DigidayThe leverage trap
“Once you’re committed, they can ask for additional investment or require that [increased spend]… It’s really tough to say no to that.”
Retail media is redrawing the brand org chart.
Budgets are migrating from sales-controlled trade dollars to marketing-controlled brand dollars, and teams are reorganizing around retailer data — from siloed shopper-marketing desks to centralized, often in-house, retail-media operations.
The operating-model journey
Bain’s field view of how CPG companies evolve their retail-media organizations as the channel approaches half of digital marketing spend. Scroll — the slide stays in place while each stage fades into the next.
2×
leaders are twice as likely to include retail digital media in total brand media planning
Profitero 2024 Organizational Benchmark · 360+ brands
+17 pts
year-on-year growth in brand investment in retail media
Profitero 2024 Organizational Benchmark
70%
of leaders source incremental retail media budget from brand marketing
Profitero 2025 Organizational Benchmark
5.8 vs 3.8
people on dedicated retail-media teams: leaders vs laggards — 48% larger
Stratably / DSI · 92 brands · Feb 2025
Framing: Bain, “From Revolution to Evolution: How Consumer Goods Companies Can Sharpen Their Retail Media Strategies.” Read the Bain perspective ↗
The turf war: who controls the spend
Retail media started in shopper and trade budgets, controlled by sales. As networks sell upper-funnel reach, brand and media teams want the purse strings — and sales is reluctant to let go.
Where sales teams control the money, retail-media commitments become leverage in annual retailer negotiations — including for shelf space. Marketers who want to cut a network for performance reasons can find themselves locked into agreements struck by sales, because walking away endangers the commercial relationship.
DigidayControl is moving
“It has been something that’s been part of a trade conversation between the brand and the trade budget; now it’s moving more and more into marketing.”
DigidayFull funnel, no safe dollars
“The argument now is retail is full funnel. Once you believe that, that’s it. There is no dollar that is safe.”
EMARKETEROne brief, four teams
“Do they all have different incentives? Do they all measure different KPIs?”
Context: of ten retail-media experts Digiday interviewed, at least three said there is no clarity on who holds the purse strings — advertisers pool dollars from wherever they can to meet joint-business-plan commitments. eMarketer expects retail media to approach a quarter of all U.S. media spend by 2028.
Consolidation under one roof
The direction of travel: brand and shopper teams merged under single marketing leadership, measured as one system.
The most advanced CPGs have stopped treating brand media and shopper activation as rival budgets. Retailers are explicitly building for this buyer: Home Depot CEO Ted Decker told its inaugural InFront that the network was being built for marketing dollars, not trade or shopper-marketing dollars — and heavier retail-media users in CPG, beauty and pharma are restructuring to combine commercial and marketing teams. The C-suite is catching up: three or four companies have folded sales and marketing under a chief growth officer, with both functions reporting to one leader (Lauren Livak Gilbert, Digital Shelf Institute, September 2025).
DigidayBrand + shopper, one P&L
“Some of the more sophisticated CPGs have actually moved brand and shopper under the same marketing leadership and they’re measuring them holistically… It’s not one versus the other.”
DigidayBypassing the agency
“Brands are saying to me, ‘Hey, just come to me… I’ll tell the agency, here’s what I’d like to do… If you go to the agency, they’re less likely to come at me with this offer.’”
SignalNew seats at the table
More brands now employ a dedicated retail-media person whose job is to innovate on the channel — sometimes with the agency looped in after the fact. Agency executives, for their part, are gently pushing clients to centralize spend under marketing, which they say has the more holistic view.
The CMO PodcastMarketing + sales, one unit
“One demand mindset where marketing and sales operate as one unit together” — “a game changer for how we operate.”
The in-house playbook
P&G is the clearest case study: media planning brought inside, the agency roster slashed, and new skills built around upper-funnel retail media.
As retail media goes up the funnel — CTV, off-site, streaming — the brief stops being a product tile and starts being a brand story. That changes the talent mix: aided awareness, brand favorability and attention scores join the dashboard, incrementality testing and media-mix modeling join the workflow, and brand teams work with creative agencies on storytelling rather than shelf creative.
The Drum30% in-house
“Reinventing advertising means reinventing agency partnerships — moving from brand people who outsource too much of their work to brand entrepreneurs with their hands on the keyboard.”
P&G now plans nearly 30% of its $7bn global media spend in-house; its agency reinvention has saved $1bn over five years.
Marketing-Interactive / WSJStandalone agency
P&G is forming a standalone agency for its North America fabric-care business, combining talent from Saatchi & Saatchi, Grey, Hearts & Science and Marina Maher Communications — after cutting its agency roster from 6,000 to 2,500 and announcing plans to halve it again.
MarTechNew muscle
Traditional trade KPIs like units sold are no longer enough. Advertisers are adopting incrementality testing, media-mix modeling and lifetime-value analysis — and the creative bar has risen from product tiles to full brand storytelling.
Counting the moves
Seventeen named org decisions from the corpus, aggregated. Nine consolidated sales, marketing, or commerce under one roof; one moved media planning in-house; five are named, dedicated retail-media or e-commerce seats inside CPG brands; two worked through coordination or networks instead of restructuring. Filter the ledger to see each.
“Should we live in sales, should we live in marketing, should we be in a COE? It’s the number-one question I am asked.”
Lauren Livak Gilbert · executive director, Digital Shelf Institute · Ecommerce Braintrust, September 2025 platform captions
Watch the episode ↗
Showing 17 of 17 named moves
Kellogg · 2022Consolidated
“The first thing I did was merge our shopper marketing teams and our e-commerce team into one team… a big move in synergizing budgets, because you had shopper budgets and e-commerce budgets and media brand budgets.”
The structure was still described in her 2025 interviews; whether it survived Mars’s December 2025 acquisition of Kellanova is unreported.
Mars Wrigley · 2024Consolidated
“One demand mindset where marketing and sales operate as one unit together” — “a game changer for how we operate.”
Mars Petcare · 2023Consolidated
Created a Chief Brand & Experience Officer, merging brand and consumer experience under one C-level seat.
Perfetti Van Melle · 2025Consolidated
“We actually have consolidated under one leader… commercial excellence… has a lot of responsibilities around the inside space and also trade planning.”
P&L placement rule: broad top-of-funnel goes to the marketing line, point-of-purchase to the trade line — “honestly, there’s kind of no real right answer in terms of where you put it.”
Unilever · 2022Consolidated
“We can now build brands and convert sales at the same time, so why would [we] artificially split that?”
Eliminated the traditional CMO role and appointed Conny Braams its first Chief Digital and Commercial Officer — a 2022–2023 phase of the marketing/commerce blur, later superseded.
Hershey · 2022Consolidated
“Hershey’s made some changes to its structure and eliminated the CMO role… we both report to the chief growth officer.”
Media and the chief creative officer aligned under one Chief Growth Officer after the CMO role was eliminated.
Church & Dwight · 2022Consolidated
“They’ve been able to unify sales and marketing” — with one role straddling both: “a P&L that’s dedicated to her with inputs from both sales and trade.”
Molson Coors · 2025Consolidated
“Roles and responsibilities all consolidated in the same team” — brand and performance, digital and traditional, creative and commerce.
Colgate-Palmolive · 2026Consolidated
“On omni-demand generation… that is central to how we’re thinking about behaving as a company and organizing our teams.”
CEO Noel Wallace tied a “strategic growth and productivity program” to building “the right organizational structure to deliver against our 2030 strategy.”
P&GIn-house
Plans nearly 30% of its $7bn global media spend in-house; agency reinvention saved $1bn over five years.
DanoneNew role
MK Woltz holds a dedicated Sr. Director, Retail Media Strategy seat inside the brand — a founding member of RETHINK Retail’s Media in Retail brand cohort.
Kraft HeinzNew role
Juliana Nodwell holds a dedicated Retail Media Manager seat inside the brand — a founding member of RETHINK Retail’s Media in Retail brand cohort.
NestléNew role
Nicole Lesinski holds a dedicated Director, eCommerce Strategy seat inside the brand — a founding member of RETHINK Retail’s Media in Retail brand cohort.
MarsNew role
Josh Clarkson holds a dedicated Global Retail Media Lead seat inside the brand — a founding member of RETHINK Retail’s Media in Retail brand cohort.
NestléNew role
Added a full-time “translator” role responsible for e-commerce education — a dedicated seat bridging the capability gap between teams.
Coca-Cola · 2023No restructure
“We’ve always been a very networked organization.”
Did not restructure — worked through cross-functional networks to break down silos instead. The deliberate counterexample.
Nestlé Health Science · 2026No restructure
“It should be one brief, and that brief should be kind of consistent across the different teams that might be deploying it.”
Named the friction as misaligned incentives across e-commerce, retail media, shopper marketing and retailer-relationship teams — and fixed the incentives instead of redrawing the org chart.
The ledger counts named, public org decisions found in this research corpus — it is not a survey and is not representative of the industry. Coca-Cola and Nestlé Health Science are kept as deliberate counterexamples: coordination without restructuring.
Sources, definitions and caveats
This page collects named, public statements about how brands are reorganizing for retail media — operating models, budget ownership and in-housing. It is a research snapshot, not a survey of all brands and not a spend estimate.
Quotations are verbatim from the linked sources; ellipses mark trims that do not change meaning. Where a speaker is quoted second-hand in trade press, the outlet and article are labeled in place.
This is a fixed research snapshot. It does not update automatically.
- Bain: From Revolution to Evolution — retail-media operating-model journey.
- Digiday: Who controls retail media spend? — Rigas, Walker, Marsten.
- Digiday: U.K. retail media spend up but internal tug of war holds back growth — Palmer, Black, Crawford.
- Digiday: Retail media networks want brand dollars, blurring budgets — Musi.
- Digiday: The ‘Bermuda Triangle’ of retailers, marketers and agencies — Brenner, Wolny.
- Digiday: How did we get here? — Argyilan, Decker.
- The Drum: P&G now does 30% of its media planning in-house — Pritchard.
- Marketing-Interactive: P&G forms standalone agency — fabric-care agency, roster cuts.
- MarTech: Retail media moves from the bottom of the funnel to center stage — budget shift, metrics, creative.
- Profitero: Stats Unwrapped 2025 — 2025 Organizational Benchmark findings; retail media funding by leaders.
- Profitero: 2024 eCommerce Organizational Benchmark Study — 360+ brands; media planning and investment growth.
- Profitero: 2023 eCommerce Organizational Benchmark Study — 383 e-commerce leaders; reorg prevalence, media ownership, headcount.
- Stratably / DSI: How (Leading) Brands Do Retail Media — 92 brands (2025); dedicated team size and funding fragmentation.
- Mars: Chief Brand & Experience Officer — October 2023 press release.
- Brave Commerce: Julie Bowerman, Kellogg — September 2022; shopper + e-commerce merged into one omni team (auto-transcribed).
- Brave Commerce: Sylvia Buxton, Perfetti Van Melle — April 2025; consolidated media ownership, P&L placement rule (auto-transcribed).
- Brave Commerce: Simon Miles, Coca-Cola — October 2023; networked organization over restructuring (auto-transcribed).
- Ecommerce Braintrust: Lauren Livak Gilbert, DSI — September 2025; reinventing the organization, chief growth officer wave (platform captions).
- Adweek: Unilever doesn’t have a CMO anymore — Conny Braams named first Chief Digital and Commercial Officer, April 2022 (a 2022–2023 phase, later superseded).
- PRNewswire: RETHINK Retail’s Media in Retail — named retail-media title holders at Danone, Kraft Heinz, Nestlé, and Mars.
- EMARKETER Behind the Numbers — Gabi Viljoen, Nestlé Health Science — April 2026; the “one brief” fix for misaligned incentives (no public URL; via research corpus).
- Brave Commerce: Charlie Chappell, Hershey — July 2022; CMO role eliminated, media and creative aligned under a Chief Growth Officer (auto-transcribed).
- Brave Commerce: Surabhi Pokhriyal & Barry Bruno, Church & Dwight — April 2022; unified sales and marketing with a dedicated P&L role straddling both (auto-transcribed).
- Brave Commerce: Brad Feinberg, Molson Coors — March 2025; brand, performance, digital, creative and commerce roles consolidated in one team (auto-transcribed).
- Digital Shelf Institute: Christina Vail, Profitero, on org design — Nestlé’s full-time e-commerce “translator” role.
- MarketBeat: Colgate-Palmolive Q2 2026 earnings call transcript — CEO Noel Wallace, July 31, 2026; organizing teams around omni-demand generation, org structure for the 2030 strategy (verbatim).
Research snapshot: September 15, 2026Named sources only