When you're selling a $2 yogurt cup instead of a $200 jacket, every dollar of ad spend needs to work harder, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands are fundamentally changing how they approach retail media to make that happen.

"There's always a level of precision that has to go into how we execute our media," Shanteria Jones, director of shopper marketing at Chobani, told our analyst Arielle Feger at EMARKETER’s Ad Buyer Strategies Summit. "When we're talking about a $2 or $5 product, we have to have a level of precision and rigor that goes behind how we're auditing our campaigns."

US CPG advertisers are expected to spend nearly $59 billion on ads in 2026, according to an EMARKETER forecast. How that budget gets activated across retail media networks matters more than ever as brands navigate fragmentation, demand better measurement, and push for industry standardization.

What earns more investment from CPG brands

Retail media networks can't rely on scale alone to secure bigger budgets from CPG advertisers anymore.

• Jones outlined three questions she asks retail partners: What unique offering or capability do you bring? What's your measurement consistency? What's the business impact?
• "Every dollar needs to have a place, and it needs to have some efficiency behind it," she said. "Are you getting more of the investment? Are you getting less? That talks about joint partnership."

Sarp Tunçay, an ecommerce and retail media leader in the CPG space, prioritizes driving measurable impact through actionable shopper insights and disciplined execution, emphasizing that scale is no longer the investment differentiator it once was.

"Some retailers have been trusting their scale in the last couple of years, but it's not like that anymore," he said.

Retail media networks need to demonstrate value beyond audience size. CPG brands are demanding proof that investments drive measurable business outcomes, not just media metrics.

Moving beyond ROAS to measure true impact

CPG brands are abandoning return on ad spend as their primary success metric, pushing instead for measurements that explain business growth.

“We can see the what, but we want to know the why,” Feger said, pointing to the growing industry focus on incrementality and business outcomes over traditional efficiency metrics.

"ROAS is definitely not the norm," Jones said. Instead, she focuses on incrementality and new buyer analysis.

"Turn the media off and let me see if it's driving my incrementality,” she said. “That's where you start to really see the business impact."

To achieve this, Chobani built its own incrementality methodology that strips out factors like price and promotion to show true media impact. For brands without those resources, Jones recommends going directly to retailer first-party data from sources like Nielsen or retailer-specific systems.

The standardization problem persists

The lack of consistent measurement standards across retail media networks remains a major pain point for CPG brands managing multiple retail partnerships.

"We are one brand, and then we have many retailers, and we want to service all of them in the right way," Jones said. "But we also want to have a standard that has a level of rigor that tells us that this is consistent, this is right, this is what we deem best in class."

The inconsistency also creates internal communication challenges, forcing retail media leaders to spend as much time educating stakeholders as analyzing performance.

• Jones has conducted "retail media 101" sessions with her organization to help colleagues understand the dynamics of digital advertising.
• "We have to take on that responsibility of saying, this is the future of what's happening."

Tunçay noted that definitions and methodologies still vary from one retailer to another, "which makes our lives difficult sometimes to actually explain to the leadership team who are not day-to-day in those exercises."

Navigating that complexity requires strong cross-functional alignment with sales, trade marketing, and brand teams.

"Thirty to 40% of your job is technicality, but the rest is actually how you build your personal relationship within the company and also with your partners," said Tunçay.

Watch the full session