Quick answer: Retail media's biggest mistake is brands and retailers still treating the space as a login instead of infrastructure. David Glaza, founder and CEO of DIGITS Agency and a fourteen-year Target veteran who helped build Target Circle, joined Unlocking Retail Media to explain why local sales teams get shut out of national budgets, why regional grocers have to aggregate to compete with Kroger and Albertsons, and why alcohol brands are only now getting first-party data after years of being locked out entirely.
Most conversations about retail media start and end with the same five names: Amazon, Walmart, Target, Kroger, Instacart. James Avery, Kevel's CEO, sat down with David Glaza, founder and CEO of DIGITS Agency, to talk about everyone else. David spent fourteen years at Target, where he helped build Target Cartwheel, the loyalty and promotions product now known as Target Circle. Since founding DIGITS about a decade ago, he has worked with CPG brands, alcohol and beverage companies, and regional grocers, and he now centralizes retail media operations for six regional grocery chains.
Below are the questions brands, agencies, and regional retailers are actually asking right now, based on that conversation.
What Is the Most Common Mistake Brands Make in Retail Media?
Quick answer: Simply not showing up. Brands wait until a launch is days away, then look for retail media budget that was never planned for in the first place.
David did not hesitate when James Avery asked where brands go wrong. Agencies with deep Target experience field the same call constantly: a brand is launching in a week, three weeks, a month, and needs help, only to discover there is no budget behind the request. Retail media has moved past the point where it can be an afterthought.
"The most glaring mistake from some of the smaller brands is not spending." - David Glaza
The second biggest mistake David calls out is less obvious and cuts deeper into how brands structure their teams.
Why Don't Local Sales Teams Have More Control Over Retail Media Spend?
Quick answer: Because most CPGs run retail media through a centralized national team, leaving the local sales director, the person who actually knows the retailer's priorities, with almost no say in how the budget gets deployed.
David pointed to a disconnect he sees constantly: sales directors who work a specific retailer relationship every day, who understand the planogram, the competitive set, and which promotions matter locally, often have little to no influence over the retail media strategy running against their own account. That decision sits with a national team optimizing across every retailer at once.
"It's surprising to me how many directors of Target at CPGs say they have very little influence into the retail media." - David Glaza
James connected this to a structural shift the industry has made without fully reckoning with the tradeoff: as retail media has centralized, it has also moved further away from the store-level, relationship-driven version of trade spend that used to fund a local end cap or a high school football sponsorship. David expects some bifurcation to emerge, with national teams running programmatic scale while local teams get a lever, even a blunt one like a bid multiplier, to influence spend tied to real-time, store-level events.
What Is Investment-Grade Media, and Why Does It Matter?
Quick answer: It is DIGITS' framework for helping a brand's sales director argue for a bigger share of internal media budget by proving their retail media spend meets the reporting, placement, and performance bar the retailer already benchmarks against.
The term came out of conversations with sales leaders who felt shortchanged. A brand might spend five million dollars a year at Target while the retailer's own benchmarks suggest they should be spending eight. Every year, that sales director goes back to headquarters asking for more funding and gets turned down, in part because nobody can articulate why the additional spend would actually work. DIGITS built a checklist, essentially a definition of what qualifies as investment-grade media at Target, so a sales director walks into that budget conversation with evidence instead of a hunch.
The goal is not just winning a bigger slice of the retailer's benchmark. It is proving the spend performs as well as, or better than, the next best alternative, whether that is Meta or linear TV. That is the argument that actually moves a CFO.
How Are Regional Grocers Solving Retail Media's Scale Problem?
Quick answer: By combining a passive national feed, like Instacart's Carrot Ads, with a locally managed service layer that gives small CPG teams campaign execution without adding headcount, then aggregating multiple regional grocers together to reach meaningful scale.
David described the retail media playbook for a regional grocer as two-pronged. Step one is plugging into a national marketplace feed. Instacart's Carrot Ads let a regional grocer start generating passive revenue with no proprietary build and no local sales team required. Step two, and the more interesting part for DIGITS, is local managed service: on-site media, off-site campaigns, and event-driven promotions built for CPG teams who have money from retail media but little operational support to spend it well.
The bigger opportunity is aggregation. DIGITS currently centralizes operations for six regional grocers, each in the 50-to-200-store range, and Glaza is candid that brand budgets have not caught up to this model yet. Most CPGs still budget for a top ten list of named retailers and lump everything else into a miscellaneous bucket. That is starting to change as scale accumulates.
At that scale, a collection of regional grocers starts to look, in aggregate, like a retailer the size of an Albertsons or a Kroger, without the store count of any single chain ever cracking a brand's named top ten.
What's Actually Changed in Alcohol Retail Media Compliance?
Quick answer: The landscape has flipped in the past five years. Most major retailers now allow first-party offsite audience targeting for alcohol, similar to food, though on-site ad placements remain largely off-limits, and the rules still change state by state.
DIGITS entered alcohol retail media about six years ago, pushed in part by regional grocer clients with an existing specialty in the category. Glaza was direct about how far the category has come. "If we were doing this podcast five years ago, I think we would've said, 'You can't do much of anything.” he stated.
Today, major retailers give alcohol brands first-party offsite audiences and closed reporting, largely on par with food and CPG. The remaining gap is on-site: most major retailers still will not run on-site alcohol ads, though marketplaces like Instacart, Uber, DoorDash, and goPuff will.
Layered on top of the retailer-level rules is a patchwork of state law: Sunday sale-hour restrictions that differ from state to state, control states where liquor can only be sold through specific stores, and even gas-station beer rules that vary by state. DIGITS built what it calls the Cheers Network to navigate that complexity across retailers and states at once, and David compared the category's current moment to what happened in food during the pandemic, when digital penetration jumped from an afterthought to a year-round necessity almost overnight.
Is TikTok Shop Actually Driving Retail Media Sales?
Quick answer: Not as directly as its own reporting suggests. Glaza and Avery both described a spillover effect where TikTok drives discovery, but the purchase itself often happens later, on Amazon or in a physical store.
Avery raised a stat he had heard: for every sale actually completed on TikTok Shop, a brand might generate roughly two times that in sales elsewhere. Glaza did not find it surprising, and offered a personal example from that same morning.
"I saw a brand on TikTok. I didn't click buy it. I went to Amazon and bought it there." - David Glaza
Measuring that halo effect is still mostly manual. David called it merchant math: noticing a spike in TikTok activity and a corresponding bump in Amazon sales in the same week, and drawing the obvious conclusion even without a clean attribution path. He expects better measurement tools, possibly through card-network partnerships, to formalize this over time, but for now the real return on TikTok spend is understated by whatever TikTok itself reports.
Where Is Retail Media Headed Next?
Quick answer: Expect a split between nationally run programmatic infrastructure and locally controlled execution, alongside a growing bet on connected TV and short-form video commerce.
David expects retail media to keep centralizing at the data and infrastructure layer, consolidating search, offsite, and DSP-managed spend into more consistent systems, while still building in room for local control at the store or account level. On the channel side, he is watching connected TV and the shift toward short-form video and live shopping, though he is candid that nobody has fully cracked how that translates into driving business at a Target, Walmart, or Kroger yet.
Key Takeaways at a Glance
1. What is the most common retail media mistake, according to David Glaza?
Not spending. Many smaller brands wait until launch is days away before looking for budget that was never planned for.
2. Why do local sales directors have so little say in retail media?
Retail media is typically run by a centralized national team, even though local sales teams understand the retailer's priorities best.
3. What is investment-grade media?
DIGITS' framework for helping a sales director prove their retail media spend meets a retailer's own benchmark for reporting and performance.
4. How do regional grocers compete at scale?
By combining a national marketplace feed with locally managed service, then aggregating roughly ten to fifteen regional grocers to match the size of a major national chain.
5. What has changed in alcohol retail media?
Most major retailers now allow first-party offsite targeting for alcohol. On-site placements are still largely restricted, and rules vary by state.
Conclusion: Scale in Retail Media Is an Infrastructure Problem, Not a Headcount Problem
Every theme in this conversation points back to the same structural gap. Local sales teams cannot act on what they know because the budget and the tools sit somewhere else. Regional grocers cannot compete at national scale because there is no shared infrastructure to aggregate them. Alcohol brands are only now getting first-party data because retailers had to build the compliance and reporting layer state by state, retailer by retailer.
That is the same problem Kevel was built to solve from the retailer's side of the table: giving retail media networks, whatever their size, the infrastructure to own their data, their targeting, and their monetization strategy instead of waiting for a bigger platform to build it for them. As agencies like DIGITS prove there is real demand below the top ten retailers, the networks with the most control over their own stack will be the easiest ones to plug into.
Listen to the Full Conversation on Unlocking Retail Media
For more insights like these, tune in to the full episode of Unlocking Retail Media, the podcast where Kevel CEO James Avery sits down with industry leaders and innovators shaping the future of retail and commerce media.
Listen to the full conversation with David Glaza on Unlocking Retail Media.
