By Katie Carlson, Director of Customer Success, Americas at Zitcha
Retail media networks have become one of retail's fastest-growing profit centers, but many retailers still struggle to align merchandising and media teams. When those teams operate independently, brands receive conflicting guidance, campaigns underperform, and commercial opportunities are lost. Drawing on over a decade leading retail media at Overstock.com and Bed Bath & Beyond, Katie Carlson shares the structural changes that transformed her team's performance.
If you're building or scaling a retail media network (RMN), here's what I wish someone had told me at the start. Some of my most valuable lessons had nothing to do with ad tech, bid strategies, or CPCs. They had everything to do with the people sitting three desks over from me: the merchandising team.
Internal misalignment between merchandising and retail media is the biggest threat to your retail media network’s performance—not Amazon or Walmart Connect. Merchants and media teams that operate in silos will always underperform, and your brand partners will feel it. Getting this right is the single highest-leverage thing a retailer can do to build a durable, profitable RMN.
Retail media often sits completely separate from merchandising. We did and it showed. We were having totally different conversations with the same brands. We had no visibility into what the merchants were asking for, and they had none into what we were selling. The result? Brands felt pulled in two directions, and our internal credibility suffered.
Merchants viewed retail media as noise, something that disrupted their category strategy and confused the customer experience. In every conversation I have with retailers building their RMNs, internal alignment comes up as the hardest part. Not ad tech. Not brand relationships. People.
Because retail media was a significant profit center, merchandising had to tolerate us. But tolerance isn't partnership. Merchants would tell brands directly that sponsored products "don't work" or that their money was better spent elsewhere on trade.
Those conversations, even when well-intentioned, cost us real revenue and real relationships. And once leadership figured out those conversations were happening, there was a mandate: figure it out.
Leadership moved our retail media team into the merchandising org and we all reported to the same person. It was painful at first. Old habits die hard, and both sides brought defensiveness and territory to the table. Structural integration alone doesn’t fix merchant-media misalignment; it just forced the conversations we'd been avoiding.
The org structure change alone didn't fix our problems. What fixed it was what we did next.
Giving merchants visibility into campaigns, proposals, and reporting improved performance for both retail media and the brands we worked with. For years, we resisted—telling ourselves that retail media needed to be independent to be truly incremental. We were wrong.
Here's the practical version of what that looked like:
Merchants were invited to all brand meetings where media was part of the agenda
They had input on which SKUs and products we included in sponsored campaigns
Campaign performance data was shared with merchants as part of regular category reviews
Retail media proposals were reviewed in the context of what merchandising was already asking of the brand
Merchants know their categories. When we started letting them flag which SKUs they actually wanted promoted—new arrivals that needed a visibility boost, products with strong margins, items tied to seasonal pushes—our campaigns performed better and our pitches to brands were more coherent.
Brands stopped getting conflicting signals. Merchants stopped undermining us. Everyone looked smarter.
The unlock for our retail media team was learning to speak merchant language—leading with category outcomes, then backing into the media metrics that supported them. That reframe changed conversations overnight. The disconnect became obvious when we compared what each team measured:
|
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) |
Retail Media Team Focuses On |
Merchant Focuses On |
|---|---|---|
|
Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) |
Blended campaign ROAS as proof of value |
ROAS as a category health indicator; skeptical if it looks inflated |
|
Market Share |
Used to upsell brands on more spend |
What's happening to our category position? |
|
Unit Sales / Sell-through |
Secondary metric |
Are we moving product? |
|
Media Revenue |
Quarterly quota to hit |
A distraction if it conflicts with trade goals |
|
SKU Performance |
Top performers get more budget |
New arrivals and margin-rich SKUs need visibility |
Homepage placements, email slots, category page banners—have to be negotiated with marketing before a brand signs their IO, not after. Once a brand has signed, you’ve lost your leverage to secure that real estate.
The cadence that worked for us was simple: mid-year, we'd sit down with marketing leadership and negotiate what inventory would be available for sale in Q4. That gave us a sellable calendar, protected our commitments to brands, and gave marketing the visibility they needed to plan their own storytelling.
Paid media placements should never be given away as trade favors. This needs to be an enforced, executive-level policy, or it will quietly erode your monetization.
This one still gets me. Merchants would go directly to the marketing team and ask for a free homepage placement for a favored brand. Marketing, with open inventory and a relationship to preserve, would say yes—and suddenly a brand that I'd been trying to get to spend $50K knew they could just ask the merchant nicely and get it for free.
Co-locate or integrate retail media under merchandising leadership—structural separation breeds strategic tension
Create a shared review cadence where merchants see campaign proposals before they go to top brands
Give merchants a formal input channel for SKU recommendations in campaigns—make it part of your standard planning workflow
Align on a shared set of KPIs that connects media performance to commercial outcomes (sell-through, market share, margin contribution)
Establish a clear inventory governance policy: what can be sold, what's reserved, and who has authority to change that
Require retail media sign-off before merchandising can offer paid placements as trade concessions.
The RMNs that will win in the next five years aren't the ones with the best ad tech. They're the ones where merchants and retail media teams are telling the same story to the same brand at the same time. I spent the first half of my retail media career fighting the merchandising team. I spent the second half wishing I'd just partnered with them from day one.
That alignment doesn't happen by accident. It requires structure, transparency, shared KPIs, and—honestly—a little humility on both sides.
