You're paying it to play. But is it growing your business, or just your vendor’s margins?

Retail media is the new tax.

💥 What We’re Seeing:

Retail media spend is up 32% YoY across food and beverage brands. But sales haven’t followed. Why?

Because most brands are buying visibility, not velocity. They’re pouring budget into Walmart, Instacart, Amazon, and Target with no idea what’s actually converting and no control once the click happens.

We recently audited $820K in retail media spend across 7 clients. Over 40% had zero measurable contribution to sell-through.

And the scariest part? Those same teams were cutting DTC budget to fund it.

📉 The Hidden Risk:

Retail platforms are telling you what performs — using black box attribution, pooled data, and self-graded ROAS.

Would you let Meta grade its own homework?

Then why are you trusting Instacart to tell you how well your ads perform… inside Instacart?

✅ What Smart Brands Are Doing Instead:

1. Tying media to velocity, not just placement.
   Retail spend only gets greenlit if we see lift in sell-through per door.
   

2. Geo-locking retail ads by inventory availability.
   No more advertising out-of-stock SKUs. We map availability down to ZIP.
   

3. Building middle funnels off-platform.
   Brands are running Meta/Google awareness to brand-controlled LPs first then retargeting to drive to retail.

📊 Snapshot:
A well known CPG brand slashed its retail media budget by 37%.

They layered geo + inventory triggers, re-allocated $55K to Meta, and used custom LPs to warm traffic.

→ Sell-through per door? Up 19%.
→ CAC? Down 22%.
→ ROAS on retail media? Finally real.

🧠 The Takeaway:

Retail media isn’t optional anymore.

But wasting budget on invisible conversions is.

If your campaigns aren’t tied to real-world sell-through, you’re just renting shelves and hoping for the best.

Want the framework we use to vet every retail media dollar? Give us a call and we’ll walk you through it.

Meta Ads Just Shifted, and It’s a Wake-Up Call for Hybrid Brands

If you're still running Meta campaigns the way you did last quarter, you're already behind.

Meta just killed the Advantage+ Shopping toggle.

They’ve redesigned the campaign setup flow.

They’re pushing all eComm advertisers—DTC and retail—toward full AI-driven delivery.

What that actually means:

• Your manual retargeting setups may be working against you

• Advantage+ isn’t optional anymore it’s baked into the campaign structure

• Creative and audience matching is happening in real-time

This changes how you run hybrid strategies across Meta, Amazon, and Retail Media. Because when Meta owns the funnel logic, your role shifts from control to orchestration.

We’ve been seeing this new structure across multiple F&B, beauty, and CPG accounts.

Here’s what’s working:

✅ Segment your product feeds by margin, not just SKU
Meta’s AI doesn’t care about your internal revenue targets, so you have to guide it.
Low-margin SKUs? Quarantine them or layer cost caps.

✅ Rebuild retargeting from scratch
Audiences aren’t behaving the same under this structure.
Time windows, exclusions, and offer sequencing all need re-testing. Assume nothing.

✅ Run post-click testing outside Meta
With the algorithm optimizing at the top, your landing experience has to do more work.
We’re seeing CAC spike when brands don’t A/B test their post-click journey. Especially true for retail push-to-Amazon flows.

Bottom line?
This isn’t a UI refresh. It’s a forced shift to Meta's new model.
If you don’t update your strategy, performance will drop, and you won’t know why.

📉 CAC will rise
📉 Frequency will flatten
📉 Retargeting will lose steam

If you’re hybrid, this shift hits even harder. Because Meta was one of the last places you still had levers. Now it’s more like steering a train.

The old way of managing spend is gone.

Retail media is bleeding margin. Meta just took away your levers.

If you're not building a new system, you're already behind.

Know someone spending $50K+/mo on Meta or retail without a plan for this? Forward this their way.