The Five Decisions Every Retail CEO Needs to Make About Retail Media

Most retail CEOs think of retail media (if they think of it at all) as a project to generate some extra revenue. The ones who get it right treat it as a growth engine for the business.

That distinction determines how you resource it, who leads it, how you measure it, and whether it compounds or stalls. In my experience, the difference between those two outcomes almost always comes down to five decisions.

During my career I've worked at two of the UK’s leading retailers - Tesco and Sainsbury’s - and seen their media arms from the inside. I’ve also led the global retail media function at Delivery Hero building the business from scratch and seen revenues grow from €15m to €120m across 40+ markets. I've advised others at various stages of the journey. What I've learned is that the retailers who succeed aren't simply the ones with the best technology or the biggest budgets. They're the ones whose leadership made these calls.

Decision 1: What is retail media actually for in your business?

This sounds obvious. But the ‘why’ is so often overlooked or mis-identified as being about ‘easy money’. 

Is retail media a margin lever that goes straight into the P&L? A way to fund price investment and pass value back to customers? A mechanism to deepen supplier relationships? A competitive differentiator in your category?

The answer shapes almost everything downstream - who owns it, who it reports to, how it's measured, what success looks like. Without a clear answer at the top, the people doing the work are building on quicksand. That’s because with change comes disruption and if the rest of the business doesn’t understand the ‘why’, they’ll be managing the fallout from a decision that was never made.

The retailers getting this right are thinking about retail media as a flywheel, not a revenue line. For example: media revenue funds price investment. Better value drives people to buy more, and come back. Loyalty drives data depth. Data depth helps brands understand their business better and makes the media more valuable. The whole business gets stronger.

Over the past year, Kingfisher Group named retail media as a margin lever in their 2025/2026 FY results - not just extra revenue, but part of the P&L conversation. Sainsbury's CEO discussed measurement of incrementality that Nectar360 media drives on an earnings call. And Tesco describes their ecosystem as the largest closed-loop media network in the UK. These aren't pure media businesses. They're retailers who decided what retail media was for, and built accordingly.

Decision 2: Who is accountable for making this a successful business?

The most important organisational decision to make, is who is accountable. And whether that person has a genuine mandate to build something.

Retail media needs an intrapreneur: someone with the mindset of an entrepreneur operating inside the organisation. Someone who can navigate internal politics, build cross-functional relationships, and make things happen to drive commercial outcomes. This person is rare. When found, the need proper backing.

When it gets treated as a side project - handed to the ecommerce director, or someone already running at capacity - retail media will stay a side project, and the P&L will show it.

The person who owns this needs to report to someone at the top who cares. That's not a nice-to-have. It's what determines whether the tricky decisions get made or get avoided. Giving someone responsibility without authority is a sure-fire way to make retail media stall.

Decision 3: Which function should retail media belong to?

This is a different question from Decision 2, and an equally important one.

Retail media sits at the intersection of commercial relationships with suppliers and marketing relationships with customers. Both teams have legitimate claims on it. Neither will naturally cede ground.

Where it sits determines whose goals it serves, how it's funded, and how conflicts get resolved. There's no one right answer. But there is a wrong process - leaving it unresolved and hoping the teams quietly figure it out between themselves. 

That never happens. Instead there’s lots of noise. The organisation defaults to whoever shouts loudest, and retail media can end up owned by the wrong function for the wrong reasons.

This is a CEO-level decision. If that’s you, make it deliberately rather than letting it be inherited by default.

Decision 4: How do commercial, marketing and retail media work together?

This is where most retail media builds fail hardest.

The friction between trade, marketing and retail media teams is one of the most consistent things I see in this work. It's totally normal. It's structural - these teams have different and often conflicting goals, different relationships with the same suppliers, and competing claims on the same spaces used as media (inventory).

If unresolved, this becomes much more than a culture problem. It becomes a drain on the profit that retail media can bring. Every week without clarity on who owns what, what can be sold, to whom and by whom, is revenue not captured, supplier relationships not deepened (or worse, damaged), and talent quietly burning out.

What resolves it isn't simply goodwill or a workshop. It's clarity - on inventory allocation, eligibility, ways of working, and where accountability sits. In my experience that requires real drive from the leadership, with knowledge that those at the top are prepared to make tough calls rather than leaving them to be fought out by those doing the doing.

The language matters too. Commercial teams talk about suppliers and funding. Retail media teams tend to talk about clients and investment. Retailers need a shared frame, otherwise you've got two different conversations that are at odds with one another.

Set the governance. Map who owns what. Create the conditions for these teams to work together. And then hold them to it.

Decision 5: What are you willing to invest before expecting meaningful returns?

If the board is expecting meaningful, sustainable retail media revenue within twelve months, the most important thing the CEO can do right now is have an honest conversation.

Retail media done properly is a multi-year transformation. The first phase is infrastructure, team-building, and establishing the commercial model. Then comes scaling what works and iterating on what doesn't. Only after those foundations are in place do you really start to see the compounding value.

This doesn't mean there are no early wins. There are plenty, they are material, and they’re super important for internal momentum and board confidence. But they need to be positioned and understood as proof points on a longer journey, not the destination itself.

Retailers who underfund the early phases and then measure against ambitious targets often end up in the same place: a retail media operation that has absorbed time and created internal friction and a lot of people left wondering “was that worth it?”.

So retailers need to set the investment expectations honestly. Framed as the growth investment it is. And revisit the strategy every 12-18 months - the landscape is moving quickly and what works now won’t be what works in the next phase.

The test

Five decisions, five questions.

If you can't answer all five confidently, you probably don't have a retail media business yet. You have something more like a retail media project (if anything at all).

That's not a criticism, it's a starting point. Most retailers are somewhere on that journey. The ones who step on fastest are the ones who pause to take stock and make the decisions.

Who this is for

If you're a retail CEO or COO who has retail media on the agenda - or a senior leader who's been handed the brief and is working out what it actually requires - Carroll Commerce helps leadership teams get clarity on what they're building and make the decisions that move it forward. If this article made you realise that one or more of these decisions hasn't actually been made in your organisation, that's a conversation I'm happy to have. Get in touch with Tara Carroll.

FAQs

What is the difference between a retail media project and a retail media business

A project has a budget, a sponsor, and an end date. A business has a P&L, a strategy, and the expectation of compounding returns over time. The distinction matters because it determines how you resource it, who leads it, and how you measure success. Most retail media operations sit somewhere between the two - for maximum benefits, the retailer’s goal is to move deliberately toward the business end of that spectrum.

Who should own retail media inside a retail organisation?

This is one of the most common and consequential questions. Retail media sits at the intersection of commercial, marketing, data, and technology - which means it often ends up owned by nobody, or contested by several teams. The most effective structure is a dedicated retail media function with a single accountable leader, clear mandate from the CEO or CCO, and defined handshakes with category, marketing and tech. Without this, retail media almost always stalls.

How do you get commercial and marketing teams aligned on retail media

Alignment doesn’t come from goodwill alone. What works is clarity; on what is expected of who, what inventory exists and can be sold, who can buy it, how campaigns are delivered, and where accountability sits when things go wrong. Getting to that clarity usually requires someone who can sit above the internal politics, understand all perspectives, and help leadership make the tough calls.

How long does it take to build a retail media network?

A meaningful retail media capability - with a clear product, commercial model, and measurement infrastructure - typically takes 12 to 24 months to build properly from scratch. The transformation to embed retail media in the business takes much longer. The retailers who move fastest are those with strong CEO mandate, a clear operating model from the start, and an experienced operator leading the build rather than a strategy team producing recommendations.

What if we're not sure whether to build retail media ourselves or use a managed service?

That's a great question to ask before committing significant resource. The answer depends on your scale, your data assets, your internal capability, and what you're ultimately trying to achieve. Carroll Commerce works with retailers to get honest clarity on that question, including advising against building - and alternative routes - when the ingredients aren't there.