Somewhere between the retail media team celebrating their return on advertising spend (ROAS) and the eCommerce team hitting their conversion targets, the brand is quietly losing category share. Both teams are working and winning on their own scorecards, yet the business is not growing the way the numbers suggest it should.
Mark Yessin, a media and marketing strategy leader who has rebuilt commerce systems from the inside at Gap, Mars, Reckitt, and Hain Celestial, has seen this dynamic play out consistently across some of the world’s most recognizable consumer brands. The diagnosis is not a budget issue or a talent issue. “When retail media and eCommerce are treated as one commercial system, retail media stops being a performance tax and starts becoming a growth multiplier,” Yessin says.
Two Teams. No Shared Scoreboard
Retail media teams optimize for ROAS within retailer platforms, while eCommerce teams optimize for conversion rate and on-site experience. Both are technically doing their jobs, but neither is asking whether those jobs are pointed at the same outcome. The consequence is predictable. Investment concentrates in lower-funnel retail media that captures demand already in the market, while the upstream activity that actually grows category share gets chronically underfunded. Media drives shoppers to product pages not built for that traffic, and promotions misalign with media bursts. What was designed to be a growth engine becomes expensive demand routing.
Yessin’s solution is a structural redesign rather than a budget reallocation. Media should influence assortment decisions, hero stock keeping unit (SKU) selection, and promotional cadence. eCommerce should inform which products warrant media acceleration based on available margins and conversion elasticity. When those feedback loops exist, the internal conversation shifts. Teams stop asking whether retail media is efficient and start asking whether it is changing share. That question, deceptively simple, moves the organization from channel optimization to something far more valuable: revenue architecture.
The same logic applies when unifying retail media and direct-to-consumer (DTC) budgets. Most organizations make the mistake of consolidating budgets before aligning incentives, turning a strategic opportunity into an internal political battle. The sequence matters:
1. Define shared outcomes first: total revenue contribution, incremental growth, and customer value.
2. Then establish complementary roles: DTC builds audience and intent, while retail media converts that demand at the point of purchase.
3. Budget fluidity follows naturally when both teams are measured on the same result.
The New Shelf
AI-driven discovery is not on the horizon. It is already reshaping how brands compete for visibility, and most retail media strategies were not built for it. Competing for keyword rankings is giving way to competing for inclusion in AI-generated recommendations, and the criteria are entirely different. Structured product data, consistent taxonomy, and rich metadata determine whether an AI system can understand a brand well enough to recommend it. Authority signals, such as reviews, retailer performance, and content coverage, determine whether it will. Intent scenario mapping replaces keyword optimization, with brands defining the use cases they want to own rather than the search terms they want to rank for.
“The brands that treat AI as a new shelf rather than a new channel will adapt the fastest,” Yessin says. Retail media, eCommerce, DTC, and AI-driven discovery are converging into one commercial environment. Performance is becoming compounding rather than campaign-based. The brands structured to operate across that entire system, aligned product data, content, pricing, and media, will not necessarily spend the most. They will simply be the easiest for machines to surface and the most coherent for shoppers to trust.
The Move Most CMOs Have Not Made
The strategic shift Yessin would advise any chief marketing officer (CMO) to make before the market catches on is treating SKU prioritization as a commercial discipline. Most organizations allocate retail media based on historical performance or retailer pressure without connecting investment systematically to margin, inventory position, and growth potential.
The opportunity is to define a small set of priority SKUs deserving disproportionate visibility, align media, content, and promotional activity around them, and build a dynamic reallocation model that accelerates investment toward SKUs showing momentum. “When velocity increases, the media accelerates it further,” Yessin says. The brands that make this move early build category presence and become progressively harder for competitors to close.
Retail media has spent years being treated as a line item. The organizations pulling ahead have figured out it is something else entirely, a lever that shapes the shelf, influences the algorithm, and builds durable advantage one compounding investment at a time.
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