Retail Media Doesn’t Have a Talent Problem. It Has a Design Problem.

Retail media doesn’t feel broken because it’s hard. It feels broken because it’s being built by people who don’t fully understand what they’re building.

I’ve spent the last several years working inside retail media as a sales lead and a media planner, focused on CPG strategy and joint business development and growth.

My experience hasn’t been unique. In fact, it’s been painfully typical.

What I’ve seen again and again is not a lack of talent, but a lack of clarity. Not a shortage of smart people, but a shortage of leadership that actually understands the work. Not a failure of capability, but a failure of design.

One line from a 2025 Digiday piece keeps sticking with me:

“Let’s be honest, it’s just media and it’s just sales. It’s not rocket science. They can learn.”

That line doesn’t minimize the work. It exposes the myth around it.

Retail media isn’t magic.

It isn’t mystical.

It isn’t elite.

It’s media.

It’s sales.

It’s organizational design.

It’s incentives.

It’s ownership.

It’s leadership.

And if it really is learnable, then the question becomes: Why does it feel so dysfunctional inside so many organizations?

From the inside, retail media often looks like this:

• New business units launched from consulting playbooks

• Leaders promoted into roles they’ve never actually done

• Undefined products sold with confidence

• Process replacing strategy

• “Operating models” without vision

• Platform launches mistaken for business creation

What gets labeled a “talent problem” is usually a system problem.

But there’s a deeper issue people don’t like to say out loud.

Most retail media organizations are being led by people who come from retail, merchandising, and operations—not media.

That doesn’t make them bad leaders.

It means they bring the wrong mental models to the work.

Retail logic is built for stability, predictability, and control.

Media logic is built for iteration, ambiguity, testing, and tradeoffs.

When retail leaders try to run a media business using retail instincts, friction becomes the default.

So teams end up carrying retail process into media problems.

They optimize for organizational comfort instead of effectiveness.

They design for familiarity instead of real-world performance.

If retail media is truly learnable, then the work should be structured for learning.

But in many organizations, it isn’t.

Learning is expected, but not supported.

Iteration is encouraged, but not protected.

Ownership is implied, but not defined.

And when roles, incentives, and decision rights aren’t clear, people don’t fail loudly.

They stall quietly.

Retail media sits at the intersection of sales, media, ecommerce, data, and merchandising. Each of those functions has real goals. But without a shared decision system, those goals become competing forces.

That’s when the day-to-day starts to feel off.

Decisions feel arbitrary.

Ownership becomes blurry.

Morale drops.

Progress slows.

And eventually, people start asking: Why isn’t this working?

I don’t claim to have the blueprint for fixing it.

But I do know what it feels like to live inside a system that wasn’t designed for the people doing the work.

And I believe most of the pain in retail media today isn’t inevitable.

It’s structural.

Retail media is and will be powerful.

It will favor fast growing brands and large budgets.

It will continue to reshape how brands and retailers work together.

But power doesn’t automatically make something healthy.

If retail media is going to mature, it won’t be because of more platforms or bigger decks.

It will be because organizations finally get honest about what they’re building and design for how the work actually happens.