Retail media networks are not a replacement for field sales. They are amplification — and if your field team and your media spend aren't coordinated, both programs underperform.
Loblaw Advance and Empire Media+ are now mature enough that CPG brands have real data on what they produce. A Kraft Heinz case study published in October 2026 showed that adding Empire Media+ in-store screens to a Sobeys and Safeway campaign generated approximately $159,000 in incremental sales — a +1.08% lift above stores that didn't receive the in-store display component. That's a tangible number. And it raises the right question for a sales manager: are my field reps doing anything differently in the stores where we're running media?
Most aren't. That's the problem this article is about.
Understand What These Networks Actually Sell
Loblaw Advance operates across the full Loblaw banner set — Loblaws, No Frills, Real Canadian Superstore, Zehrs, Shoppers Drug Mart, and PC Express. Its core strength is PC Optimum, an 18M+ member loyalty program that ties purchase history to media exposure at the SKU level. Stingray was named a demand partner in November 2026 to sell Loblaw Advance's in-store digital screen inventory — 2,000+ screens across 700+ stores reaching 6.3 million unique customers weekly.
Empire Media+ covers Sobeys, Safeway, IGA, FreshCo, and Farm Boy. It's a younger network, but the Kraft Heinz proof point is exactly what gets Sobeys buyers paying attention to vendors who can pair media investment with strong field execution.
You don't need to become fluent in programmatic advertising. You need to know which of your accounts are inside an active media flight — and make sure your reps are walking into those stores differently.
Coordinate the Flight Calendar With Your Rep Calendar
If your brand is running a Loblaw Advance campaign in Q4, your reps need the store list and flight dates before the first impression is served. This almost never happens. The media team runs the campaign. The field team runs their route. Nobody connects the two.
The fix is structural. When a media flight is confirmed, the store list goes into your CRM as a tagged account segment — something like "Loblaw Advance Q4 Flight" — so every rep covering those doors sees it in their territory view. Visit frequency should increase during the flight window. The rep's job in those stores is straightforward: the product is in-stock, correctly faced, and placed where the in-store screens are directing shoppers.
If a Loblaw screen drives a shopper to your product and it's out of stock or in the wrong bay, you've paid for media that produced a frustrated customer. That's a gap report problem as much as a media problem.
Use Field Data to Build the Media ROI Case
Retail media networks want brand investment. Buyers at Loblaw and Sobeys want velocity. Your field team sits at the intersection of both.
If reps are logging visit notes, capturing shelf photos, and tracking on-shelf availability at the account level, you have the field-side data that makes a media ROI conversation credible. When a Loblaw Advance account manager asks what happened to sell-through during a flight, your answer shouldn't be a marketing deck — it should be account-level data showing in-stock rates, facing compliance, and order frequency during the flight window.
That's also how you build the case for a larger media investment next cycle. Retail media teams respond to brands that can demonstrate their field execution held up during the activation.
Don't Let Media Spend Subsidize Bad Execution
Retail media can paper over weak field execution for one campaign cycle. It won't hold for two.
The accounts inside an active media flight should be your highest-priority visits during that window — which means they need to be tiered accordingly and routed with higher frequency. A flat route that treats a media-active Sobeys the same as a low-velocity FreshCo is a schedule, not a strategy. If you're still building your account tiering model, this article on retail account tiering covers how to build visit priority into the CRM so reps stop spending equal time on unequal doors.
Assign Ownership and Measure It
Retail media campaigns have clear owners on the marketing side. Field execution during those campaigns usually has none.
Someone needs to own the connection between the media flight and the field program: a store list delivered to reps before the flight starts, a visit target for each in-flight account, a shelf compliance check logged at each visit, and a post-flight debrief comparing in-stock rates and order frequency in in-flight versus control stores.
If your manager dashboard can't answer "which in-flight Loblaw accounts were visited at least twice during the campaign window, and what did the shelf look like" — you're running two programs that will never prove they work together.
GreenPaths lets you tag in-flight accounts so reps see them in their route priority, log visit notes and shelf photos at each stop, and gives managers the account-level visit history to put next to media attribution data when the campaign wraps. If your brand is spending on Loblaw Advance or Empire Media+, the field infrastructure underneath that spend should be just as deliberate.