With more than 350 retail media networks now vying for advertiser dollars, the channel has become so saturated that brands risk cannibalizing their own organic visibility by over-investing in paid placements.
That’s the cautionary message from one media agency executive, who argues the industry’s obsession with return on ad spend is leading brands down a costly path.
“Retail media has almost just become media,” said Molly Hop, managing partner at Havas Media Network, in this video interview with Beet.TV at Beet Retreat San Juan. “CPCs are going up, it’s becoming way more crowded, way more competitive.”
She says the problem is that constant optimization toward ROAS means advertisers may be “buying a placement that you were winning organically anyway.”
The case for organic-first strategy
Rather than immediately reaching for the paid media lever, Hop advocates starting with organic positioning and content optimization.
“Think about how you optimize that organic experience and that organic positioning first,” Hop said. “Content and the language that you use in your brand story, in your PDP, are still really important to drive up that visibility and really drive that conversion.”
The stakes are considerable. U.S. retail media ad spending is expected to reach $71.09 billion in 2026, according to Emarketer, a 17.8% year-over-year increase. That growth is outpacing both social and search advertising.
Why ROAS is ‘broken’
Hop argued that ROAS creates a myopic focus on paid results while ignoring the broader brand positioning that ultimately drives consumer preference.
“I have to be honest, I despise ROAS. I hate ROAS as the main metric,” Hop said. “If you’re constantly optimizing to ROAS, you’re only optimizing to paid metrics, which means you’re not again thinking about the overall position of your brand.”
The alternative, she suggested, lies in metrics that capture incremental value rather than simply tracking paid conversions. “Are you driving incremental growth? Are you driving that visibility? Are you driving that consideration and optimizing to those KPIs? That’s really where you’re going to win,” Hop said.
Increasingly, advertisers are demanding better execution quality and clearer standards from retail media networks, pushing retailers to improve data transparency and develop more sophisticated attribution models.
AI agents are reshaping discovery
Hop said optimising brands for search won’t necessarily work in an AI environment.
“SEO, I feel like the under-recognized kind of practice within every organization, is constantly thinking about visibility in terms of essentially the standards that Google sets,” Hop said. “But the LLMs have changed that enormously.”
The problem, she explained, is that content structures optimized for traditional search engines don’t necessarily perform well when AI agents are curating recommendations. “What we’re seeing is when we audit, is that how content is structured, how pages are structured, how PDPs are structured, actually isn’t necessarily appealing to those agents,” Hop said.
She urged a reassessment of content strategy to structure content appropriately to be indexed in the new world.
