From Performance Marketer To Retail Media Architect: A Changing Role For Growth Teams

Commerce media has emerged as one of the fastest-growing digital advertising channels, transforming how enterprise brands reach consumers in super high-intent environments. Retail media is the biggest slice of the commerce media pie. Powered by first-party data and closed-loop measurement, retail media connects media spend directly to sales across online and in-store channels, serving as a retailer-specific subset of commerce media that drives measurable growth through retailer-owned platforms.

Specifically in the realm of retail media, an eMarketer’s Report has found that U.S. retail media ad spend is expected to exceed $62 billion in 2025, a jump of over $10 billion Y-O-Y. This momentum is being driven by expanding ad formats, richer targeting capabilities, and the integration of retail data into channels far beyond retailer websites (off-site retail media).

Equally transformative is AI. Generative AI tools are powering dynamic messaging, personalized recommendations, and creative versioning at scale. McKinsey finds that 73% of U.S. advertisers are likely to partner with Retail Media Networks (RMNs) that leverage AI for creative expansion and productivity.

Performance marketers who once optimized large-scale campaigns across platforms like Google and Meta are now seeing a control shift toward retailer-owned ecosystems, where familiar strategies meet new constraints and opportunities. Here’s a comparison of the two:

The performance marketer who once specialized in two or three dominant platforms now faces a patchwork of ecosystems each with its own rules, inventory, and data. Complexity is escalating fast due to:

• Full-funnel media expansion: RMNs now extend beyond sponsored search into display, video, CTV, and in‑store media.
• Off-site activation: RMNs are using shopper data to serve precise ads across social platforms, programmatic open web, and CTV.
• In-store media presence: eMarketer forecasts U.S. in‑store retail media spend will top $1 billion by 2028, still under 1% of total spend, but ripe with opportunity. Long a black box, in-store media is also becoming better measurable with first-party data and AI-powered attribution models.

Adapting to Multi-Channel Complexity

McKinsey data shows just how quickly multi-channel complexity is accelerating: 53% of advertisers used five or more Commerce Media Networks (CMNs) in 2024, up from 38% in 2023, meaning marketers are already juggling multiple partners and compliance rules at once. BCG reports that brands now allocate around 20 % of ad budgets to retail media, with most planning to increase that alongside RMN expansion.

As this ecosystem fragments, AI is emerging as the operating system for retail media as 55% of marketers expect it to power recommendations, optimization, and personalization, according to an eMarketer report.

The Role Has Been Stretched:

The foundation of performance marketing still holds; measurement, iteration, ROI obsession. But the role has been stretched in three important ways:

• Less control, more orchestration: No more end-to-end ownership; instead, collaboration across creative, retail, and analytics is essential.
• From testing landing pages to testing SKUs: The unit of optimization has shifted from site experiences to retailer product detail pages.
• Creative as logistics: Traditional silos between media, brand creative, and retail teams no longer work. Creative must now be versioned by SKU, seasonality, and retailer compliance, turning creative execution into a supply-chain-like process.

It’s no surprise then that 48% of US marketing leaders expect AI to play its biggest role here, automating and enhancing creative efforts at scale.

The overall outcome is not a replacement but an expansion: the performance marketer has evolved into the retail media architect, part media strategist and part creative ops lead.

Carrying Forward Performance DNA:

The evolution from static to dynamic execution shows how performance marketing DNA is being reapplied in retail media.

The experience of a leading U.S. grocer, Giant Eagle, is instructive: static creative versioning wasn’t enough. They shifted to dynamic, data‑driven ads auto‑updated with first‑party data across touchpoints.

By automating feed-driven creative production with DaVinci Commerce, they lifted CTR by 54%; proof that creative agility is the new performance lever in retail media.

Infrastructure for the New Role:

For marketers stepping into the “retail media architect” role, infrastructure is critical. They need systems that automate creative, unify media execution, and scale personalization. AI-powered platforms, like DaVinci Commerce, provide exactly that connective tissue: automating retail-ready creative production, enforcing compliance, and linking first-party data to dynamic creative decision-making.

This enables growth teams to stop managing fragmentation and start architecting the full retail experience.

A Role Rewritten:

The rise of retail media is not just a channel shift; it’s a career evolution. The next era of growth leaders won’t just optimize campaigns, they will architect commerce and retail ecosystems, leveraging orchestration across RMNs, creative precision, and AI-enabled scale.

The result is a new kind of marketer: the retail media architect, carrying forward the precision of performance marketing while expanding it to build the next era of commerce-driven advertising.