If you’ve ever opened your laptop on a Monday morning and found yourself staring at 17 tabs just to answer a single reporting question, you’re not alone. Retail media today often feels like a puzzle pieces scattered across platforms, dashboards, and spreadsheets.
The irony is that retail media is meant to simplify. It should bring retailers and advertisers closer, not send teams digging through Excel files like archaeologists searching for buried insights.
When campaign data sits in one tool, product sales in another, and merchandising inputs in a third, the cost is more than time. It’s:
Missed insights: Important signals get lost between systems.
Slow decisions: Teams reconcile instead of acting.
Frustrated teams: Marketing, merchandising, and ad ops keep asking, “Which number is right?”
Lost revenue: By the time the data is pieced together, the chance to optimize may already be gone.
And this isn’t just an efficiency problem. It’s a confidence problem. When decision-makers can’t trust the data in front of them, they hesitate. That hesitation costs money.
“Single pane of glass” might sound like a buzzword, but in retail media it has real impact. A unified view means:
Clarity: Campaign delivery, sales lift, and advertiser spend in one place.
Speed: Less reconciling, more optimizing.
Alignment: Merchandising and media working from the same truth.
Accountability: Reporting that links spend to outcomes, building trust with advertisers.
Instead of acting as system integrators, teams can get back to being strategists.
The retail media market is maturing fast. But many networks underperform due to what our recent whitepaper with Retail Gazette calls the “frankerstack” problem. Advertisers are scrutinizing ROI, and retailers are under pressure to prove value. Networks that win won’t just be the ones with more data, but the ones that can make sense of it quickly and clearly.
And here’s the kicker: retailers know this. In fact, on a recent sales call I heard one retailer bluntly said they were drowning in spreadsheets, describing their current process as “wasteful,” consuming tens of thousands of hours a year with little confidence in the outputs. They don’t want another dashboard. They want clarity, alignment, and proof their investment is paying off.
At Zitcha, we’ve built our platform to give retailers that unified view from day one. Not as an add-on, not as a patchwork, but as the default. Because we know retail media teams already have enough tabs open in browsers and in their minds.
Retail media doesn’t need more noise. It needs clarity. And clarity starts with a single pane of glass.
About the Author
Dominik Elias is a Product Marketing Manager and one of the founding members at Zitcha. With 15+ years in B2B marketing, she loves solving problems and connecting teams which is why Zitcha’s mission to make retail media better for everyone just fits.