and that channel doesn’t get the funding,” she said.
Long-term planning is also complicated by the evolving nature of search behavior. Brands now target a wide range of keywords, not just brand and category terms, but also occasion-based and intent-driven queries. That creates nearly limitless ways to structure paid search campaigns, Perez said, but also adds a layer of complexity that’s difficult to manage without precise strategy and resources.
Fitting said marketers are now more equipped to handle these complexities than in the past. Before the pandemic, conversations around paid search often involved educating stakeholders on its value. Now, those discussions are more strategic.
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