Retail Media’s Biggest Identity Crisis: Why Brands Are Asking the Wrong Question

Retail Media Breakfast Club · Jun 9, 2026 · 9m · transcript

For years, we've debated where retail media belongs. Is it part of search? Is search part of retail media? In this episode, I revisit a question I posed 18 months ago after a thought-provoking essay from Hershey's Vinny Rinaldi helped clarify what I was missing.

I explore why retail media continues to be funded, measured, and evaluated differently from other media channels, and why that may have less to do with capabilities, and more to do with organizational structures and inherited expectations. I unpack the growing conversation around demand creation versus demand capture, the role of…