The Drum’s commerce media columnist, Kiri Masters, sits down with Brian Monahan, the former Dentsu exec charged with shaking up the Albertsons Media Collective.
Albertsons Media Collective
Brian Monahan has a tell. When he’s about to describe a career-defining decision, he uses the same phrase: “It just seemed so bloody obvious.”
Obvious that brands needed to advertise on websites in 1996, so he quit his agency job to launch Left Field, landing Amazon as a first client. Obvious that Walmart should build a retail media network when most executives saw it as a distraction, so he pitched the board and got it funded. Obvious that Albertsons Media Collective should match every ad impression its brands buy with enterprise marketing spend, creating a recently launched “BOGO for retail media.”
The pattern reveals something about how Monahan operates: he oscillates between large enterprises and startups, spotting opportunities that seem bloody obvious to him while others are still debating risk. His latest move to Albertsons Media Collective fits that mold – except this time, he’s not starting from scratch. He’s taking a scaled operation with 100m addressable IDs and presence in 13 of the 15 largest DMAs, and making it move with startup energy.
Albertsons didn’t hire Monahan for a steady hand. They hired him to shake things up.
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What makes Monahan particularly dangerous in retail media is his origin story. “I’m a media planner by trade,” he tells me, and that background shapes everything about his approach to leading Albertsons Media Collective.
While most retail media networks are run by executives who came up through merchandising or e-commerce, Monahan spent years on the other side of the table – at agencies like Dentsu, where he most recently led their global retail media practice. He knows what media buyers actually need because he used to be one.
“Media has become unplannable,” he says bluntly. “It’s just so fragmented. Instead, what we’ve got is high-frequency trading, not media planning.” That perspective – understanding that buyers are drowning in complexity rather than enjoying an abundance of choice – informs his strategy at Albertsons.
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I’ve written extensively about how retail media networks must do more to promote themselves as B2B media companies rather than retail operations with an advertising side hustle. Monahan embodies that shift. He speaks the language of media buyers because he was one. He understands why they’re frustrated with measurement inconsistency, why they demand transparency, and why retailer claims of “grading their own homework” create trust deficits.
His solution? “We’re willing to provide our conversion data into a clean room so people can inform their overall analytics, not just ROAS on our campaigns. We’re providing more self-service interfaces so buyers can work with us directly.”
This isn’t revolutionary thinking. But in an industry where many retailers still treat advertising as a margin-extraction exercise rather than a partnership, having a leader who genuinely understands the buyer’s perspective matters.
One of Monahan’s most provocative arguments centers on something retail media has largely ignored: the brand equity of the retailers themselves.
“Safeway is turning 100 next year,” he tells me, his energy ramping up. “The reason Safeway is called Safeway is that it was founded on a cash-and-carry business model, which was the safe way to buy groceries. At that time, going into the Great Depression, the convention was to buy groceries on credit. A lot of families were going into debt trying to feed their kids. Safeway was the cash-and-carry safe way to buy.”
He pauses for effect. “We have six banners in our 22 that are over a hundred years old. We have fed families for four generations. There’s equity in that. There’s trust and equity in that that can be transferred to our advertising partners. And we haven’t unlocked that yet.”
This thinking explains initiatives like Albertsons’ partnership with Linqia to bring social-first creator storytelling into the shopper journey, or their deal with Perion to unlock first-party retail audiences through display and digital out-of-home campaigns. These aren’t just inventory plays; they’re attempts to weave retailer brand equity into advertiser messaging.
The company has also launched an in-store digital display network, and Monahan teases a technology called that can dynamically adjust creative when a product’s price drops in a specific store for a limited time. “To have creative that can be that flexible and can move alongside your pricing strategy—I think it’s a needle mover,” he says.
The BOGO offer is classic Monahan – a hook that generates buzz while solving a real problem. For every ad impression an advertiser purchases, Albertsons matches it with an impression from its enterprise media budget. It’s the kind of attention-grabbing tactic that gets people talking while demonstrating alignment between retailer and brand goals. Monahan knows how to market to marketers.
“It’s risky because we’re committing our own enterprise media to align to what our advertisers are asking us to do,” Monahan acknowledges. “But it just seems so bloody obvious that we should be working together. We have the technology to do it. It’s just a matter of making the decision to do it.”
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Not every ‘bloody obvious’ idea will land well with everyone. When Monahan describes a future where retail media moves toward Performance Max-style automation – where advertisers input their objectives and the platform handles the rest – I’m personally skeptical.
I’ve written extensively about the trust deficit that retail media networks already face. Surrendering more control to black box systems seems likely to amplify those concerns, not resolve them. Retail analyst Andrew Lipsman described why these tools misalign incentives, requiring platforms only to hit budget-level performance standards rather than maximize ROAS for every segment and placement.
Monahan’s response to my skepticism is telling. He doesn’t dismiss it. Instead, he acknowledges the tension: “The only way the brands are going to come along with it is if they feel it in their overall sales. Are there going to be growing pains? Yes. Absolutely. But is it going to work? I have conviction it will.”
It’s a bet that might not pay off. But that’s the nature of visionaries – they place many bets and remain comfortable knowing not everyone will agree with them. Let’s say for now that the proof will be in the pudding.
Perhaps Monahan’s most important observation has nothing to do with technology or tactics. It’s about the existential challenge facing retail media networks beyond the top two or three players.
“As we try to cross the chasm from shopper and trade budgets to brand budgets, retailers seem to think they live in these isolated universes,” he says. “That’s fine if you want to live off your shopper and trade budgets. If you’ve got bigger ambitions, you're going to need to figure out how to plug into this other ecosystem that doesn’t care about individual retailers. It cares about sales all up.”
Translation: Most retail media networks are still funded primarily by trade marketing and shopper marketing budgets – money that brands allocate specifically to individual retail partnerships. But the real prize is national brand budgets, the larger pools of money that CMOs allocate based purely on performance, regardless of which retailer benefits. Those dollars are ‘Darwinian’, as Monahan puts it – they go wherever drives the most sales. To win them, retailers must prove they’re not just another place to shift trade dollars around, but genuine media partners that drive measurable growth.
His solution focuses on workflow integration: providing conversion data into clean rooms, building self-service interfaces, and potentially even piping into buyers’ own tools. “It’s this spirit of collective growth,” he says. “How do we show what really drives effectiveness?”
Under new CEO Susan Morris, chief merchandising officer Michelle Larson, and chief commercial officer Jennifer Saenz, Albertsons is betting that the future of retail is “a hybrid business model between retail and media. It’s not a side hustle. It’s not an ATM pumping profit into the business. It’s part and parcel of the company.”
That organizational alignment – having retail media report to a chief commercial officer who also oversees enterprise marketing, loyalty programs, and personalized services – creates what Monahan calls “a growth flywheel” rather than a profit center operating in isolation.
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There’s a sense, speaking with Monahan, that he’s just getting started. The proposed Kroger-Albertsons merger put initiatives on hold while both companies waited for regulatory resolution.
Now, with new leadership and that uncertainty behind them, Albertsons may be making up for lost time. And given Monahan’s track record of forcing conservative retailers to take moonshots, watching what comes next feels less like observation and more like witnessing the setup for something big.
Watch what they do, not what they say. Because if history is any guide, Monahan is already spotting the next bloody obvious opportunity that everyone else is missing.