August 28, 2026
Chris Riedy
I was proud to be on a panel with Catherine Berger of Bimbo Bakeries and she said something that immediately caught my attention: “unproductive trade.”
She was referencing the work Bimbo is doing to understand which trade dollars are actually contributing to incremental growth and profitability, and which are simply moving product without contributing to new revenue.
That’s good marketing, but Catherine took it a step further when she asked what should marketers do with unproductive dollars once they are identified?
The questions gets at a much bigger shift happening across the industry. The lines between trade, shopper, and media are becoming less useful because brands have better ways to understand what those investments are yielding.
One consumer, too many budgets
Katie Daleo, general manager of CPG at DoorDash, was on the same panel. She spent years on the brand side and remembers the marketing silos: trade, marketing, and shopper teams with their own budgets and objectives. Those structures remain in place but the consumer journey looks very different. Measurement has also improved to the point where promotions and marketing campaigns are being evaluated against the same or similar business outcomes.
Katie advocated for brands to establish “one North Star” tied to a customer result. I agree. But aligning an organization around a shared customer outcome often means rethinking budgets, incentives, planning processes, and even how success gets measured. The challenge is bigger than simply agreeing on the objective.
That isn't an indictment of CPG organizations. These teams developed specialized expertise for good reasons, but commerce increasingly cuts across their responsibilities. A consumer can encounter a brand message, receive a promotion, and make a purchase within a connected ecosystem. That's why a shared definition of success is increasingly valuable.
Proof changes the budget conversation
The conversations we're now having with brands include questions around proof: How many units actually moved? Were those sales incremental? Are the outcomes based on deterministic purchase data or a model? Can the results be validated by an independent source?
Every platform needs to keep its own score because it needs that information to optimize. But there's a difference between the measurement required to operate a campaign and the proof a CPG leader needs to decide where the next million dollars should go.
Enter third-party validation. Circana recently analyzed 48 Ibotta campaigns using the same causal methodology it applies to media effectiveness studies. It found an average 16.5% incremental sales lift and 17% increase in new household penetration. The campaigns also produced a 10.9% sales lift on non-promoted products within the same brand portfolio.
Those are great numbers, but the more interesting part to me is what they allow marketers to do. When promotions can be evaluated with the same kind of incrementality rigor marketers expect elsewhere, the discussion about trade and media starts to change. Brands have a stronger basis for comparing where dollars are producing incremental growth and where they aren't.
The goal is not one giant budget
I don't expect CPG companies to wake up tomorrow, eliminate their organizational structures, and put every marketing and trade dollar into one giant pool. Different investments still have different jobs to do.
Convergence doesn't mean pretending those things are the same. Convergence is reaching a greater agreement about the outcome everyone is ultimately trying to achieve.
Catherine described profit ROI as one way Bimbo is creating an apples-to-apples view across investments. Katie talked about connecting media performance with signals such as out-of-stocks, merchandising, and distribution so brands can understand why something performed the way it did.
Those are meaningful changes because they move the conversation beyond attribution toward decision-making. If a promotion is generating profitable incremental sales, keep going. If performance changes, understand why.
Follow the outcome
Right now, consumers are focused on value. This has led to brands being more thoughtful about when an offer is useful, who needs it, and what it takes to change a purchase decision.
Katie talked about personalization as part of the answer. Catherine broadened the definition of value beyond price to include things such as meal solutions, discovery, information, and new occasions. I think they're both right.
Organizational silos are real, measurement still varies considerably across platforms, and not every consumer interaction fits neatly into an incremental lift study. But we're getting better at answering the questions like, "Did this investment create growth that otherwise would not have happened?"
When brands can answer that confidently, a trade dollar and a media dollar don't need to be the same. They just need to be accountable to the same goal.