EXCLUSIVE Q&A: Brian Monahan, Albertsons VP of retail media
Albertsons Companies is maximizing the value of its customers to its brand partners.
Chain Store Age recently sat down with Brian Monahan, senior VP of retail media at Albertsons, to discuss the grocery conglomerate’s Albertsons Media Collective retail media arm. Monahan, who assumed his position in July 2025, most recently spent more than seven years as the global client president and head of retail media solutions at Dentsu International and has also served as head of customer strategy at Pinterest and VP of marketing at Walmart.com.
Monahan discussed the value Albertsons Retail Media Collective delivers, technology and strategy plans, and its new limited-time curated advertising packages.
What are the key reasons Albertsons launched a retail media network?
The power of our relationship with our customers and the data that we capture on them lets us understand their needs, motivations and missions. That insight, combined with data from the different intersection points in our customers’ shopping journey for funnel, mid-funnel, low-funnel, and moment of truth, creates a powerful canvas to help a shopper simplify their mission and discover great products that fit the needs of their family.
A retail media network is a great tool to drive growth and a great business model to put relevant content in front of a shopper. Clearly, it's a requirement for being a competitive retailer in today’s market.
[READ MORE: Albertsons delivers branded ad content to shoppers]
What are some of the critical capabilities or solutions Albertsons Media Collective offers brands?
The fundamental differentiation that we offer is the is access to our customers. We have 100 million addressable IDs that allow us to present relevant messages to shoppers throughout their journey.
What’s unique about Albertsons is we are a collection of 22 banners, each with a distinct history and relationship with the customers serve. Safeway is turning 100 next year and Acme is turning 130. These retailers have fed families for generations. There's a trusted brand relationship, and there's an understanding of the different types of missions that those families shop us for.
The Albertsons Media Collective offering is to let brands understand the needs of those households and those families and to connect with them to discover new products.
What are Albertsons Media Collective’s top goals for the next six-to-12 months?
First, to live up to our name. The goal of driving collective growth. We are not in the business of capturing ad budget for the sake of padding margin or of shifting share from one advertiser to another. We want to grow categories, and we want to grow customer relationships for life.
We are also pursuing enterprise alignment in how we will work with merchandising, marketing and media. We will continue to innovate with measurement so we can look at incrementality and customer lifetime value to understand and see the impact on business.
Also, we continue to innovate with new media products, new surfaces and new ways to connect with our customers, like our in-store screen network that's being installed or shoppable recipes and other formats that we're rolling out on our app.
Is Albertsons Media Collective doing anything with next-gen AI technology?
We are early in the journey, and we have a lot of tools that are in our workflow we are trying to optimize. Everything from how we're writing code to how we're looking for insights from performance reports, and we will continue to develop it. With generative AI, we are starting to experiment in areas like bringing more of our brand voice into the creative.
Why did Albertsons Media Collective introduce its program to match impressions with funding?
Under what we have been calling internally a ‘buy one, get one’ (BOGO) program, advertisers who work with us this fall to target members of our audience will have impressions matched with Albertsons enterprise-funded advertising. In essence, we're going to take a customer, based on what we know about their past purchase patterns, and line up exposure so they're getting product messaging from an advertiser talking about the benefits of their product as well as being exposed to one of Albertsons’ enterprise messages trying to drive trips and traffic.
As far as I know, no other retailer has ever done that before, because in most organizations, the enterprise marketing team is very different from the retail media network team, and we have the ability to connect the dots.
This program is one of the first of many steps to come of how we're going to bring everything that we offer to the table, together with our advertisers and our supplier partners to drive collective growth. This first one is if you invest in an impression to help us drive a sale, we will too.
Can you discuss any future plans?
Our average return on ad spend for the campaigns we ran in the first half calendar year 2025 is 66% better than it was in the first half of calendar year 2024. We are going to take the foundation we built and look to continue to lead to bring integrated growth solutions together to our advertising partners to start full-funnel growth drivers.
This will include our connected TV product that's off-site, as well as our ad products on the website and in-store signage, lined up in a way that we can track incremental category growth at scale and leverage our banners and all our great customer relationships.
