P&G bets big on retail integration as CPGs question incrementality
By Kimeko McCoy • February 2, 2026 •
Ivy Liu
As U.S. growth slows and macroeconomic headwinds get harder to weather, brands like Procter & Gamble and Diageo are placing larger bets on retail media.
And where the big spenders go, other advertisers are likely to follow, even as it’s unclear whether retail media actually leads to incremental growth.
P&G is navigating a fragmented “new media reality,” and is banking on new retail media ambitions and plans to prioritize data and AI to address it, said Shailesh Jejurikar, P&G’s president and CEO, on the company’s latest earnings call. That fragmentation, thanks to emerging platforms and technologies, has made building a consistent brand narrative harder to do across online video, social media, e-commerce sites and in-store, he said.
And that’s the very promise of retail media — to close the gap between discovery and purchase within the same ecosystem.
“The consumer understanding and brand-building capabilities we have from initial brand impulse to purchase transaction to in-home consumption are valuable assets,” Jejurikar said, without providing specifics around retail partners or spend figures. “Integrating these with each retailer’s category strategy and business model will enable our brands to create value across all retail formats.”
CPG ecosystem shifts
Diageo has also pulled retail media upstream as a core part of its marketing mix — yet another sign of retail media’s dominance in the marketplace.
“With marketing under constant pressure to deliver immediate ROI, this evolution makes perfect sense,” Freddy Dabaghi, chief transformation officer at Crispin, said in an email to Digiday. “These leaders are increasingly prioritizing retail and affiliate channels as core pillars of brand building.”
Global retail media spend is projected to grow from $184 billion in 2025 to $312 billion by 2030, per Forrester’s recently published Global Retail Media Forecast. Agency execs say client budgets are increasing this year and retail media investments will see part of that growth.
“Retail media, for our agency and for clients who sell consumer products, is the fastest growing segment for them and for us as an agency, it’s on fire,” said Shattuck Groome, chief media officer at Mile Marker media agency.
Zach Ricchuiti, avp, client solutions at Kepler, told Digiday that retail media spending was growing across the agency’s entire client roster. “There’s not a single brand that’s decreasing their retail media budget year over year,” he said. While established advertisers already au fait with the channel might only add incremental spending increases this year, he noted that challenger brands were increasing retail and commerce media budgets by up to 20%.
“We are seeing across our spread of clients, generally a pretty healthy attitude of increasing spend,” he added.
As retail media owners draw in larger and larger proportions of brand advertising budgets, clients are gradually shifting investments from TV, audio and traditional shopper-oriented media like direct mail, toward the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Alberton’s and Kroger.
Jacob Davis, executive director, global head of performance at Crossmedia, credited this in part to still-shaky consumer confidence following last year’s tariff roller coaster. Retail media is now seen as a safe harbor by wary marketers, he noted.
“When you are in semi-uncertain times… consumers race to things that they trust, and advertisers will do the same,” he said.
Gold rush or toll booth?
Even as some of the industry’s biggest players set the tone around retail media spend this year, questions around incrementality and fragmentation have yet to be quelled. Aside from Amazon and Walmart, retail media is still largely considered to be the Wild West, Mile Marker’s Gromme added. Inconsistent metrics and and varying capabilities across retailers have helped make it so.
Case in point: Last year, The Home Depot added yet another acronym — “ROMO,” or return on marketing objectives — to help advertisers measure impact that goes beyond the immediate sales.
RMNs are growing, but clients generally still view them as lower-funnel channels or ties to maintaining retailer relationships, said Tucker Matheson, co-CEO and co-founder at performance media agency Markacy.
“From my perspective, I don’t necessarily pay attention to what Procter & Gamble is doing, I don’t necessarily think they lead the way. We use our own data. We use our own clients,” said Groome.
— Sam Bradley contributed reporting to this story
