What Is Retail Media and Why Every CPG Brand Needs a Strategy in 2025
Omnichannel Commerce: How to Connect Shelf to Screen
Ask ten brand managers whatomnichannel means and you'll get ten different answers — most of themvariations on "being present across multiple channels." That's notwrong, exactly. But it misses the point badly enough to explain why so manyomnichannel initiatives produce underwhelming results.
Omnichannel commerce isn'tabout presence. A brand can run TV, social, a Walmart Connect campaign, and anFSI promotion and still have no omnichannel strategy at all — just multipleunconnected tactics running in parallel. Real omnichannel is about coherence:making the shopper's experience of your brand consistent, connected, andmutually reinforcing whether they encounter you on a digital shelf, a physicalshelf, a social ad, or a retailer's weekly circular.
That's harder than it sounds.And it requires thinking about shelf and screen not as separate domains but astwo faces of the same purchase environment.
The structural problem at mostCPG companies isn't strategy — it's organization. Brand marketing and trademarketing have historically lived in separate departments, with separatebudgets, separate agencies, and separate success metrics. Brand marketingthinks in terms of awareness, equity, and share of voice. Trade marketingthinks in terms of display compliance, promotional lift, and retailersell-through.
Neither discipline is wrong.But the gap between them — and the assumption that they can operateindependently — produces a shopper experience full of disconnects.
A consumer sees your brand adon connected TV on Thursday night. On Saturday they're at Target and the endcapisn't built. On Tuesday they're on Instacart and the product page has noenhanced content. Three exposures to your brand, zero coherence. The brandimpression doesn't compound — it fragments.
Fixing that requires more thana new strategy deck. It requires structural changes to how brand teams plan,brief, and measure across the full commerce system.
When we talk about connectingshelf to screen, we mean building a system where what happens in digital mediaand what happens at physical retail are deliberately coordinated — not justthematically consistent, but operationally linked.
In practice, that means a fewspecific things:
Your in-store shopperactivation should not be running in weeks when your digital media is dark, andvice versa. The best commerce results come when digital reach and in-storeactivation overlap — when the consumer who saw your programmatic display ad onMonday encounters a visible presence at retail on Wednesday.
This requires shared planningcalendars across brand and trade, with media flight schedules built aroundretail activation windows rather than the traditional reverse. The retailer'spromotional calendar should anchor your planning — everything else should layeron top of it.
The audiences you're reachingdigitally and the shoppers you're activating in-store should be the same people— or at least overlapping cohorts. Retail media gives you the intelligence tomake this happen. If you know that a specific audience segment over-indexes foryour category at Kroger, that insight should be informing both your KrogerPrecision Marketing investment and your in-store activation at Kroger.
The brands that use theirretail data to drive both digital and physical strategy — rather than keepingthose data streams separate — see measurably stronger results from bothchannels.
One of the most common pointsof disconnection is creative. Brand teams develop assets for awareness mediathat don't translate to retail. Trade teams develop in-store materials thathave no relationship to the campaign running on social.
A connected shelf-to-screensystem starts with a creative concept that was designed from the outset to workacross environments — adapted for each specific context but clearly part of thesame brand expression. That's a different brief, a different process, and oftena different kind of creative partner than brands are accustomed to workingwith.
The strategic intent is onething. Making it operational requires a few foundational elements:
Every brand should have onemaster planning document that maps retail promotional windows, seasonalmoments, digital media flights, and shopper activation timelines in a singleview. Most brands have four or five separate planning documents that exist in differentdepartments and rarely talk to each other.
Consolidating those into onecoherent commerce calendar is unglamorous work, but it's the operationalbedrock of any real omnichannel program. It forces conversations aboutpriorities, flags conflicts between plans, and creates shared accountabilityfor the overall shopper experience.
Brand and trade teams often siton entirely separate data sets — brand equity trackers, sales velocity reports,retail media dashboards, shopper panel data — with no mechanism for those datastreams to inform each other.
Building even a simple monthlyreporting structure that brings the key signals together — what's happeningwith brand awareness, what's happening with in-store execution, what's happeningwith digital shelf performance — creates the visibility needed to make genuineomnichannel decisions.
If your brand agency and yourshopper/commerce agency aren't in regular communication, you don't have anomnichannel system — you have two separate programs that happen to feature thesame logo. At minimum, quarterly planning sessions that include both partnersand the brand team are necessary. The best setups involve a lead commercepartner who is genuinely managing across all touchpoints, which reduces thecoordination burden on the brand team significantly.
Any conversation about shelf toscreen has to include the marketplace channel — Amazon, Instacart, Walmart+,and the growing ecosystem of quick-commerce and specialty platforms. For manyCPG categories, marketplace is now the fastest-growing retail channel, and itoperates by its own rules.
The digital shelf on Instacartis not just an online version of the physical shelf. It has its own searchalgorithm, its own content requirements, its own promotional mechanics. A brandthat treats its Instacart storefront as an afterthought — low-resolutionimages, thin product descriptions, no enhanced brand content — is leaving significantvolume on the table even if its physical shelf execution is excellent.
Marketplace strategy has to beintegrated into the broader commerce plan, not managed as a sidecar. That meansdedicated attention to digital shelf content, marketplace-specific promotionalplanning, and performance media on the platform that connects to in-storestrategy where the retailer sells through both channels.
Beyond the standardchannel-specific metrics, a few indicators tell you whether yourshelf-to-screen system is actually functioning as a system:
• New-to-brand buyer rate from retail media campaigns —are digital touchpoints actually bringing new shoppers into the brand franchiseat retail?
• In-store velocity in markets where digital media isrunning versus control markets — is digital media lifting physical retailsales?
• Digital shelf performance metrics — how are yourproduct pages converting on key marketplace platforms relative to categorybenchmarks?
• Coherence score in shopper research — when you surveyshoppers, do they describe your brand as consistent and clear acrosstouchpoints, or fragmented and confusing?
The brands winning inomnichannel today aren't winning because they have a better strategy document.They're winning because they've done the unglamorous operational work — thecalendar consolidation, the data integration, the agency alignment, thecreative briefing reform — that makes strategic intent into actual execution.
In a $8 trillion retailenvironment, that operational advantage compounds quickly. A point of marketshare gained through better omnichannel execution is a point of share that'sgenuinely hard for a less-coordinated competitor to take back.
The question worth asking isn'twhether omnichannel commerce matters. It clearly does. The question is how muchof your current approach is real integration and how much is parallel activitydressed up in omnichannel language.
AgencyFive Eighty builds end-to-end commerce strategies for brands that need shelfand screen to work as one system. From retail media and shopper marketing toeCommerce planning and creative production, we manage the full picture — sobrands don't have to.