Latest / Retail Media Breakfast Club / Retail Media’s Biggest Identity Crisis: Why Brands Are Asking the Wrong Question
Transcript
- Retail Media: Same Job Description, Different Invoice === [00:00:00] Kiri Masters: A lot of you listening would be familiar with this kind of conversation. The brand says to the agency, "Our objective is to build awareness and drive sales." The agency says to the brand, [00:00:15] "Sure, but which one do you actually want?" If you've spent any time in agency land, you've heard that brief 1,000 times. [00:00:26] It sounds like a strategy, but it's really just a cop-out. [00:00:30] Awareness and sales. Sure, mate. That's why we all have jobs. But how much of each? And which one wins when they inevitably resist each other? 18 months ago, I wrote a piece asking something that [00:00:45] felt slightly heretical at the time: Is retail media part of search, or is, search part of retail media? [00:00:53] And on Sunday, over the weekend, Vinny Rinaldi, who is the VP Customer Connections at [00:01:00] Hershey, he published an essay that really got a lot of traction in my network. And reading it, I realized that he'd answered a key question that I had posed back then. [00:01:11] So I went back and reread my own [00:01:15] piece. [00:01:15] [00:01:16] Kiri Masters: My argument back then was that our channel labels had stopped making sense. Retail media is CTV, and it's digital video, and it's search. We're [00:01:30] measuring it often as a separate line on the chart while the formats inside it are often identical to the ones that we had been buying for years. [00:01:40] And so back then, I ran a LinkedIn poll and I asked, [00:01:45] "Is retail media part of search or is search part of retail media?" And 73% of respondents said that traditional digital channels were subsets within retail media. 18% said it depends on who's asking, as in is [00:02:00] the CMO asking about it or is the CFO asking about it? [00:02:03] And only 9% of respondents saw retail media as a subset of search. Now, keep in mind that my audience on LinkedIn is largely people working in [00:02:15] retail media, so that might skew how this question would get asked if you asked a broader set of media buyers what they would say. But the question that really matters here is where the budget comes from and how [00:02:30] you measure it. [00:02:31] Jon Flugstad, who is now the chief business officer at MetaRouter, put it really well in the comments of that post from last year. He said, "Treating retail media like a channel misses the point. It's a [00:02:45] way of buying media where the gravitational pull is the connection to the audience and the transaction." [00:02:53] So I had the diagnosis, but I didn't really have the why. I could see that retail media was funded [00:03:00] oddly and measured oddly, but Vinny's piece really articulates why that approach has been so persistent even when it's recognized as less than ideal [00:03:11] Vinny says in his piece that retail media [00:03:15] didn't just get funded oddly, it inherited an entire job description from the budget that it came out of. Same job description, but a different invoice, Vinny says. When the money comes from search, retail [00:03:30] media inherits the brief of search, the metrics of search, and the ceiling of search. [00:03:37] You're optimizing against intent that already exists, you're capturing demand, you're not creating it, and that is a real [00:03:45] job, but it's not the only job that retail media could be doing [00:03:50] Demand creation and demand capture aren't two budgets, he argues. They're one system. I had been [00:04:00] asking where retail media sits, but the better question is what it's for. If you give it a real brief, the funding will follow according to Vinny. [00:04:10] Now this reminded me of a comment that I heard at Possible this year. On a [00:04:15] panel at the Adweek house, Lauren Weinberg, the CMO of Supergoop, said, "I don't wanna see retail media as a line item on my campaign plan from my agency." Now that isn't a complaint about retail [00:04:30] media being on the plan, it's that retail media gets plopped in there as one undifferentiated amorphous blob [00:04:40] And going back to Vinny in his piece, he isn't just sort of [00:04:45] theorizing from an ivory tower here. He describes at Hershey how they are pulling commerce media upstream into the brief and planning conversation, evaluating it against the same objectives as every other channel, [00:05:00] and feeding the purchase signal back into who they target and what they put behind a brand next quarter. [00:05:07] The brand investment creates new intent. The commerce investment converts it at the moment of decision, and [00:05:15] the data closes the loop. Now, that only works if both halves are briefed together, which is exactly the part that a lot of brands skip [00:05:30] The agentic AI revolution is here, and the competitive edge belongs to those who move faster than disruption itself. Join Miracle Ads and me in [00:05:45] New York City on June 10, 2026, for strategies, insights, and connections built for the era of agentic commerce. Discovery is shifting, media economics are following, [00:06:00] and the brands and retailers who figure out what comes next won't be the ones who wait. [00:06:05] They'll be the ones already moving. Join me at the Miracle Summit in New York City on June 10. Link to register [00:06:15] in the show notes [00:06:16] Shea Murtaugh, who is the CEO of the agency Hoffman Murtaugh, said wisely in the comments on Vinny's post, she says, "Retail media didn't fail brand objectives because of [00:06:30] capability. It failed because it inherited performance briefs, performance metrics, and performance expectations before most brands ever asked what role it should play." [00:06:41] And that is a similar argument that [00:06:45] Jordan Witmer of SaltXC made in a live stream that we did together a few weeks ago. the way he describes it is that whoever owns the budget decides what retail media is allowed to be [00:06:59] [00:07:00] Better measurement, more transparency. These are the things that brands consistently say are what is holding retail media spend back. But what if it's really more about organizational clarity? It seems from this [00:07:15] collection of responses that a lot of brands still don't have it. Now, so far, this all sounds like consensus, and it mostly is, but not entirely. [00:07:24] On Vinny's post on LinkedIn, a familiar question surfaced. Even if you give retail [00:07:30] media a real brief, can the platforms actually measure against it? Adam Heimlich, co-founder of Chalice AI, made the case that they cannot. That modeling new-to-brand sales and household penetration is genuinely [00:07:45] hard, and the platforms that RMNs run on weren't built for it. Rick Watrell, the founder of MLogix AI, took the other view. The capabilities are there, but the execution is not. [00:07:59] So this [00:08:00] comes down to a debate of can't versus won't. And there's a related move happening here that I keep hearing about, which is brands bringing their own measurement to the table rather than relying on retailer-provided metrics. [00:08:15] They want to normalize results across retailers, and fairly or not, they trust a third party more than the retailer that is grading its own homework. [00:08:25] This all sidesteps the can't versus won't debate [00:08:30] in a pretty useful way. If you don't trust the platform to measure brand impact, stop asking it to and bring your own yardstick instead. And that's probably the more practical path for most brands right now. [00:08:44] Not waiting for [00:08:45] RMNs to build the perfect attribution model, but plugging retail media into the measurement framework they already have [00:08:52] So what's next? The budget silo problem I flagged last year is squarely within the industry discourse, [00:09:00] and I'm so glad that we're talking about it like this. But even after we agree on the problem, we're still left deciding what the money is supposed to do before it gets spent, and then arguing about whether our tools can even prove that it did the job. [00:09:14] I asked [00:09:15] an okay question eighteen months ago. Vinny just asked a better one. The answer is still up for grabs, and honestly, that's the most interesting place for it to be [00:09:25]