Creative:
The New
Performance
Variable
in Retail
Media

Executive Summary

Retail media has become one of the fastest-growing channels in advertising. Networks have invested billions in first-party data, measurement infrastructure, closed-loop attribution, and shopper intelligence. Those investments have transformed how brands reach consumers.

Yet advertising creative has failed to evolve at the same pace.

The industry has largely continued using production models built for television campaigns and seasonal brand launches while expecting them to power hundreds of retailer-specific activations across an increasingly fragmented retail media landscape.

The result is a structural mismatch between sophisticated media capabilities and creative systems that cannot produce, adapt, or optimize content at the speed modern retail media demands. Data and clear audience targeting were once the limiting factors. Today it is the scale of creative production.

This guide examines why that gap exists, how it affects campaign performance, and what leading retail media organizations are doing differently. Drawing on production experience across more than 3,000 CPG campaigns, it outlines a practical framework for building creative systems that match the pace and complexity of today's retail media environment.

The retail media networks delivering a competitive advantage are not just collecting more shopper data — they are building creative infrastructures capable of activating that data to create experiences for their shoppers that are personal and beneficial.

Targeting has largely been solved by retail media networks, yet the creative pieces remain elusive.

Retailers' media arms have fundamentally changed how brands can reach shoppers. For the first time, advertisers can activate campaigns using real purchase behavior rather than inferred intent. Networks now combine first-party transaction data, closed-loop measurement, and loyalty programs to create some of the most sophisticated advertising environments in the industry.

For the networks themselves, this growth carries its own stakes. Advertiser retention, achievable CPMs, and category share all depend on brand partners seeing a return on their media spend — and creative is increasingly the variable that decides whether they do. A network that helps its brand partners produce better creative is not just doing them a favor. It is protecting its own ad revenue.

Most campaigns running through retail media channels are adaptations of broader brand initiatives. National brand assets become online PDP videos, re-versioned social assets, resized with the retailer logo attached. The media strategy changes but the creative strategy is pulling from the old playbooks. As a result, precision targeting frequently delivers generic messaging to highly qualified shoppers.

Creative built for national brands is awareness-focused and rarely, if ever, addresses the shopping missions, purchase triggers, merchandising environments, nor the retailer-specific behaviors of the shopper.

If your media can be targeted, shouldn't your creative as well?

Traditional production models were optimized for a world of relatively few high-value creative assets developed over long planning cycles. Retail media flipped this on its head. Asking agency partners to just "work faster" is a recipe for failure. The solution lies in creating a different operating model.

Traditional creative production was designed to optimize craftsmanship. Retail media requires systems optimized for adaptability. Successful partners in this space not only understand the brand, but they also have a deep understanding of the technology and how these two parts intersect.

The Production Mismatch

Retail media has introduced a fundamental shift in how shopper and commerce creative should be developed. Not too long ago, brands created a single campaign meant to be used across multiple channels and platforms. Today, each network represents a unique shopping environment built around its own customer behaviors, purchase motivations, and merchandising strategies.

A shopper browsing recipes on Kroger will be making different decisions than a member filling a stock-up order on Sam's Club or one discovering the latest trends at Target. Yes, the audiences may overlap — but the shopping missions and intentions do not.

Retail media performs best when creative is designed for the environment and audience for which it appears. This is what we call network-native creative — and nowhere is it more powerful than when this thinking is leveraged in video.

Network-native creative begins with a single brand strategy but intentionally adapts messaging, visuals, offers, and storytelling to reflect each retailer's shopper behavior and media environment.

Rather than asking "How do we resize this campaign?" high-performing organizations are asking "How should this campaign come to life inside this retail ecosystem?"

Every Retail Network Has a Different Context

Networks have invested heavily in understanding shopper intent. Creative should reflect that same level of sophistication.

Artificial intelligence has dramatically reduced the time required to create marketing assets. Generating images, video, copy, and design variations is no longer the constraint it once was. Yet, simply introducing AI tools into existing workflows produces lackluster results.

The reason is straightforward: technology accelerates existing processes, but it cannot transform them. Organizations that continue using approval structures, briefing methods, and production workflows designed for traditional campaign development are simply reinforcing broken ways of working.

The organizations realizing meaningful business value are redesigning their production systems, not merely adopting new technology.

The Creative Maturity Curve

Many enterprise CPG brands are at Level 1 or early Level 2. The gap is one of workflow design, not technology. Teams advancing fastest have redesigned their production processes around getting the most out of AI — not simply adding AI tools to existing ways of working.

More Creative Is Not Better Creative

One unintended consequence of generative AI is the assumption that quantity equals effectiveness. It does not. Producing one hundred creative variations without understanding which ones improve business outcomes simply creates more content to manage.

The strongest production systems create a continuous feedback loop with each campaign informing the next. Organizations that establish this cycle compound performance — not volume. That difference will define the next generation of retail media leaders.

AI creative adoption across Fortune 500 CPG companies is further along than most industry coverage suggests — but it is unevenly distributed. What separates the groups is not company size or budget. It is an organizational mindset.

There are three types of individuals present within an organization:

For retail media networks, success means supporting all three groups simultaneously. The Cautiously Curious represent the largest pool of incremental activation revenue. The Gatekeepers represent the relationships most at risk of stagnating. A network that can bridge both cohorts toward better creative infrastructure wins on both ends.

Across thousands of retail media activations, a consistent pattern has emerged. The highest-performing brands are no longer treating creative production as a sequence of isolated projects. They are building repeatable systems that connect strategy, production, measurement, and optimization into a continuous workflow.

They Build Once and Adapt Intelligently

Traditional production begins with every retailer as a new project. Leading organizations begin with a single strategic brief and systematically adapt it for each retail environment. The core campaign remains consistent — the difference is that execution changes to reflect shopper context, media format, merchandising strategy, and retailer-specific objectives.

Instead of producing ten unrelated campaigns, they produce one strategic platform capable of supporting hundreds of relevant executions and behavioral moments.

They Design for Continuous Improvement

Traditional campaigns end when media launches. Modern creative systems begin learning when campaigns launch. Performance data is treated as creative intelligence rather than simply media reporting. Questions evolve beyond "Did the campaign perform?" to "What did this campaign teach us about our shoppers?"

Each activation informs the next creative decision. Over time, organizations accumulate institutional knowledge that cannot be replicated simply by generating more assets. Learning — not production volume — becomes the competitive advantage.

They Embed Governance Into Production

Retail media cannot afford to separate speed from control. Brand standards, retailer requirements, legal considerations, and regulatory guidance must be incorporated from the beginning — not reviewed after creative has already been produced. Organizations that integrate governance throughout production consistently reduce revision cycles while increasing confidence among legal, brand, and marketing teams.

Proof from the Field

The following case studies are drawn from production work across 3,000+ CPG campaigns on major retail media networks.

Read from the network side, both case studies point to the same conclusion: brand partners who win with better creative spend more, and spend it with the network where it worked. That is the return an RMN should be underwriting when it invests in creative infrastructure.

The legal and approval layer is the most consistently underestimated friction point in AI creative adoption. It is also the one that most directly limits the speed advantage AI is supposed to deliver.

• Sequential review designed for low volume. At 10 assets per campaign, manageable. At 100 variants, a structural bottleneck that eliminates the production speed advantage before it reaches the network.
• Unclear AI-specific usage rights. Most brand licensing agreements predate generative AI. The legal status of AI-generated assets under existing brand guidelines is frequently undefined, creating review paralysis.
• Brand safety calibration lag. AI tools require a calibration period to produce reliable on-brand outputs. During this period, review rates increase as teams learn what the tool can and cannot be trusted with unsupervised.

For a network, this evaluation is not a favor to brand partners. It is a direct lever on network revenue. Advertisers renew and expand budgets with the networks where their creative performs. Technology is increasingly becoming a commodity — the workflow is not.

When evaluating creative partners, retail media organizations should look beyond demonstrations of AI-generated content and instead examine how the creative is produced, governed, and improved over time.

Key questions include:

• How are brand standards incorporated into production?
• How is retailer-specific guidance reflected throughout the creative process?
• How are campaign insights captured and applied to future work?
• What role do human creative teams play throughout the development?
• How does the workflow reduce the burden on legal and compliance teams?

The answers to these questions will reveal the possibilities for long-term partnership value.

The conversations surrounding AI and retail media are evolving rapidly. The following responses reflect the themes emerging across enterprise CPG organizations and retail media networks as creative production becomes a competitive capability.

Has retail media become a creative business?

Increasingly, yes. The competitive advantage of retail media came from audience targeting, first-party data, and measurement. As those advantages become more comparable, creative execution is becoming a larger determinant of campaign performance. The question is no longer whether a network can deliver the right shopper — it is whether the creative speaks to that shopper in a relevant way.

Why haven't traditional agency models solved this?

Traditional agencies were designed to deliver fewer campaigns with high production value while retail media requires continuous adaptation across retailers, audiences, formats, and shopping occasions. It is a workflow problem many agencies were not built to solve.

Does every retailer really require different creative?

No, not always. Effective retail media balances brand consistency with contextual relevance. The objective is not to reinvent the campaign for every retailer — it is to express the same strategy in ways that align with different shopping environments, purchase motivations, and media formats.

Isn't AI-generated creative video a brand risk?

The greater risk is poorly governed production, not artificial intelligence itself. Enterprise organizations should evaluate AI-enabled workflows the same way they evaluate any production system: Are brand standards embedded from the beginning? Are legal requirements incorporated before production? Is human creative leadership involved throughout development? When governance is integrated into the workflow, AI becomes a production capability rather than a compliance concern.

What should executives measure beyond ROAS?

Return on ad spend remains important, but it tells only part of the story. Leading organizations increasingly evaluate creative using a broader set of business outcomes, including: sales lift, incremental household penetration, add-to-cart behavior, creative production velocity, time-to-launch, creative reuse across retailers, and speed of optimization after launch.

Where should organizations begin?

Most organizations do not need a complete transformation. They need a focused starting point. Successful programs often begin with a single campaign, one retailer, or one category where faster production and creative adaptation can be measured against existing workflows. Organizations that demonstrate measurable value through focused pilots are better positioned to scale responsibly.

Three developments will define the retail media creative category over the next 12–18 months. Networks that are built for them now will have a structural advantage that is difficult to close later.

Retail media has transformed how brands identify the right shopper. The next transformation will determine how effectively brands communicate with that shopper.

The networks and brand teams that build those capabilities today will shape the next generation of retail media performance.

Creative won't just be an output of the campaign. It will be the operating system running it.