Why Marketing Procurement Must Step Up on Retail Media Consolidation
There is a structural shift happening in how brands organize and spend their media budgets, and marketing procurement has largely been left off the stage in the first act. A recent Ad Age article highlighted a growing trend: brands are consolidating retail media and brand-building budgets under a single agency, driven in large part by pressure from CFOs who are no longer willing to accept fragmented performance reporting that conveniently release every platform of accountability. It is a smart move. But the conversation is happening between CMOs, CFOs, and agencies — and in many cases, procurement is conspicuously absent from the room.
That needs to change. Not because procurement deserves a seat out of principle, but because without it, this consolidation will be badly structured, poorly governed, and commercially vulnerable from day one.
The scale of what’s at stake
Before exploring why procurement’s absence is a problem, it is worth understanding the size of the opportunity being restructured. US advertisers spent $60.32 billion on retail media in 2025 and are expected to spend $71.09 billion in 2026, according to EMARKETER — growing at 17.8% year-over-year, outpacing both social network and search ad spending growth rates. Globally, the picture is even more striking: retail media is forecast to grow from $184 billion in 2025 to $312 billion by 2030.
This is not a niche performance channel anymore. Retail media is now one of the top three digital advertising formats in the world, sitting alongside search and social — and brands are still working out how to govern it. Only 40% of advertisers regard retail media as capable of delivering full-funnel results, which means the majority are still treating it as a lower-funnel, sales-activation tool, siloed from the broader brand-building agenda.
That siloing is exactly what the consolidation trend is trying to solve. And it is exactly where marketing procurement should be leading, not following.
Siloed budgets with different deliverables
In prior years, brand and trade spend was often managed by different teams, with very different mandates. One team managed the brand, the so-called “above the line activities” or “upper funnel” while other teams managed the trade, the so-called” below the line activities” or “lower funnel”.
Specialist retail media vendors serviced this space for years, building deep relationships with sales and shopper teams that traditional marketing procurement never had reason to enter. The category had its own ecosystem, its own language, and its own way of doing business. In short, it was a hard category to break into without very specialized experience.
As retail media grew in strategic scale and dollar value, traditional media agencies recognized the opportunity and moved quickly. They built internal commerce divisions, repositioned their capabilities, and pitched brands on the promise of a consolidated, better-value product that would bring retail and brand media together under one roof. It was a compelling story. But in most cases, the promise of consolidation did not translate into structural reality. Brands continued managing retail and brand spend in parallel, with the same internal silos intact underneath a new agency wrapper.
As any experienced procurement professional knows, breaking into an established spend category is genuinely difficult without senior leadership alignment. Trade and retail marketing had long-standing internal champions. The CFO was not yet engaged as an active driver. And so, the category continued to grow — largely inside its own procurement’s world — until the numbers became too large and too strategically important to ignore.
That moment has arrived. The retail media landscape has undergone dramatic transformation in just the past two years. Patterns are beginning to emerge — in measurement, in platform consolidation, in the blurring of brand and performance objectives. Procurement is well-placed to help make sense of this, across both categories. And crucially, the CFO has now entered the conversation not as a passive budget approver, but as an active driver of change. That is the alignment procurement has been waiting for.
The CFO is already your ally — use it
Here is the underutilized advantage that marketing procurement already holds: in most organisations, procurement reports to or has a close working relationship with the CFO. That is not a bureaucratic footnote — it is a strategic asset that marketing teams, currently under enormous pressure to justify spend, desperately need.
The Ad Age piece makes clear that it is CFO pressure driving this consolidation. As one agency CEO noted, when budgets are fragmented across multiple agencies and platforms, everyone claims their numbers are up — but the CFO sees a flat business and wants to know why. The problem, in short, is that fragmentation enables accountability gaps. Consolidation closes them.
Marketing procurement is uniquely positioned to translate this CFO concern into a structured business case — because we already speak the language of Finance. We can build the “future-state” model, frame the governance structure, quantify the risk, and present the argument in terms a CFO will trust. Rather than leaving the CMO to navigate that conversation alone — and potentially lose impact and control of the process — procurement can be the bridge.
“Procurement can go to the CMO and say: let us help you make this case to Finance. That is how procurement earns its seat at the strategy table — not by being invited, but by demonstrating it has something the conversation cannot afford to be without.”
The turf war no one wants to name
The internal politics of retail media consolidation are real and largely unspoken in polite industry discourse. Retail media budgets have historically been controlled by sales, shopper, or customer teams — not by brand marketers. Brand media sits with the CMO’s office. The two functions have different objectives, different metrics, different agency relationships, and in many organisations, a long history of quiet competition for budget and influence.
The Ad Age report touches on this, noting that the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) Retail Media Working Group published a guidebook on how marketers should organize oversight of retail media — generally involving cross-functional teams. The guidance is sensible. The execution is much harder to handle. Nobody wants to give up budget control, and nobody wants to be subordinated to a colleague’s governance framework.
This is where marketing procurement, at its best, can play a genuinely neutral role. In many organisations, procurement already has working relationships with both sides — the brand marketing team and the commercial or sales team. It is one of the few functions that can legitimately sit at the center of both without being perceived as partisan. We can translate different goals into aligned targets. We can propose governance structures that neither team would have accepted if the other had proposed them.
This is not about soft skills or stakeholder management as a nice-to-have. It is about the fact that without someone holding the middle ground, consolidation becomes a power struggle — and the agency ends up managing the politics of two competing client factions rather than doing the work.
What procurement actually brings — beyond price
When procurement is mentioned in media consolidation conversations, the default assumption is that its contribution is pricing leverage and contract management. Those things matter. But they are not the reason procurement should lead this agenda.
The first and most important contribution is governance architecture — defining who owns what budget, how performance is measured, and what the agency is actually accountable for delivering. This is the part that most consolidation exercises get wrong. They merge the budgets and appoint the agency, but they do not redesign the measurement framework. The result is that the same siloed reporting simply gets presented under a single cover sheet. One agency, still two separate conversations.
Procurement can prevent that by insisting — at the RFP stage, before any agency is appointed — that the measurement framework is unified, that brand and retail media are evaluated against shared business outcomes, and that the agency cannot retreat to platform-specific reporting when results are challenged.
The second contribution is negotiating leverage. A brand that consolidates retail and brand media under one agency becomes materially more important to that agency. That means more senior talent on the account, more genuine innovation investment, and greater willingness to offer value-added services without additional fees. Procurement’s job is to contractually capture that value: dedicated senior team structures, innovation commitments, AI capability briefings in the retail media space, and performance improvement mechanisms tied to real business outcomes.
The third contribution is the business case itself. Consolidation is not just a savings exercise — though there are real efficiencies to be realised. The full argument includes reduced operational complexity, a single source of truth for data and analytics, internally aligned corporate goals across brand and trade, and the creation of conditions under which the organisation can actually see what is working. Procurement can quantify all of this in a language Finance will accept, presenting it as an investment decision rather than a cost-saving exercise.
The harder truth about why this is happening
There is a more uncomfortable dimension to this consolidation trend that the industry is not quite saying out loud. The shift is not only being driven by a desire for better measurement or strategic coherence. It is also being driven by the realization that the fragmented media model has been generating a lot of noise that was very hard to disprove — and that the data environment has now changed enough that the noise is becoming visible.
The media and marketing world is sitting on more data than at any previous point in its history. Retail media, in particular, operates on first-party purchase data — the most precise signal available in advertising. Retail media networks connect ad impressions directly to transactions, providing deterministic attribution that traditional digital advertising cannot offer. When that level of precision is available, fragmented decision-making across siloed teams does not just create inefficiency — it creates contradictions. Different teams, using different datasets, can draw completely opposite conclusions about the same campaign.
One version of the truth is no longer a luxury. It is a competitive necessity. Brands that run unified measurement across brand and retail media — as agencies like Craft & Commerce are already doing through geographic testing (Ad Age, March 2026) — are beginning to see that the right combination of both drives significantly better outcomes than either, working in isolation. Brands still running separate teams on separate mandates are making decisions in the dark by comparison.
Procurement’s role in this context is to insist on the conditions that make one truth possible: unified data governance, clear agency accountability, and reporting frameworks that connect media investment to business results. That is not a procurement ask — it is a CFO requirement, a CMO need, and a competitive imperative.
What procurement should do now
The window to lead this agenda is open, but it will not stay open indefinitely. Agencies are already restructuring their teams in response to client demand. Brands are already running reviews with consolidated briefs. The first wave of consolidation is happening right now — with or without procurement’s input.
For marketing procurement teams who want to step into this space, the starting point is not a new framework or a revised playbook. It is a conversation with the CFO — one that procurement is in a better position to initiate than almost anyone else in the organization. Bring the data on retail media growth, the evidence on measurement fragmentation, and a structured proposal for what a consolidated governance model could look like. Then bring the CMO into the room.
That triangulation — CFO, CMO, and Procurement — is the only configuration that can make this work. The CFO provides the mandate. The CMO provides the strategy. Procurement provides the commercial rigor, the governance architecture, and the cross-functional neutrality to hold it all together.
The retail media consolidation conversation is already happening. The only question is whether marketing procurement arrives as a builder — or reads about it later in the trade press.
About the Author:
Christine Moore is the founder of RAUS Global, an independent marketing procurement and commercial governance advisory firm. RAUS Global works with brands and advisors to deliver commercial clarity and real value across the marketing ecosystem — Insight. Impact. Integrity.
Key Sources
Ad Age: “CFO pressure is pushing brands to consolidate retail and brand media with a single agency” — Brandon Doerrer, March 26, 2026
EMARKETER Retail Media Forecast, December 2025
Adtelligent Retail Media Market Outlook, February 2026