Podcast Summary
On Season 2, Episode 16 of MetricsCart’s Digital Shelf Insider podcast, Bethany Mercer, Head of Retail Media at Croud, joins our host Shreshta Joy to lay out how brands should plan retail media across the full Q4 holiday quarter.
The conversation covers pacing budgets through the holiday demand waves, the ceiling Mercer sets on brand defense spend, tailoring conquesting creative to each competitor, joining in-store and online retail media, optimizing PDPs and off-Amazon social proof, mobile and AI-search readiness, and measuring what Q4 really delivered once the discounting clears.
Episode Highlights
01:42 Phasing retail media budgets across Q4 demand waves
04:32 Brand defense vs. conquesting: optimal spend splits
07:36 Connecting in-store retail media with digital shelf activations
10:00 Optimizing holiday PDPs & leveraging off-Amazon traffic
12:18 Mobile readiness, glance readability, and continuous testing
13:52 Post-holiday optimization & post-Q4 data strategies
What We Covered
Here’s what unfolded in this episode:
How should brands pace retail media budgets across the Q4 holiday season?
Mercer points out that Q4 has shifted from a single deal day into a quarter-long marathon, which helps spread sales but demands a far stricter eye on flighting and weighting. She advises brands to use October’s early events, like Prime Big Deal Days, to kickstart momentum, noting that this year her agency’s brands saw strong year-on-year revenue growth while holding a healthy return.
She advises treating that early window as more than a margin grab. It stocks up high-intent retargeting pools and builds key audiences for the rest of the quarter while starting the sales flywheel. When Black Friday and Cyber Week arrive and conversion rates peak, she recommends opening the taps and going aggressive on high-intent search capture, and observes that health and beauty brands, along with giftable products at mid to low price points, tend to perform best here.
Her pacing benchmark is to have roughly 75-80% of the quarter’s budget spent by the mid-December peak, which is timed to the shipping deadline. Once the fulfillment cut-off passes, she advises pivoting to last-minute shoppers with guaranteed-shipping messaging and dialing ad spend down to the minimum.
How much of a retail media budget should go to brand defense versus conquesting?
This is where Mercer takes her firmest stance. In more than seven years, she says she has never encountered a brand that benefits from spending more than about 30% of its budget on brand defense. Beyond that, regular brand testing and share-of-voice monitoring tend to show you are paying for sales you would have captured organically anyway.
Where that defensive budget goes matters just as much. She advises concentrating it on high-impact visual formats, sponsored brand, sponsored brand video, and top-of-search placements, to lock up premium real estate without burning budget on standard listings further down the page, with an even stronger effect on mobile. She also advises staying data-driven, using business-as-usual periods to run paid-versus-organic pause tests that find each brand’s sweet spot, since it differs by client.
On conquesting, Mercer advises a similar visual-format approach, but with creative tailored to the specific competitor. The job is to show shoppers why your product is better: cheaper, better rated, more usable, longer lasting, or whatever USP applies. Purposeful, bespoke creatives, she says, are what steal the sale and make the most of a competitive budget.
Should Q4 digital shelf and in-store retail media share one budget?
Mercer calls this a genuinely interesting question, one Croud put to the audience at the Retail Media Pioneers event the previous month. Her read is that most enterprise brands still run in silos, with shopper marketing teams handling the physical aisle while ecom teams manage PDP and search budgets. Shoppers, she points out, do not care that your brand team and sales team are different.
She advises the brands that want to win Q4 to join those dots. If a customer sees a digital screen in the store aisle, the same promotional messaging and brand look and feel should greet them when they open the retailer’s app.
Connecting that mental availability to the physical offer at the point of sale is, as she puts it, “absolute gold.” She adds that loyalty schemes help close the loop, connecting an online ad impression to an offline sale and justifying future spend, and echoes a point from an earlier guest: teams should share only what is relevant to the other side, so the signal does not drown in noise.
How can brands optimize PDPs and creative for holiday product discoverability?
While bidding earns the impression, Mercer says, the creative earns the sale. For the gifting period, she advises making video content and the PDP carousel work double time, with unboxing highlights, gift-box packaging call-outs, and seasonal lifestyle imagery featuring trees and presents sitting alongside clean product shots. She also advises refreshing the brand store page to reflect the season, not just the PDP.
The real magic for Amazon in Q4, she argues, happens off Amazon. She advises brands to leverage creator connections, influencer unboxings, UGC and press highlights on social, then link them directly to the PDP using Amazon attribution links to build trust before the shopper even lands.
On top of that, Amazon’s Brand Referral Bonus returns roughly 10%, depending on category, on sales driven by external marketing. The payoff compounds for holiday retail media: authentic social proof, higher PDP conversion, a referral bonus that offsets CPCs, and a signal to Amazon’s algorithm that the listing is a high-converting traffic magnet.
Are mobile PDPs ready for holiday shoppers, and where does AI search fit?
With so much traffic flowing through mobile PDPs, Mercer treats mobile-first as a given. The real key, whether mobile or desktop, is continuous testing, and she cautions brands against resting on their laurels once a PDP is set up and looks great. She advises running iterative testing on a biannual or quarterly cadence across creative, visuals, and on-page text.
In an AI-driven landscape, she adds, optimizing for generative engines is now part of that work. Pointing to the branded-conversations signals coming out of Amazon’s recent Unboxed event, she expects this area to shift meaningfully, which is why she keeps ongoing creative and iterative testing at the center of the plan.
How should brands measure retail media performance after the holidays?
Mercer cautions that the standard ROAS and TACoS numbers are “probably lying to you” during Q4, because heavy discounting does so much of the lift. To see true incremental returns, both for the quarter and the year ahead, she advises digging deeper than those surface metrics.
January is for setting the strategic baseline for the year rather than tallying Q4 sales. She advises using clean rooms to reveal whether the new-to-brand customers recruited in Q4 are coming back, resubscribing, or returning for repeat purchases, which matters especially for FMCG with short repurchase cycles. From there, she recommends building new audience pools off the shoppers who turn into loyal customers, and using Q1 plus geo holdout testing to grow in the right direction instead of treating every holiday buyer as a one-off.
How should brands build a Q4 retail media strategy that pays off all year?
Pulling Mercer’s advice together, a holiday retail media plan has a few moving parts:
- A budget phased across the quarter, with roughly 75-80% spent by the mid-December peak, and early-October events building audiences for later waves.
- A brand defense ceiling near 30%, concentrated on high-impact visual formats, with conquesting creative tailored to each competitor.
- A joined-up view of in-store and online retail media, so messaging and loyalty data connect the aisle to the app.
- PDPs and creative optimized for human shoppers, retailer algorithms and AI search, backed by off-Amazon social proof and the Brand Referral Bonus.
- A measurement plan that looks past Q4 ROAS to clean-room incrementality, turning holiday buyers into year-round customers.
This episode is a reminder that holiday retail media planning works as a quarter-long discipline across pacing, creative, channels, and measurement. If your Q4 plan is still mid-build, the full conversation is worth about 16 minutes of your week.
Watch now, only on the Digital Shelf Insider podcast of MetricsCart!
Disclaimer: The content shared in the Digital Shelf Insider Podcast by MetricsCart is for general informational and discussion purposes only. The insights, opinions, and perspectives expressed by hosts and guests are their own and do not constitute professional advice, recommendations, or endorsements by MetricsCart or any affiliated entity.
