CPG brands are paying top dollar for short-term reach – and getting little to show for it once the ads stop running. In today’s digital landscape, marketers rely heavily on rented audiences: retail media networks, paid social, and third-party platforms. These channels offer scale, but when the campaign ends, so does the shopper connection. No emails. No retargeting. No insights. Just the bill.

In 2024 alone, U.S. digital advertising revenue hit $258.6 billion, with RMNs accounting for $53.7 billion – a 23% year-over-year jump (Marketing Brew). These platforms thrive because they offer the holy grail: proximity to purchase. Whether it’s Walmart, Target, Amazon, or Kroger, retailers offer access to first-party shopper data, closed-loop reporting, and tangible ROI in the form of in-store sales. For marketers under pressure to prove impact, RMNs have become the default.

But there’s a catch: brands don’t own the data, don’t control the relationship, and can’t build on past success. 

That’s why the most forward-thinking CPG teams are shifting their strategy. They’re prioritizing audience ownership: building direct relationships with shoppers, capturing data, and investing in long-term engagement. As Matt Bachmann, CEO of Wandering Bear, put it: “It’s a back-to-the-fundamentals type of marketing where understanding your consumer and what resonates with them is more important than it has been in the recent past.” 

Rented reach may deliver short-term lift — but owned audiences create lasting value.

Sponsored by: Pear Commerce partners boost sales by up to 40% by turning product discovery into purchase intent with local paths to purchase—explore proven CPG growth strategies in our free Resource Center.

What does “renting” an audience really mean? 

It means paying for access through RMNs, broad Meta or TikTok audiences, or third-party data providers like The Trade Desk – all without gaining direct ownership of the shoppers you’re paying to reach. It’s essentially borrowing attention. While these tactics can produce results, they don’t offer compounding value. You can’t re-engage, personalize, or grow those audiences over time.

Meanwhile, costs are rising and performance is flattening. Forty-two percent of advertisers are now questioning their RMN investments, seeing them more as a cost of doing business than a strategic advantage.

The case for owning your audience

Owning your audience means building relationships that grow more valuable over time. By capturing emails, retargetable traffic, and first-party shopper data, brands create segments they can activate (over and over again) across all their media channels. These audiences perform better, cost less, and create a foundation for loyalty, insights, and brand control.

Brands investing in owned audiences unlock:

• Lower cost per acquisition over time
• Stronger campaign flexibility and personalization
• Increased lifetime value through loyalty programs and remarketing
• Independence from platform-driven algorithms and pricing spikes

How smart CPG marketers are making the shift

Leading brands are diversifying their spend, blending the reach of retail media with the long-term value of owned audiences. They’re using tools like Store Locators, Shoppable PDPs, and Recipes to capture shopper insights at high-intent moments. They’re building lookalike audiences off of those high-intent shoppers to engage the top-of-funnel and build new relationships. They’re creating true retargeting strategies and investing in infrastructure to activate and measure results.

Where Pear Commerce comes in  

Pear helps CPG brands move beyond pay-to-play performance. Our platform allows brands to build high-intent audiences from real shopper behavior, making it possible to run direct-to-retail retargeting, create lookalike segments from true purchase interest, and capture shopper insights that fuel loyalty.

EXAMPLE

A popular personal care brand drove traffic from multiple sources to build a complete audience of top, middle, and bottom-of-funnel retail shoppers. 

Pear sent each conversion event back to the brand’s ad platforms for automatic audience building and optimizations.

RESULTS

• The brand saw a 5x lift in retailer visits when targeting their Pear audience compared to the third-party segments purchased through The Trade Desk – proof that real shopper behavior outperforms generic interest-based targeting.
• In a second round of retargeting campaigns, the same brand achieved 15x more retail visits using their Pear audience compared to campaigns based on brand.com visitors – showing the true power of high-intent, retail-focused engagement.
• Over just seven months, the brand achieved a 10x increase in total retailer visits, setting a new benchmark for what sustained, shopper-first marketing can deliver in the CPG space.