Retail media’s next competitive advantage is organizational

Retail media has reached a new stage of maturity. But the biggest obstacle to its continued growth may have less to do with media than with the organizations managing it.

Most brands now recognize retail media as an essential part of the marketing mix. They have access to more retailer data, platforms and measurement capabilities than ever before. Yet many are still managing this connected ecosystem through organizational structures built for a much less connected consumer journey.

Retail media didn’t create marketing’s silos. It made them measurable.

The consumer journey has converged. The org chart hasn’t.

Consumers don’t experience brands according to reporting lines. They move between streaming TV, social platforms, retailer apps, e-commerce sites and physical stores, encountering multiple forms of marketing along the way.

Inside many organizations, though, responsibility for that journey remains fragmented.

At a CPG company, for example, retail media may sit within shopper or commerce marketing while connected TV belongs to the brand or media team. E-commerce may own conversion; sales may manage retailer relationships and promotions; and analytics may sit somewhere else entirely. Each team can do its job well while optimizing toward a different objective.

A consumer might see a streaming ad, encounter the brand on social, search for it on a retailer’s site and ultimately purchase it in a store. To the consumer, that’s one journey. Inside the organization, it may cross four teams, multiple budgets and several measurement frameworks.

Retail media is exposing the cost of that fragmentation.

More data won’t fix an organizational problem

Retail media has brought marketing closer to the transaction. Brands can connect signals from media exposure to retailer search behavior and purchase in ways that weren’t previously possible.

But greater visibility also reveals where organizations struggle to act on what they know. In a recent Blue Chip survey, 61% of marketers said they expected retail media investment to increase, while 36% cited organizational and agency capability gaps as a barrier to success. Increasingly, the question is not whether brands will invest in retail media, but whether their organizations are designed to make those investments work.

Consider what happens when a retail media team sees an opportunity to shift investment based on retailer-level performance, but the broader media budget is controlled elsewhere. Or when a retailer’s promotion changes, but creative and media teams are operating on a different planning calendar. Or when commerce optimizes toward ROAS, while brand optimizes toward reach and sales is accountable for different retailer targets.

More data doesn’t fix competing incentives or unclear decision rights. AI won’t either.

AI can accelerate analysis and surface opportunities faster. But if acting on those opportunities requires navigating several teams with different objectives and budgets, faster insight simply reaches the same organizational bottleneck sooner.

Execution Is becoming the advantage

For years, much of the competitive conversation around retail media centered on access: Which networks should brands use? What data is available? Which new capabilities should they test?

Those questions still matter, but access itself is becoming less of a differentiator. The bigger advantage is the ability to turn insight into action quickly.

That requires more than just better collaboration. It’s changing how decisions are made. Brands need shared objectives across brand, commerce, sales, media and analytics. They need agreement on which business outcomes matter, who has authority to make decisions and how quickly investment can move when consumer or retailer signals change.

The answer isn’t necessarily another reorganization. There is no single org chart that will work for every company. But brands do need operating models that reflect the decisions their consumers already experience as one journey.

That could mean integrated planning across brand and commerce, shared KPIs between sales and marketing, common measurement frameworks or cross-functional teams empowered to make decisions across channels. The structure matters less than whether it reduces the distance between insight and execution.

Retail media is an organizational stress test

Measurement is one place to start. Business leaders increasingly want to know whether marketing is driving incremental sales, household penetration, repeat purchases and long-term customer value — not simply impressions, clicks or ROAS.

Those outcomes don’t belong neatly to one marketing function. If brand teams are accountable for awareness, commerce for conversion and sales for retailer performance, every function can report success without answering the bigger question: Did the combined investment grow the business?

A shared scorecard gives marketing, sales, finance, analytics and external partners a common definition of success and a better foundation for deciding where the next dollar should go.

Retail media has become a stress test for the modern marketing organization. It is revealing where legacy structures, incentives and planning processes no longer reflect how consumers move through the marketplace.

The brands that win next won’t simply add another retail media network, technology platform or AI capability. They’ll build organizations capable of quickly connecting consumer insights, retailer priorities, media, creative, sales and measurement to act.

Retail media isn’t changing marketing as much as it’s exposing an organizational model that’s overdue for change. 

This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.