‘The year where I don’t roll my eyes’ at retail: Bayer’s programmatic and digital lead on the state of retail media

Some companies like Bayer, parent company to Aleve, Alka-Seltzer, MiraLAX, are trying to push the conversation forward, past siloed walled gardens to demand more from retail partners.

“This is going to be the year where I don’t roll my eyes or make a snarky face when somebody talks about retail,” said Khara Hutchinson, head of programmatic and integrated digital activation at Bayer. “I’ve done it most of the time.”

Hutchinson got candid about the intricacies of being a healthcare company navigating a complex and booming retail media network ecosystem at Digiday, Glossy and Modern Retail’s Retail Media Advertising Strategies event in New York City on Sept. 10.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

How does Bayer think about retail media in its marketing strategy?

We’ve had all different iterations — where retail sat outside of media, where retail sat kind of with media. The half in-half out didn’t work. The sitting outside didn’t work. Last year, we were like, “How do we do a holistic, integrated plan for our brands?” And the best way for us is to really think about retail media as another part of our holistic strategy. Which sounds like, “Duh,” but it’s also really hard to do with all the stakeholders internally, externally.

Bayer doesn’t have a direct-to-consumer business or e-commerce site. How do you measure and grade the homework of retail partners?

We’ve made a lot of progress in the last couple of months. Three or four months ago, I was in a meeting with a specific retailer and I said, “I don’t want to talk about what we can’t do together anymore… This tension is counter productive and it’s boring. Let’s only talk about the things that we can do together.” Ultimately, we have to get our national media and our retail media in the same measurement cycle. [Another panelist at Digiday’s Retail Media Strategies Summit] spoke earlier about alignment on KPIs internally — so crucial. That’s also a pain point that we’ve had to work through.

Then you get to media measurement and if you’re taking retail media dollars from some other part of your media budget, the money is not endless. Basically, I’m going to ask for more money when we spend this money because we’ll need it to fund search, we’ll need it to fund some tentpole event. I say, “There’s no magic pocket of money. When you ask for more money, it has to come out of something else. Let’s plan that we don’t get to that point.” We always get to that point.

Retailers want to be seen as one-stop media shops. What’s working? 

We have to get beyond ROAS first. We’re stuck in ROAS for what we’ve all put into retail media, which is generally more so the safe stuff — the display. It’s low-cost media. If you’re moving into upper funnel, those media formats are more expensive. There’s duplications across other parts of your buy. If you have upfronts and you’re running CTV, how do you make a case to run a retail media-specific CTV that might count toward your upfront agreement, but your data cost now is so much higher because it’s a percentage of media. Those are the conversations that we’re having with the retail partners. I’ll say, “Guys, I’m just not there yet.” But then I’ll give them something else that I want to learn instead of saying no, I’m not going to do it. Trying to remove the tension and trying to work on what we can do together.

Upper funnel, I’m here for it. I do think that retail is uniquely positioned to help us quantify what upper-funnel means to actually selling something in a store or on a website. That’s what I say to them when they say, “I could take all your CTV dollars.” If I move my money into there, I’m moving it into a walled garden, and in order for me to move money into a walled garden you have to give me something back. I’ve been chasing this idea in my head of: What does brand equity, in the number, [do to] impact a sale? [Retailers] are interested in that conversation because they want my CTV dollars. 

How are you comparing retail media to other media channels? 

I don’t know that we have a differentiated POV. What I would say is there is a road map of where we want to get to. We can’t get there without bringing our retail partners with us. There are specific work streams with each of them. We’re beyond asking, “Give us all the data that we want,” because we just know that’s not going to happen. That’s counter to my “I don’t want to talk about what we can’t do anymore together.” We just have workstreams with them that we’re inking out.

As we get closer and closer to 2026 budgets being set in stone, being put in a spreadsheet somewhere, they’re engaged because their growth is going to come from the places we really want to dig into, which is off their properties. You could fully fund every retail media network — owned and operated and search — and they’re going to tell you that you’re not spending enough.

Does programmatic make the retail media space more convoluted or easier? 

You have some [RMNs] who are fully going into self-serve, which is great because it gives us a lot more flexibility. We’re hands-on-keyboard, we’re fully in-house at Bayer so we have traders who buy. We really care about quality. We care about viewability. We care about staying out of The Wall Street Journal in some of their exposes. When you give that control over to another partner, you run that risk.

You have to be all over your media. We are, but it’s harder when someone else is managing it. We get to make, hopefully, our own custom audiences. When we get to make custom SKU or custom targeting audiences, we start to see a big change. If we can’t control the inventory, we have to control the audience. If we can’t control the audience, we have to control the inventory. When we purposely go in self-service programmatic and we try to separate our national versus our retail audiences, we see incremental reach increase. We see growth numbers increase. It just works better.