Retail media is not just changing where CPG marketing budgets go — it’s changing how CPG marketing organisations are structured. The brands moving fastest are rethinking their operating models, breaking down traditional silos, and building new capabilities that didn’t exist three years ago.
The Silo Problem
In the traditional CPG model, brand marketing and trade marketing operated largely independently. Brand teams managed awareness and equity. Trade teams managed retailer relationships and promotional investment. These two functions are converging in the retail media era, but most CPG organisations haven’t yet restructured to reflect this. The result: duplicated effort (brand and trade teams both managing relationships with the same retailer media network), conflicting objectives (brand team optimising for awareness, trade team optimising for conversion), and missed opportunities (neither team with visibility over the other’s retailer investment).
What Best Practice Looks Like
The most sophisticated CPG companies are creating unified “commerce marketing” functions that bring brand and trade investment under shared planning and accountability. This function owns the total retail media relationship — setting strategy, managing retailer partnerships, allocating budget across on-site and off-site, and reporting on unified metrics that include both brand health and conversion outcomes. Some companies are going further and building dedicated retail media centres of excellence — teams with specific expertise in retail media planning, buying, measurement, and optimisation across major retail platforms.
The In-Housing vs Agency Debate
As retail media matures, more CPG companies are asking whether to bring management in-house rather than relying on agency partners. The case for in-housing: better retailer data access, faster execution, accumulated proprietary learning. The case against: the scale of investment required to build genuine expertise across multiple platforms, and the risk of losing the cross-advertiser benchmarking that agency relationships provide. The pragmatic answer for most companies: hybrid. Own the strategy, the retailer relationships, and the measurement frameworks internally. Use agency partners for execution at scale, particularly across platforms where you don’t have sufficient volume to justify dedicated in-house resource.