Aisha Khan of Dentsu told the Digiday Media Buying Summit that retail media should not be viewed only as a tool for the lower funnel. The summit ran October 26-28, 2026, in Newport Beach, California.
According to her, stores still account for more than 80% of sales, while offline placements get less than 5% of retail media budgets. Khan believes digitizing the in-store experience will drive growth that retailers have not yet captured.
In her view, retail media works well at the very bottom of the funnel but is expensive, so the balance between effectiveness and cost has not yet been struck. She expects some segments to reach a plateau while offline drives growth.
Khan links the drop in cost to measurement. Retail media's growth relied on closed-loop measurement, and AI, she said, has accelerated the shift to flexible MMM and incrementality models. Advertisers are building their own capabilities and buying closed-loop measurement from several networks rather than relying on retailers' estimates, she said. The price retailers charge for such measurement may fall.
At the same time, Khan does not suggest writing off the upper funnel. Brand-building, the upper part of retail media, cannot be neglected, she said, and she named CVS and Kroger among the networks expanding creative capabilities. Creative, she said, remains necessary in retail media, even in-store and in shopper marketing.
At the same conference, Laurel Burton, CEO of Instrument, said websites are not dying. They remain the central hub that feeds both the shopper and AI answers, she said.
Diageo in the US has handed its trade and shopper marketing to Dentsu, with Dentsu Creative chosen to run it. For buyers, this means retail media measurement goes beyond performance metrics: Khan proposes treating offline and creative as separate line items.
