What Is Retail Media and Why Every CPG Brand Needs a Strategy in 2025
How to Choose a Commerce Agency: 10 Questions to Ask Before You Sign
Every agency looks good in apitch. The deck is polished, the case studies are curated, the team that showsup to your first meeting is impressive. That's by design. The challenge isfiguring out what you're actually buying before you've signed a contract andhanded over your Q4 budget.
For brands operating in the CPGspace — food, beverage, health, beauty, alcohol — the stakes of a wrong agencyfit are particularly high. Commerce moves fast. A retailer's promotionalcalendar doesn't wait for an agency that's still getting up to speed. Shopperseasons are finite. Retail media inventory fills up.
This guide is for the brandmanager, VP of Marketing, or CMO who is currently in or approaching an agencyreview. These are the questions that tend to separate agencies who willgenuinely move your business from those who will mostly occupy calendar space.
Commerce means different thingsto different agencies. Some treat it as a synonym for eCommerce. Others meanin-store shopper marketing. The best commerce agencies operate across both —connecting the digital shelf to the physical one as a single, integratedsystem.
Before you evaluatecapabilities, make sure you're speaking the same language. A misaligneddefinition of what "commerce" means is a surprisingly common sourceof friction six months into an engagement.
This is where many agenciesstart to show their hand. It's easy to list Walmart Connect, Instacart,Roundel, and Kroger in a capabilities slide. It's another thing to have activecampaigns, bid management experience, and attribution data from those networksin the current quarter.
Ask them to walk you through arecent activation on a specific network — what the audience targeting lookedlike, how they set up attribution, what they learned. Vague answers to specificquestions tell you something important.
Every agency has successstories. The ones worth working with also have failure stories — and moreimportantly, they've learned from them. An agency that only shows you wins inthe pitch phase is either cherry-picking or hasn't been doing this long enoughto have a few bruises.
What you're really evaluatinghere is intellectual honesty and process maturity. Did they catch theunderperformance quickly? Did they course-correct? Did they communicatetransparently with the client, or did they wait until the end of the quarter toexplain the miss?
Agencies often present a seniorteam in the pitch and transition work to more junior staff after onboarding.That's not inherently wrong — junior team members can do excellent work — butyou should know who you're actually getting.
Ask specifically: Who is theday-to-day account lead? How many accounts do they manage? What's theescalation path if something goes wrong? A senior strategist who is spreadacross 12 accounts is a different reality than one who is deeply embedded inthree.
Many agencies are better at onethan the other. Strong strategists who hand off to a weak execution teamproduce beautiful decks that don't translate into campaigns. Strong executorswithout strategic grounding produce campaigns that hit tactical KPIs but missbrand and business objectives.
The agencies that consistentlyperform are the ones where strategy and execution aren't actually separate —where the people who develop the plan are close enough to the work to see whenreality is diverging from the plan and adjust quickly.
This question separatesdata-mature agencies from ones that produce impressive-looking reports full ofmetrics that don't actually connect to business outcomes.
Good commerce agencies reporton things like sales lift, new-to-brand buyer acquisition, competitive share ofvoice, and incrementality — not just impressions and clicks. They also tell youwhat they're not sure about, which requires a level of analytical honestythat's surprisingly rare.
The most common failure mode inCPG marketing is that brand media and shopper marketing operate in separatesilos with separate agencies, separate strategies, and separate measurementframeworks. The result is spend that partially cancels itself out and a shopperexperience that feels incoherent across touchpoints.
Ask the agency how they connectbrand objectives to shopper activation — specifically. If they can't give you aconcrete example from a real client engagement, that integration probablyexists in the presentation but not in actual practice.
Commerce creative is a specificdiscipline. An ad that works on a brand awareness platform doesn'tautomatically work as a sponsored listing on Instacart or a digital display atretail. The image hierarchy, the copy length, the call to action — all of itneeds to work in a context where a shopper is deciding in seconds whether toclick or scroll past.
Agencies that treat creative asan afterthought in commerce, or that recycle brand assets without adaptingthem, tend to underperform. The ones that think carefully about how creativefunctions within the specific shopper context of each placement tend tooutperform.
This question forces the agencyto commit to a specific narrative about what they're building — and gives you abaseline against which to hold them accountable.
Be skeptical of agencies thatpromise significant results at 90 days across all dimensions. Real commercestrategies require ramp time — audience data accumulation, creative testing,algorithm learning periods. An agency that tells you only what you want to hearin the pitch is probably also telling you only what you want to hear six monthsin.
The best predictor of how anagency will treat you is how they've treated clients who've been with them fortwo or three years. Ask for references from long-term clients specifically —not just the most recent success story.
And ask those references notwhether the agency did good work, but whether they'd choose them again knowingwhat they know now. That question tends to produce more honest answers.
Beyond the questions, a fewbehavioral signals in the pitch process itself are worth noting:
• Agencies that spend most of the pitch talking aboutthemselves rather than asking about your business. The best early-stageconversations feel like a diagnosis, not a presentation.
• Case studies from categories or channels that bear norelationship to your actual situation. Winning for a DTC brand is a differentproblem from winning for a brand with complex retail distribution.
• Vague answers about process. Specific questions abouthow they manage campaigns, handle underperformance, or coordinate across teamsshould get specific answers — not a pivot back to brand narrative.
• Pressure to sign quickly. A good agency relationship isworth taking the time to evaluate properly. Anyone pushing urgency in theclosing phase is making their timeline your problem.
After you've asked thequestions and checked the references, you're usually left choosing between twoor three agencies that all have credible answers. At that point, the decisionoften comes down to three things:
• Fit on the problem — Does their core strength matchyour most important challenge right now? An agency brilliant at retail mediamight not be what you need if your primary gap is shopper activation.
• Fit on the relationship — Will you be able to havehonest conversations with this team when something isn't working? The qualityof the relationship in bad moments matters more than the quality of the pitch.
• Fit on the commercial model — Does the fee structuremake sense for the scope? Agencies that price themselves as a commodity oftenoperate as one. The ones who invest in the relationship tend to price like it.
Choosing a commerce agency isone of the highest-leverage decisions a brand marketing team makes. Get itright and you have a partner that makes your entire organization smarter,faster, and more effective in market. Get it wrong and you spend a year recovering.
The questions above don'tguarantee a perfect decision. But they do raise the floor on your evaluationsignificantly — and give you a much clearer picture of what you're actuallychoosing between.
AgencyFive Eighty is an independent, end-to-end commerce agency serving brands in theBev-Alc, Food & Beverage, and Health & Beauty categories. If you'recurrently in an agency review and want to understand what the Five Eighty modellooks like in practice, we'd welcome the conversation.