Attributed sales
A purchase can be observed in the retailer environment.
Follow the money
Retail media did not create one new budget.
It is consolidating several old ones.
Trade, shopper marketing, national media and retailer-specific commercial funding are converging at the retailer P&L. Some incremental investment exists. Public disclosure cannot tell us the share from each source.
The defensible claim: retail-media growth is a mixed reallocation story—not proof that every dollar is incremental, or that a retailer’s ad revenue equals CPG budget transfer.
The funding stack
Four paths lead to the same retailer media line.
Choose a source pool. Each panel separates the direct evidence from what it cannot prove.
→
Retail media
On-site, off-site and in-store placements bought against retailer data, measurement and commercial relationships.
→
ROAS dashboard
A familiar internal currency for budget approval.
Retailer relationship
A media decision intertwined with the joint business plan.
01 / Most directly asserted
Trade & shopper dollars are being digitized.
The clearest direct assertion is a shift from in-store trade and shopper-marketing budgets to retail media as shopping moves online.
“The shift of in-store trade and shopper marketing budgets.”
Brian Gleason, then Criteo Chief Revenue Officer, identified this as one of several funding sources in the company’s 2024 retail-media investor update.
Read the Criteo investor-update transcript →What this establishes: a named retail-media supplier observes trade/shopper budget migration. It does not quantify the CPG-wide share, or prove every retailer receives it.
What repeats across the conversation corpus
Across commerce conversations, accountability language outweighs explicit trade language.
These are descriptive coding signals from public transcript text—not a survey of all brands, a spend estimate, or proof of causality.
287 / 1,000
Measurement is the approval language.
Conversation frequently returns to attribution, incrementality and purchase visibility. This helps explain why a retailer placement is internally easier to defend; it does not demonstrate that it is incrementally better.
Inspect reproducible coding counts →854 / 1,000
Off-site and in-store formats reopen the national-media question.
Once retail media is discussed as CTV, off-site, social and store media, it is no longer confined to a shopper-marketing brief. That is the mechanism by which national-media budgets become a plausible source.
Inspect transcript contexts →20 / 1,000
Trade is a specific, finite base—not a complete explanation.
Explicit trade language is far less frequent than measurement language. Direct leadership statements—not keyword counts—are the evidence that trade and shopper funds are a source; the count is not a measure of dollars transferred.
Inspect trade-funding contexts →Brand-side operating view
“Same job description, but a different invoice.”
Vinny Rinaldi, VP, Consumer Connections, Hershey, as discussed in a public Retail Media Breakfast Club transcript: when money originates in search, retail media inherits the search brief and its metrics. This is an attributed practitioner view, not an audited spending result.
Read transcript, 03:15 →
Supplier-side operating view
“We need to translate our retail media spend and KPIs into tangible sales results.”
Allison Fowler, Director of Media Strategy at Rust-Oleum, quoted in a public transcript about Home Depot’s Orange Apron Media. The funding conversation is tied to sales accountability, not media exposure alone.
Read transcript, 05:15 →
Retailer executive view
“An investment of a certain amount will yield some type of action that you can observe at the cash register.”
Seth Dallaire, then EVP and Chief Revenue Officer, Walmart U.S. The closed-loop case gives the retailer’s ask a clear internal defense, though it is not an incrementality test.
Read company-hosted transcript →
Evidence boundary
The answer is a mixed stack, not a single origin story.
Direct sources support several pathways. They do not support a universal allocation formula.
What the evidence supports
Real funding paths
- 01Trade and shopper funds shifting into digital retailer placements.
- 02National-media dollars moving into scaled retail-media formats.
- 03Retailer-specific requests being managed through the total retailer investment.
- 04Some incremental funds and non-CPG advertiser demand.
What it does not support
A made-up decomposition
- דMost retail-media spend comes from trade” as a sector statistic.
- דRetail media caused brand media to fall” from retailer revenue growth.
- דHigh attributed ROAS proves the money was better spent.”
- ×One retailer’s revenue as a proxy for CPG spend alone.
Why five years of filings do not settle it
The relevant pools sit in different accounting lines.
Public financial reporting separates commercial funding in ways that make a trade-to-retail-media transfer invisible without a manufacturer × retailer ledger.
The accounting map
One budget decision can leave three different trails.
McCormick’s filing illustrates the structural problem: a shift in commercial investment may not appear as an increase in “advertising expense.”
Trade fundsPaid to customers; recorded as a reduction of net sales.
Shopper marketingIncluded in promotion costs.
AdvertisingRecorded separately from trade funds; includes conventional media types.
Implication: comparing a CPG’s advertising expense to a retailer’s ad revenue misses trade and commercial funding by design.
Direct filing language
“All trade funds paid to customers are reflected … as a reduction of net sales.”
McCormick FY2025 10-K. The filing also distinguishes promotion costs, including shopper marketing, from advertising expense.
Read the filing →The test that would settle it
Follow the retailer P&L, not the channel label.
Retail media is not only a media-buying decision. It is an investment decision spanning the total retailer relationship.
01
Retail-media invoices: campaign and retailer-level spend.
02
Commercial funding: trade, allowances, co-op, displays and JBP commitments for the same retailer and period.
03
National media: on-site and off-site retail media separated from other channels.
04
Incrementality and profit: baseline, cannibalization, contribution margin and the spend displaced.