The CPG View · 2026-06-04 · 21 min
You've had quite an unconventional path into retail media - you came in from the vendor side, not from ad tech or media agencies. Can you walk us through that journey and what ultimately led you to building Topsort? A lot of retailers are now a few years into their first retail media network and starting to ask hard questions about whether the technology they built on is actually going to take them where they need to go. What are you seeing out there, and what does it really cost a retailer to get that foundation wrong? One thing that stands out about Topsort is the emphasis on experimentation - real A/B testing - at the infrastructure level. Why does that matter so much, and when you add AI-driven optimization into the mix, what do you think a retail media network starts to look like that's genuinely different from what most people are running today? From the brand side, there's a lot of budget flowing into retail media right now but also a lot of frustration. What are CPG brands asking for that most networks still can't deliver - and how should brand leaders be thinking about holding their retail partners accountable in a way that's different from how they evaluated trade spend?
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